Long Market and Neptune's Fountain in gorgeous Gdansk Jim at The Solidarity Museum Explore Gdansk’s Nautical Museum Sopot Beach in Poland Visitors told me Gdansk in Poland was a lovely city but I was amazed at just how beautiful it was. For readers of a certain vintage the name still conjures up visions of striking shipyard workers led by Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade-union in the 1980s. They were fighting for freedom against a totalitarian government after decades of repression.
The city on the Baltic coast had already suffered a brutal and tragic history, being invaded by the Nazis at the start of World War II in 1939 and then decimated by Russian shelling as the Soviet power pushed back the Germans at the end of the war in 1945. Allied bombing also added to the carnage. Jim at The Solidarity Museum Nearly ninety per cent of its old town buildings were destroyed.
Then came the bleak years behind the Iron Curtain. Today, Gdansk could not be more different from the images that were beamed around the world forty years ago. Freedom has brought prosperity.
The old sections of the Main Town have been rebuilt in the same glorious, gothic-renaissance style, the streets are filled with tourists and there is a proliferation of bars, restaurants and luxury hotels around the city. The famous shipyards are still operating with the addition of a wonderful museum and library dedicated to Solidarity, a union which grew into a ten million strong freedom movement for the whole count.