Gdynia: Catch the sea breeze
In an open field, on an undeveloped coastline, within just a few years, the largest and most modern transshipment port on the Baltic Sea was built.
history stop essays history ports tricity news04 january 2025 | 14:59 | Source: Przystanek Historia IPN | Prepared by: Anna Zechenter | Print
Transatlantycki dworzec morski przy nabrzeżu m/s Piłsudski przed 1938 r. Fot. Wikimedia Commons
The builders of Poland focused enormous effort on this great project—to ensure that the drama of 1920 would never be repeated, when the British ship Triton loaded with weapons for the country fighting the Bolsheviks was docked in Gdańsk, and the Germans blocked its unloading; to prevent Poland from having to pay foreigners vast sums for the transport of imported goods; to avoid handing over part of the profits from the exported coal to foreign shipowners; and, finally, to allow the country to profit from maritime trade.
"Window to the World"
"The port in Gdynia is one of the most vital enterprises of modern Poland, and its construction is a primary need for the country," wrote Stefan Żeromski in his appeal from 1924, when our maritime border spanned 147 kilometers, including Hel and the Puck Bay, and the piers and port basins wedged into the water were the only window to the Baltic.
"If Poland fails to secure its position on the Coast," warned the author of The Wind from the Sea, "not only will our miserable weakness be exposed to the world, our reluctance to engage in defensive work, cowardice, and laziness […], but additionally, the living branches, tendrils, and shoots of our power will fall victim to the plague of our incapacity and mortal fear of the enemy."
And he added:
"Of course, they will tell me that building ports is not the matter and task of poets. But it is necessary to forge the port, its image, its essential need, its national vision in the souls of people, to carve it in hearts, to chisel it into the limits of will. This work must be surrounded by collective love. It must be built day and night with all the lands and the entire nation."
The generation that fought for Poland's sovereignty knew the price the nation could pay for lacking a window to the world. The politicians of the reborn Republic, as well as engineers and economists, understood the necessity of creating a strong state, facing the sea.
"Where the chest and courage grow..."
For years, we were repelled by the PPR (Polish People's Republic) indoctrination of the Baltic idea, which endlessly justified the Yalta division of Poland with the intrusive propaganda of the "recovered lands" and appropriated "Piast traditions." According to the twisted logic of communism, it was not worth lamenting over the Eastern Borderlands since Pomerania and Lower Silesia had been annexed to Poland. That is why today, people forget that the Baltic idea was alive in the 19th century, when it stood in opposition to the Jagiellonian idea, focused on the East.
For years, we were repelled by the PPR indoctrination of the Baltic idea, which endlessly justified the Yalta division of Poland with the intrusive propaganda of the "recovered lands" and appropriated "Piast traditions." According to the twisted logic of communism, it was not worth lamenting over the Eastern Borderlands since Pomerania and Lower Silesia had been annexed to Poland.
"The nation not bordering on the sea cannot be historical," wrote the philosopher and political activist Karol Libelt in 1849. "There, where the eye loses itself in the endless, boundless wet space, where the mind and imagination are rocked by the endlessly swaying waves; where the chest and courage grow, accustomed to storms and sea tempests, which man learns to overcome – there […] man feels differently, thinks differently, expresses himself differently, and some mysterious force urges him to action."
Almost forty years later, Jan Ludwik Popławski, the editor of "Przegląd Wszechpolski," emphasized:
"Free access to the sea, the complete possession of the country's main water artery, i.e., the Vistula, are almost necessary conditions for our existence. All this Baltic coastline from the Vistula to the mouth of the Niemen, so recklessly squandered by the Polish state, must be reclaimed by the Polish nation. […] Our politicians still dream of Vilnius and Kyiv, but they care less about Poznań, have almost completely forgotten about Gdańsk, and do not think at all about Königsberg and Opole."
So that Poland is not a slave
The Piast concept, represented by the National Democrats (Endecja) and the agrarians (Ludowcy), clashed during World War I and the struggles for the borders of the Reborn Poland with the Jagiellonian concept, promoted by the Pilsudski followers. Roman Dmowski, Poland's delegate to the Paris Conference in 1919 and a signatory of the peace treaty in Versailles, which granted Poland access to the Baltic Sea, wrote in the 1920s:
"When thinking of a strong Poland, truly independent both economically and politically, it was impossible to imagine it being isolated from the sea by an uninterrupted strip of German possessions. [...] The short […] period of existence of our reborn state surely made it clear to us how enormous the importance of the small stretch of coastline we possess is for our independence and for our economic development, and how great a difficulty it presents that Gdańsk does not belong entirely to the Polish state."
