The forests have the upper hand in northwest Poland. Driving west into the setting sun, the forests evidently stretch beyond the horizon. Birch slipping to pine and back again. Occasionally there are little Pomeranian townships, gritty pock-marked places like Ińsko and Chociwel. Ińsko has made the most of its location on the shore of a lake to develop a modest crayfish industry. Chociwel has a huge red brick church, playfully Gothic, which looks distinctly German in demeanour — as well it might for until 1945 Chociwel was in Germany and was called Freienwalde. At Chociwel railway station, a fading sign reminds passengers that Berlin is just a couple of hundred kilometres away. But no longer do the trains run to the German capital. The regional centre and one-time Pomeranian capital of Szczecin is nowadays the end of the line for trains from Chociwel.
First glimpse of Szczecin arriving from the east, whether by car or by train, is of the city’s shipyards. History was made in these shipyards. In the late nineteenth century, some of the world’s great ocean liners were built in this great industrial complex, among them the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse which in 1898 snatched from Cunard the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. When the Kaiser Wilhelm lost the title, it was to another liner from the same shipyard, the magnificent four-funnelled SS Deutschland.
“Welcome to Szczecin” proclaims a sign by the side of the highway, curiously accompanied by a rendering in the International Phonetic Alphabet that affects to show precisely how the name of the Polish city should correctly be pronounced. “Just a conceit of the city council,” explains Szymon, a student at the local university, when we meet him on the riverfront in Szczecin the next morning. “They’ve put those signs up all over town. Some experts at the uni say they haven’t even got the phonetic symbols correct.”
Capital of Pomerania
Szczecin is certainly a tongue-twister, as much of a challenge for outsiders as the convoluted history of the city. Once part of Swedish Pomerania, the city was ceded to Prussia in 1720. Over the ensuing two centuries, the city — called Stettin in German — developed into Germany’s premier Baltic port. It was a city that built ships, and the busy quays and docks of Stettin sustained Berlin. Cheap freight rates on the railways linking Pomerania with Berlin meant that Stettin merchants had the edge over their rivals in Hamburg when it came to supplying the German capital. Berliners came by train to Stettin to board the steamers that took them to Baltic resorts on the islands of Usedom, Rügen and Wolin.
The Szczecin waterfront is no longer as busy as it was when Ludwig Eduard Lütke painted this image in the early nineteenth century. The large building in the centre background is the Palace of the Pomeranian Princes.
In its heyday, the city’s wharves bustled with traffic from London, Amsterdam and Königsberg. Yet as a major port, Stettin has always had to contend with not having easy year-round access to the sea. Downstream from the city, the River Oder (Odra in Polish) decants into a vast lagoon, hemmed in by sandy offshore islands. In winter, this lagoon has to be kept open by ice-breakers, and even in summer navigation of the shallows is hardly easy. Yet Stettin thrived, not merely as the principal port for Berlin but also as a northern entrepôt for much of central Europe, and thus serving as a Baltic counterpoint (and competitor) to Trieste on the Adriatic.
“The Trieste parallel is an interesting one,” says Szymon, looking out over the Odra towards a scene of post-industrial desolation on the far bank of the river. “Stettin’s hinterland stretched to Prague and beyond,” he explains and goes on to tell the tale of how the Versailles Treaty (after the First World War) included provision to ensure that Czechoslovakia should have unimpeded access to the German port.
German Stettin morphed into Polish Szczecin after the Second World War, as a great swathe of territory east of the Oder was assigned to Poland. And not just east of the river. The post-war border between Poland and Germany is conventionally referred to as the Oder-Neisse Line, alluding to the German names for the two rivers which the Potsdam Conference in 1945 agreed should mark the approximate line of Germany’s new eastern border. The German port city actually lay mainly on the west bank of the Oder / Odra, but was nonetheless assigned to Poland. “The new name for the city was critical,” remarks Szymon. “It marked Szczecin out as being somehow very Polish.” That was surely important in a part of the Baltic region that did not have any deep imprint of Polish history.
More than six decades on, no-one could be in any doubt as to Szczecin’s Polish credentials. This is not a city that has the feel of a community that lies right by the German border. But nor does Szczecin have that assertive selfconfidence of cities like Poznań, Gdańsk or even Bydgoszcz — all three Polish cities of broadly similar size. “There’s a big difference,” explains Domenika who manages a new hotel in a plum position above the river next to the city’s Nautical Academy. “We are very much more distant from Warsaw. In Szczecin, we have a sense of being economically and geographically marginal, a place on the very edge of Poland.”
