Gdańsk

• 1. Introduction

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  At 04:45 in the morning on the 1st of September 1939, the first shots of World War II were fired on a Polish military depot at Westerplatte, in a city the world then knew as Danzig. That city is Gdańsk, on the Baltic coast of northern Poland, capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and home to 486,492 people. It is Poland's sixth-largest city and its major seaport, sitting at the mouth of the Motława River at the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay. Together with nearby Gdynia and the resort town of Sopot it forms a metropolitan area called the Tricity, the Trójmiasto, with around 1.5 million residents. A place that opened the deadliest war in history would, decades later, help end communism in Europe. How does one city carry both of those stories? Why was it claimed, lost, and reclaimed so many times, by Polish dukes, German knights, Prussian kings, and a free-city government answering to the League of Nations? And what does it mean that a town whose name was spelled a dozen different ways across a thousand years is now, in 2025, a UNESCO City of Literature?

• 2. A Name In Many Tongues

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  Gdania, a river now known as the Motława, most likely gave the city its name, though some linguists trace it to the Proto-Slavic root gъd-, meaning wet or moist. The earliest written record came after the death of Saint Adalbert in 997, where the settlement appears as urbs Gyddanyzc. After that the spellings multiply across the centuries: Kdanzk in 1148, Gdanzc in 1188, Danceke in 1228, Gdańsk in 1236, Danczik in 1399, Danczig in 1414. In Polish documents the form Gdańsk was used consistently, while German-language records drifted through many variants until the name settled as Danzig. The shifts followed a logic of sound: the cluster gd became d, the combination ns became nts, and an inserted i finally broke up the closing cluster. Latin offered its own choices, Gedania, Gedanum, or Dantiscum, while the Kashubian language calls the city Gduńsk. On special occasions it answers to a grander title, the Royal Polish City of Gdańsk. Some Kashubians have called it their capital city, though the cultural ties between the city and the Kashubia region remain debatable, and such names stir controversy even among Kashubians themselves.

• 3. Between Piast And Teutonic Knight

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  In the 980s, Mieszko I of Poland erected a stronghold on the site, tying the Piast realm to the trade routes of the Baltic Sea. The settlement had begun in the 9th century as a village living off farming and fishing, before becoming a trading centre and being annexed around 975. By 1300 the town held an estimated 2,000 people, modest in the wider world of commerce but important in regional trade. German settlers, many from Lübeck, had begun arriving around 1180, and at the latest in 1263 the Pomerelian duke Świętopełk II granted city rights under Lübeck law. The peace did not hold. In 1308, after a rebellion against the governor appointed by the future king Władysław I the Elbow-high, the town was taken by Brandenburg, and Polish forces besieged in the stronghold called on the Teutonic Knights. The Knights freed them and then seized the town for themselves, and a massacre followed whose death toll historians still dispute. Błażej Śliwiński in 2008 estimated around 1,000 commoners killed, while Smoliński in 2021 placed the figure between 60 and 150. A papal bull issued by Clement V charged the Order with the killings. The Knights then incorporated the town into their monastic state and told the remaining burghers to leave. They did not rebuild until the mid-1320s, when Lübeckers returned, bringing back the pre-1308 town seal.

• 4. The Royal Seaport

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  On the 15th of May 1457, King Casimir IV granted the town the Great Privilege, after the council had invited him and he had already stayed for five weeks. The grant gave full autonomy and royal protection, removed tariffs and taxes on trade within Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia, and let the town make its own laws, administer its territory, and mint its own coin, the Danzig thaler. It united the Old Town and Main Town and authorised the demolition of the New Town, which had sided with the Teutonic Order; by 1457 the New Town was gone, with no buildings left. This followed the Thirteen Years' War of 1454 to 1466, in which the Prussian Confederation renounced the Grand Master and appealed to the king for reintegration into Poland. With privileged access to Polish markets, the seaport prospered while still trading with the other Hanseatic cities, having joined the Hanseatic League back in 1358 and kept ties with Bruges, Novgorod, Lisbon, and Seville. Nicolaus Copernicus visited in 1504 and 1526, and Narratio Prima, the first printed abstract of his heliocentric theory, was published in the city in 1540. In 1577, the city shut its gates against Stephen Báthory, and after a six-month siege its army of 5,000 mercenaries was defeated in the field on the 16th of December. Unable to take the city by force, Báthory confirmed its privileges, and the city paid 200,000 guldens in gold as an apology.

