My dad never liked old Gdańsk,’ Łukasz says, as we leave this museum to what some might feel was a lost paradise. 'It was hard for him to even work at the Polytechnic University, because it’s a brightly pronounced work of German architecture. After the war, the German style here was very disliked. Polish modernism was considered to be an alternative – there is a lot of it in Gdynia. But now the city history museum is promoting the free city period, as if nothing else happened afterwards.
While walking past some buildings on Długi Targ Street, we duck into a museum once again. Truth be told, it is not formally a museum but a ‘Free City of Gdańsk Historical Zone’. The ‘zone’ is a private initiative, but it doesn’t differ too much in content from the state museum we saw in the Town Hall: all the same interiors with packages from German products, porcelain and furniture. In Russia, the reproduction of nostalgic scenes from life long ago also exists in museum practice. Only there it relates to another golden age – the 1960s and 1970s, when today’s elderly people were still young and wore synthetics and flared pants, and the grass was greener. In Poland, the 1960s are remembered without reverence – this was the dawn of Soviet dictatorship. But at the end of the 1970s, Solidarity had already begun, and with it came workers’ strikes and the first political victories of Lech Walęsa.
‘Actually, they weren’t intending to overthrow the communist regime,’ Łukasz explains, as he tells me about the history of the Solidarity trade union and the beginning of free Poland. 'And they themselves were very surprised when it was all over.’ We walk down to the European Solidarity Centre, a museum which opened in 2014 for the 25th anniversary of the first free elections. This enormous building, built especially for the museum and archive, is crammed with the most modern technology so that it can tell this key story in the country’s history as effectively as possible.
It all began with workers’ strikes in the Gdańsk shipyards – the largest on the Baltic Sea. Local labourers put forth demands that were quite socialist in nature: they wanted to create an independent trade union.
And so began the long discussions that would smoothly snowball into a decade of political showdowns, the struggle in the streets between protestors and police, and arrests, and Wojciech Jaruzelski’s martial law, and the elections of 1989. And there, too, socialism officially ended.