And he concluded: "Poland without the sea would always be a slave to the powerful neighbor."
About one of his meetings with Pierre de Margerie, the then political director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dmowski wrote:
"Even in the spring of 1918, a French diplomat in a high position, deeply involved in Polish affairs, said to me: 'But, sir, that would be a miracle if what you are saying were to happen, if the territory of your state were to reach the Baltic!' 'Maybe it would be a miracle,' I replied, 'but this miracle must happen if both we and you are to exist as independent nations.'"
During the interwar period, from discourse at the level of ideas, a kind of synthesis emerged in the realm of real politics: the Eastern Borderlands, so important for shaping Polish cultural and spiritual identity, although reduced by the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty, remained largely within the borders of the Second Polish Republic, continuing to co-create that identity. Access to the sea not only widely opened up trade routes for the economy but also became the beginning of a new, common "maritime" consciousness. The nationalists' demands were realized by their opponents — the Pilsudski followers.
In the Village of Gdingen
The first Poles from the interior of the country appeared in the small fishing settlement of Gdingen before World War I. Before the defeated German Empire ceded us a strip of coastline, the village was discovered by holidaymakers escaping from the bustle of the German resort of Sopot, which was frequented by crowds of Varsovians in the summer.
"It was July of the year of our Lord 1911," wrote Adolf Nowaczyński in 1934. "There was probably no quieter place on the whole globe at that time."
The Eastern Borderlands, so important for shaping Polish cultural and spiritual identity, were indeed reduced by the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty, but remained largely within the borders of the Second Polish Republic, still contributing to this identity. Access to the sea not only widely opened trade routes for the economy but also became the beginning of a new, widespread "maritime" consciousness.
A few dozen small fishing cottages, a rectory with a priest who had fought in the 1863 uprising, a small railway station, a small brickworks, and three shops.
"After the checzs [local dialect for cottages] and houses lived They. They meaning those who had endured here for six hundred years, survived everything, refused to move, and waited, waited for twenty-some generations," wrote Nowaczyński about the Kashubians. "Quiet, calm, seemingly sluggish, not very graceful, silent, distrustful, grumpy... tribe. […] All day long they were fixing something, hunched over their fishing nets, constantly patched up [...]. Perhaps there was no other peasant group in all of divided Poland that had to fight harder and more persistently for a rough, simple livelihood, for everyday existence, than these murmuring, closed-off Kashubians […]. By the second [year], the people of Gdynia had somewhat loosened up, as the first families began to arrive. […] By the second year, they no longer wanted to rent rooms to 'Lutram' [outsiders], but only to 'their own'."
By 1914, more and more intellectuals began to arrive, enchanted by the sea, engaging with the local Kashubians, reminding them of their Slavic roots, and giving lectures on the history of Poland.
Kashubian fisherman and Polish sailor
The "maritime" idea, maturing since the mid-19th century, slowly began to take real shape when the reborn Poland took possession of its strip of coastline, symbolically marrying the sea in Puck on February 10, 1920.
"A light rain didn’t hinder us at all, and the Kashubians claimed that this is how God always blesses fishermen," recalled General Józef Haller, who on behalf of the Republic carried out this ceremonial act. "After the Mass, with cannon salutes and the Polish anthem played, the Polish naval flag was raised on the mast. The previous guardian of the coast—a Kashubian fisherman with only an oar as his weapon—handed over the watch to the Polish sailor."
Several Kashubians rushed to fetch the ring thrown into the waves, but it drifted away.
"When I asked them," Haller wrote, "'Why didn’t you catch it?' they prophetically replied: 'We will have it in Szczecin.' I was very moved by this, as we sensed that Puck was not the full sea, but only a small window to it."
"It became a state," wrote Melchior Wańkowicz at the beginning of 1939 in Sztafeta, summarizing his journalistic book about the first two decades of free Poland, meant for future generations to inherit this great legacy. That "first two decades" became the last, and the young people to whom the book was addressed would die a few months later defending the coast, then fight in the underground against two occupiers, and when the world celebrated the end of the war, they would die from gunshots to the back of the head in the security police's dungeons. That is why this book is now read with a tight throat.