• 5. Prussian Rule And A Free City

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  In 1793, in the Second Partition of Poland, the Kingdom of Prussia annexed Danzig, and the population largely opposed it, wanting to remain part of Poland. The mayor stepped down over the annexation, and the city councilor Johann Uphagen resigned in protest. The First Partition of 1772 had already left Danzig a Polish exclave, cut off by a military barrier the Prussian king justified on the pretext of a possible cattle plague. During the Napoleonic Wars in 1807, a coalition of French, Polish, Italian, Saxon, and Baden forces besieged and captured the city, which became the Free City of Danzig, a client state of the French Empire until 1814. After France's defeat the city returned to Prussia in 1815. In 1871 Danzig became the first city in Continental Europe to establish a sewer system with wastewater treatment, a marked improvement to public health, and that same year it joined the German Empire under Prussian leadership. After World War I the Treaty of Versailles made it the Free City of Danzig again, an independent state under the League of Nations with its external affairs largely under Polish control. It had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament, and government, and issued its own stamps and currency, the Danzig gulden. Poland kept a post office, a garrison at Westerplatte, and a customs union with the city.

• 6. War And Its Aftermath

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  Albert Forster, a Schutzstaffel member, led the local branch of the Nazi Party to victory in the city's legislative elections in the 1930s, triggering a wave of repression. The Danzig government expelled Polish students from the technical university, forcibly Germanized dozens of Polish surnames, removed Polish-era landmarks such as the Artus Court and Neptune's Fountain from the heritage list, and banned the use of Polish in public places. The Gestapo tracked many ethnic Poles, and in Operation Tannenberg they were arrested and moved to camps such as Stutthof or executed in the Piaśnica forest. Within a year of a 1937 pogrom, more than half of the city's Jewish community had left, and only 600 Jews remained by 1941, with many transported to the single-building Danzig Ghetto. As the Red Army neared in 1945, thousands of civilians fled during Operation Hannibal. Polish and Soviet troops captured the city in March 1945, leaving it heavily damaged, with the city centre 90 percent in ruins. Under decisions made at Yalta and Potsdam, the city was annexed by Poland, the surviving German residents fled or were expelled, and ethnic Poles repopulated it. Up to 18 percent of the new arrivals had been deported by the Soviets from pre-war eastern Polish areas. On the 30th of March 1945, the Gdańsk Voivodeship was established as the first Polish administrative unit in the Recovered Territories.

• 7. Birthplace Of Solidarity

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  In August 1980, the Gdańsk Shipyard became the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union and political movement. Ten years earlier, in December 1970, the city had been the site of anti-regime demonstrations that led to the downfall of Poland's communist leader Władysław Gomułka, when military and police opened fire on demonstrators in Gdańsk and Gdynia and killed several dozen people. In September 1981, to deter Solidarity, the Soviet Union launched Exercise Zapad-81, with amphibious landings conducted near Gdańsk, while Solidarity's first national congress was hosted in the Hala Olivia in the city. The movement's opposition to the regime led to the end of communist rule in 1989 and sparked protests that overthrew communist governments across the former Eastern Bloc. Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa, became President of Poland in 1990. In 2014 the European Solidarity Centre, a museum and library devoted to the movement's history, opened in the city. Donald Tusk, a Gdańsk native, has been prime minister of Poland since 2023, having also held the office from 2007 to 2014, and served as President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.

• 8. The City Today

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  In 2024, Gdańsk received 4.5 million tourists, many from Scandinavia and Germany, making it one of the most visited cities in Poland. Visitors find a reconstructed Hanseatic core along Ulica Długa and Długi Targ, a pedestrian thoroughfare once walked by visiting Kings of Poland and now called the Royal Route, flanked by elaborate city gates including the Highland Gate, the Golden Gate, and the Green Gate. St. Mary's Church, built in the 15th century, stands among the largest brick churches in the world. The Olivia Star tower in Oliwa rises 180 metres, the tallest building in northern Poland. The St. Dominic's Fair, dating back to 1260, draws crowds as one of the biggest trade and cultural events in Europe. The city is home to the University of Gdańsk, the Gdańsk University of Technology, the Museum of the Second World War, and the Polish Space Agency. In January 2019 the Mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, was assassinated by a man recently released from prison, dying the day after a multi-hour surgery. Months later, in October 2019, the city received the Princess of Asturias Award in the Concord category, recognized for its sensitivity to solidarity, freedom, and human rights. In 2025, the city became a UNESCO City of Literature, a fitting title for a place that has worn so many names.