The hallmark sounds of Szczecin recall the city’s multinational history. The cobblestones that line the back streets of the Old Town are very Prussian cobbles. We know the distinctive rumble of car tires on the rough setts of Könisberg’s old cobbled streets. And the bombinating resonance of a driver speeding a tad too fast over Berlin cobbles. Szczecin reverberates to that same sound. The other characteristic sound of the city is that of the trams which lurch and rattle through Szczecin’s streets.
Shipyards standing idle
And what of the bustle and boom of the shipyards that once built the world’s finest and fastest passenger liners? These are the silent zones of modern Szczecin, places left to the night watchmen and security guards who preside over an industrial wasteland. In the 1990s, the Szczecin shipyard was acclaimed as a model of successful privatisation in post-Communist Poland. Under the leadership of businessman Krzysztof Piotrowski, the complex had secured a full order book, much to the envy of other Baltic region shipyards in Sweden, Finland and Germany. Over a ten year period, the Szczecin yard built over one hundred ships without any state aid.
But in 2002, the then heavily indebted shipyard filed for bankruptcy, amid recriminations of mismanagement. Shipyard workers took to Szczecin’s streets in their thousands, enacting mock executions of Piotrowski and the company board. The demise of the shipyard has hit Szczecin hard, cutting the heart out of the local economy, and bringing demoralisation to a community that always saw itself as part of Poland’s economic and political vanguard. In 1970, Szczecin workers had risen in protest against the government. Ten years later Szczecin was one of the cities that propelled Solidarność into the political limelight, and activists in the Baltic city took a leading role in the demonstrations of 1988 and 1989 that presaged the introduction of political pluralism in Poland. Szczecin citizens are not used to sitting on the sidelines, yet that is what they have been forced to do since the collapse of the shipyards in 2002. In 2009, there was talk of investors from Qatar, but the deal fell through. Recent weeks have brought a new ray of hope with a Russian consortium suggesting that the site might be used for a new assembly plant for Russian trucks and cars.
The Maritime Museum may have turned its back on Szczecin history, but reminders of the sea are everywhere in the Szczecin streetscape.
On a bold bluff above the River Odra stands an assertive sweep of civic architecture. The centrepiece is Szczecin’s Maritime Museum, which once told the proud history of Szczecin as a major Baltic port and a global player in the shipbuilding industry. But in recent years, the maritime theme has been played down, as the museum’s curators refocus on topics that are less painful and less controversial in Szczecin. No-one can object to galleries that document village life in different parts of Africa (complete with a sound track of noises from an African street market). There are also rotating exhibitions. Last year it was an exhibition of nineteenth-century musical instruments from Masovia, and now it is early twentieth-century art from Estonia.
The Maritime Museum may have turned its back on Szczecin history, but reminders of the sea are everywhere in the Szczecin streetscape. Anchors and fake masts decorate road intersections. Cafés proclaim maritime connections with names like ‘Columbus’ and ‘Clipper’. But the only passenger vessels which nowadays dock in Szczecin are there first and foremost for tourists. No longer do the big Baltic ferries cruise up the Odra to the centre of the city. Now they berth in Świnoujście on the coast.
One of three ships permanently moored on the Szczecin quayside is a floating restaurant serving not Polish but Russian food. There are summer season cruises around the empty docks. Three years ago, a new hydrofoil service started linking Szczecin to Świnoujście, zipping across the lagoon in just 75 minutes — much faster than any train linking the two communities. But the locals have stuck steadfastly to the train where the fare is just one third of that on the hydrofoil. For the 2011 season, the hydrofoil is running just once daily in each direction.
Wander the streets of Szczecin and you are forever reminded that this is no ordinary Polish city. There is the legacy of Prussia in nineteenthcentury civic buildings such as the town hall, savings bank and main post office. Superb brick Gothic facades of the kind that you find from Lübeck to Stockholm and Tallinn are reminders that Szczecin is a city of the Baltic world, a place that was defined by the sea. From the ferry terminal at Świnoujście, Scandinavia is just a short ferry ride away. “Too short,” says Szymon. “Danes and Swedes come over in coachloads,” he explains. For some, it seems, the real lure of Szczecin is cheap vodka. And this is a pity, for the city has so much more to offer.
Trams on Szczecin’s Plac Grunwaldzki (photo © hidden europe).
Szymon stands on the bank of the Odra and surveys the empty shipyards away to the east. He is an acute observer of the Szczecin cityscape and its shifting political moods. “Can you imagine how that news has gone down?” he asks, referring to the prospect of Russia coming to the rescue of the Szczecin economy. “This is a city that, as much as any other in Poland, resisted Soviet influence,” adds Szymon. Local trade union leader Jacek Kantor would agree. This Solidarność veteran has been quick to remind the media that Szczecin men are shipbuilders and not car assembly workers.