In 1921, the decision was made to build the port. The choice of location was determined by a report from engineer Tadeusz Wenda, who in 1920 had been sent on a reconnaissance mission by Kazimierz Porębski, the director of the Department of Maritime Affairs of the Ministry of Military Affairs. Upon returning to Warsaw, Wenda wrote that the most convenient place for building a military port, and possibly a commercial one, was the lowland between Gdynia and Oksywie, located 16 kilometers from the New Port in Gdańsk. He cited the advantages of this location, including the protection from winds provided by the Hel Peninsula, deep water close to the shore, low banks that facilitated work, and the proximity to the Gdynia railway station.
Impressive Pace
In April 1923, just seven months after the Polish Parliament passed the "Law on the Construction of a Port in Gdynia in Pomerania as a Public Utility Port" on September 23, 1922, the Temporary Military Port and Fishermen's Shelter were opened, and in August of the same year, the first full-sea vessel, the French-flagged s/s Kentucky, arrived in Gdynia.
A year later, in April 1924, the first port was opened for use. However, it was too modest in relation to the state's needs, and by July, a Polish-French consortium was established, and construction of a larger facility began. When Germany, as part of its customs war, stopped purchasing surplus Polish coal in 1925, the Polish response was straightforward: increase the intensity of work at the port. By 1938, 70% of Poland's foreign trade went through Gdynia.
The port gave rise to a city built on modern urban planning principles, with wide arteries and buildings with characteristic rounded lines resembling the shapes of ship hulls. Round windows evoked ship portholes, while the superstructures resembled captain’s bridges. Large glass surfaces and light-colored walls created a feeling of airy lightness—hence, Gdynia was referred to as the "white city."
The plans of the enthusiasts of opening Poland to the sea found a vigorous executor in Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, the Minister of Industry and Commerce from 1926. He was the one who, as the author of the ambitious plan for the Central Industrial District, which in the 1930s aimed to provide jobs for thousands and boost economic development, as well as strengthen the country's defense, convinced the parliament to allocate appropriate funds for Gdynia. In March 1926, it was granted city rights as a twelve-thousand-strong settlement. Kwiatkowski, a chemist by training and a politician by obligation, combined a clear understanding of economic realities with the necessity of throwing a mobilizing idea to society, giving it a perspective for the future.
"We want to stick to the sea! This is a need and an unshakable necessity for the entire state and the entire society. This great poem, crystallizing next to Gdynia and gradually expanding further along the entire Polish coastline, is a poem of peaceful, economic work, building new foundations for our progress on the path of civilization," he wrote in 1930, when the first regular passenger line between Gdynia and New York was opened. "And above all, the most important thing is that today Gdynia represents the spiritual ownership and the ownership of work, effort, and the capital gathered with such immense difficulty by the entire Polish society."
How different was the understanding of Polish interests back then—can any contemporary politician think in terms of the "spiritual ownership" of the nation?
How no one understood Kwiatkowski’s value
"Every new meter of coastline, every new crane, every new goods warehouse, every new commercial establishment in Gdynia, every improvement in communication, every new ship, every new factory on the coast, every bank" — everything that connected Gdynia with Pomerania and the rest of the country. These accomplishments pleased him, as they were "a significant part of our national achievement" in the effort to catch up with countries that had ruled the seas for centuries and to civilizationally equate the newly formed state with Western Europe.
Three years later, work on the port was completed, and it was then that, for the first time, Gdynia exported more than Gdańsk. By 1934, it handled more cargo than any other port in the Baltic. The modern Gdynia port had coal and general cargo handling facilities, fishing, passenger, and military ports, as well as a small repair shipyard.
Today, one follows with bated breath the pace of the port builders. The tonnage of the merchant fleet, which in 1927 stood at 9,000 tons, surpassed 100,000 tons just eleven years later, and a port that served fifty shipping lines, including twenty Polish ones, was created almost from nothing. By the end of the two-decade period, Gdynia boasted twelve kilometers of waterfront, basins covering 320 hectares, capable of accommodating transatlantic ships, the largest cold storage facility in Europe, housing goods from 1,200 railway wagons, which Wańkowicz meticulously calculated. In one hour, 75 cranes moved 7.5 tons of cargo to warehouses covering 217,000 square meters.
"In Dalmatia, journalists asked me, 'How do you do it, since we, already independent for half a century... have only a few little ships,'" Wańkowicz told his readers, "since the Portuguese expressed their astonishment that, being the third colonial empire in the world, they had no own shipping line before the war, and now they have pitiful beginnings. Since... oh, what can I say, since in Gravesend, a Polish sailor cursed an English sailor and gave him an incredible volapük [mock language] of blunders and failures because he failed to dock the ship properly... now I know that we will enrich the lexicon of curses so much that the late Samuel Linde will turn in his grave."
