Historic Background Of Gdansk

Gdansk started life as an inconspicuous cluster of fishing villages- named Gyddanyzc- in the 7th century, and took about five hundred years to grow into a port of any significance. By the 10th  century, the town had been annexed by Poland, and by 1224 had started receiving vessels from overseas. Gdansk’s prosperity continued, with the port- now called Danzig- joining the Hanseatic League in the mid-14th century. The 16th century, during which Danzig’s fortunes peaked, was a particularly significant period; Danzig became Poland’s largest city, and the country’s commercial and industrial hub.

Danzig’s days were numbered, however; in the 17th century, the Swedish-Polish Wars wreaked havoc on the city, emptying its coffers and sending it into a decline which persisted through the next three centuries. Attacked by Peter the Great of Russia in 1734, Danzig collapsed, along with the rest of Poland, and re-emerged as a free city only at the end of the First World War.

Danzig’s days in the sun were short-lived; enticingly situated at the end of the Polish Corridor to the Baltic, the city was an attractive proposition for Hitler, and it was the Nazi attack on Danzig that triggered off World War II. The war was disastrous for Danzig; ethnic `cleansing’ of the city’s Jews by the Nazis decimated almost 90% of the population, leaving Danzig a mere shadow of itself.

At the end of World War II, Danzig- now renamed Gdansk- was freed and returned to independent Poland. Things remained quiet for about three decades, during which time the city and the port developed; in the 1980s, the shipyard strike spearheaded by Lech Walesa and `Solidarity’ resulted in a revolution which was to mould Polish politics during the closing years of the 21st century.

Today, Gdansk is back to being one of Poland’s largest and most important cities; a commercial and cultural hub which is fast making up for lost time.