Things to do
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European Solidarity Centre
A rust-coloured steel building beside the historic gate of the Lenin Shipyard, where in August 1980 striking workers led by an electrician named Lech Wałęsa won the right to a free trade union. The exhibition follows the movement through martial law to the elections of 1989. The plywood boards listing the strikers' twenty-one demands are on display. Outside stands the monument to workers shot in 1970.
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Long Market
The ceremonial street of the old merchant city, running from the Golden Gate to the Green Gate on the river, along which Polish kings made their entries. Narrow houses with ornate gables and stone terraces line both sides, nearly all rebuilt from ruins after 1945. The bronze Neptune fountain of 1633 stands before the Artus Court, the merchants' hall, which holds a tiled stove eleven metres tall.
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Malbork Castle
The headquarters of the Teutonic Knights from 1309, and by land area the largest castle in the world: three walled enclosures of red brick above the river Nogat. Half of it was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt over decades. The visit takes three to four hours with an audio guide through refectories, chapels and the grand master's palace. Trains from Gdańsk take under an hour.
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Museum of the Second World War
Opened in 2017 in a tilted tower of red concrete, with the exhibition itself fourteen metres underground. It tells the war chiefly through civilians across all of occupied Europe and Asia, with a reconstructed prewar street that visitors meet again later, bombed. The scale is large and the content heavy. Three hours is a minimum. Tuesdays are free and correspondingly busy.
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Oliwa Cathedral
A long, narrow Cistercian abbey church in a leafy northern suburb, famous for a rococo organ of nearly eight thousand pipes completed in 1788. Carved angels on the case blow trumpets and ring bells, and stars and suns turn, when it is played. Short demonstration recitals are given several times a day. The abbey park next door has a palm house and a whispering grotto.
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St. Mary's Church
Among the largest brick churches in the world, begun in 1343 and able to hold twenty-five thousand. The whitewashed interior is plain and immensely tall. An astronomical clock of the 1460s shows saints' days, zodiac and moon phases, and its maker is said to have been blinded so he could build no rival. Over four hundred steps lead up the tower to a rooftop view.
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Westerplatte
At dawn on 1 September 1939 a German battleship opened fire on the small Polish garrison holding this wooded peninsula at the harbour mouth. Expected to last twelve hours, some two hundred soldiers held out for seven days. Ruined barracks and guardhouses remain among the trees, beneath a tall granite monument. Tour boats make the trip from the old town quay in under an hour.
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Żuraw
A timber crane housed in a fortified water gate on the Motława quay, built in the 1440s and for centuries the biggest port crane in Europe. Men walking inside two pairs of giant treadwheels could lift loads of several tonnes or step a ship's mast. Burned in 1945 and reconstructed, it belongs to the maritime museum. It is the emblem of the city.