The White City
A city based on modern urban planning concepts grew up around the port, with wide thoroughfares and buildings featuring characteristic rounded lines, reminiscent of the hulls of ships. Round windows evoked the portholes of a ship, and the upper structures resembled the captain's bridges. Large glass surfaces and light-colored walls created an impression of luminous lightness — this is why Gdynia was called the "white city." Few such clusters of modernist architecture have survived in Europe.
Gdynia grew at an astonishing speed, as evidenced by the numbers: in May 1936, it had 83,000 inhabitants; by December of the same year, 102,000; and by 1939, 127,000. People from almost all over the country, especially from Pomerania, came here to work. In just a decade, the small fishing village transformed into a bustling city with excellent infrastructure, an airport in Rumia, and the State Maritime School, relocated here from Tczew in 1930. The city was still under construction, something that Wilhelm Korabiowski, the famous advisor of the Wesoła Lwowska Fala, observed:
"There are no worn-out, venerable atmospheres here, [...] no corners full of history. Everything here is new, sharp, cold, raw, and audaciously young. In some gates, hammers are still at work, and the smell of paint is in the air. [...]. And right before our eyes, scaffolds, beams, and ladders are climbing higher and higher, and concrete, iron, and glass rise from within. There is no street where, as if before our eyes, construction is not increasing."
Land prices also grew, from two zlotys per square meter at the start of construction to over one hundred zlotys in 1929.
The Sea Festival, celebrated at the end of June and beginning of July since 1932, attracted curious visitors from all over the country.
"The whole pier flutters with the colors of countless flags of all known maritime nations; ships decorated with garlands of flags arrive at the port, and the bright sun and crowds of people from all parts of Poland join in — wrote the translator Paweł Hulka-Laskowski in 1934. — All of Poland turns to the sea with love and admiration; this is not just a psychological riddle, and not necessarily a miracle, but definitely something more. The times of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were times of energy withdrawal, simply the illness of a society that wanted peace at any cost. [...]. So what does this current enthusiasm mean, universal, enduring, growing steadily from year to year? Is this not a return to health after a long, heavy illness?"
The enthusiastic writers rarely mentioned the slums bordering the "white city," the villa district of Kamienna Góra, and the developing Orłowo. They did not speak of the poverty that came to the area from all parts of the country as it was recovering from the ravages of war — those who came here either did not find work or took up occasional odd jobs. These newcomers had nowhere to return, so they stayed for years in shacks made of boards and clay in Grabówek, in huts in Leszczynki, and in ruins on the other outskirts of Gdynia at the time. There, they lived with their families on the brink of starvation. Journalists, amazed by the scale of construction, avoided this topic, especially since a similar landscape stretched across other cities and around the major construction projects of the interwar period. Some were lucky, others were not. This was the reality of Poland at the time, emerging from post-war collapse and, in the 1930s, struck by the Great Depression.
"Here beats our heart"
The atmosphere of the city and the port captivated journalists visiting Gdynia. Count Antoni Sobański, who was engaged in this work, succumbed to the charm of the ubiquitous vitality and joy of life.
"Gdynia is a city [...] masculine; a city of healthy people," he wrote in 1934, "because they must endure hard work, and their entrepreneurship is already proven, as 95% are newcomers with the traits of emigrant courage; a city that seems not Polish, as it has no common traits with other cities of the Republic; finally, a city that is not Slavic, as there is neither place nor time for Slavic melancholy and gloom. [...] Here, most of the work is owed to the hands of simple people or to those intellectuals who have been ennobled by constant contact with muscular effort, specifically engineers and architects."
With emotion, Paweł Hulka-Laskowski observed the awakening of a "maritime" consciousness among people flocking to the Baltic from all over Poland. He was particularly struck by an old miner from Katowice, who had spent his life working in a coal mine:
"He takes off his cap, sheds his clothes, and wades into the water as if baptizing himself for this sea and for this maritime Republic. Watching him, I know he will say at home, 'I swam in the sea.' But these words will mean something more than just a report of a swim, for it is for him like sanctification by the great sacred element, a symbol of worldliness and power. And I understand and feel this Silesian miner because I feel the sea just as they do."
And he concludes:
"This piece of land is today the dearest, most beloved piece of Poland; here beats our heart, here our minds work and our muscles strain."
The text is from issue 12/2018 of Biuletyn IPN.
More information can be found in the Gazeta Morska.
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