Gdansk 08/04
When the sun shines, the city shines with an efullugence which makes the spots jump around in the eyes!....Gdansk/Danzig was never very large....when it was the League of Nations Free City it barely had 400,000 people...and yet its historical role is mammoth....and not just the 20th century years. The Gdansk merchant class were as rich as pompous as the Spanish court in the 15th and 16th century, building great mansions and guildhalls, the renaissance rooms being lovingly restored and stuffed with the oddest things.
Neptune of course was huge and the fountains/bricabrac/furniture with Neptunian themes abound. Red was the color of choice in things...perhaps because winter up here is no doubt extremely monochrome. The city had huge minorities then: there are two sections of town called "Old" and "New" Scotland...a large and rather patrician Jewish community which the Nazis of course obliterated...even the odd Arab and Chinese: Such was the city's trade.
The inventor idiot-savant Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer here (and gave the United States of America a way of telling the weather which separates us from every single other bit of the known world). Schopenhauer was born here but his allegiance oddly was more to Poland than to Prussia which irritated Potsdam to the quick. I am a little chary of too much Malthus talk about place vs personality (how in God's name to explain the Zulus?) but some things seem for sure. Danzig/Gdansk produced rebels/heretics by the score. Look at Lech Walesa as the most recent example. He who is unfortunately alive and not martyred, he who was chucked out much as Churchill was. It's in the soil? It's in the air? One thing is for damned sure, the light here is wrenchingly beautiful when the sun does shine.
OK that's Gdansk for the moment. All is not bliss. The more highly restored areas are frantically popular with Polish tourists as ugly as any...street martkitchstands-and people do wander around rather distressingly eating ice cream cones and carrying balloons. There is enough amber to turn the world a hepatitis-yellow and much is sure to be fake. (The test: rub a kleenex on a piece of it...if light paper then adheres magnet-fashion, it is real). There are no antiques though: Too many wars, rapes, expulsions. The Soviets tried to move as many of the Poles out of their "liberated" city of Vilnius (Wilno) as possible and leave it to the Lithuanians. Many of these people ended here. One hopes in this century that these horrible sweeps of people might stop...I thought they had with Hitler and Stalin...but then came Bosnia and then came Rwanda. The Poles though have no one much in their borders to hate and I am sure it rather bewilders them.
- FRED
Neptune of course was huge and the fountains/bricabrac/furniture with Neptunian themes abound. Red was the color of choice in things...perhaps because winter up here is no doubt extremely monochrome. The city had huge minorities then: there are two sections of town called "Old" and "New" Scotland...a large and rather patrician Jewish community which the Nazis of course obliterated...even the odd Arab and Chinese: Such was the city's trade.
The inventor idiot-savant Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer here (and gave the United States of America a way of telling the weather which separates us from every single other bit of the known world). Schopenhauer was born here but his allegiance oddly was more to Poland than to Prussia which irritated Potsdam to the quick. I am a little chary of too much Malthus talk about place vs personality (how in God's name to explain the Zulus?) but some things seem for sure. Danzig/Gdansk produced rebels/heretics by the score. Look at Lech Walesa as the most recent example. He who is unfortunately alive and not martyred, he who was chucked out much as Churchill was. It's in the soil? It's in the air? One thing is for damned sure, the light here is wrenchingly beautiful when the sun does shine.
OK that's Gdansk for the moment. All is not bliss. The more highly restored areas are frantically popular with Polish tourists as ugly as any...street martkitchstands-and people do wander around rather distressingly eating ice cream cones and carrying balloons. There is enough amber to turn the world a hepatitis-yellow and much is sure to be fake. (The test: rub a kleenex on a piece of it...if light paper then adheres magnet-fashion, it is real). There are no antiques though: Too many wars, rapes, expulsions. The Soviets tried to move as many of the Poles out of their "liberated" city of Vilnius (Wilno) as possible and leave it to the Lithuanians. Many of these people ended here. One hopes in this century that these horrible sweeps of people might stop...I thought they had with Hitler and Stalin...but then came Bosnia and then came Rwanda. The Poles though have no one much in their borders to hate and I am sure it rather bewilders them.
- FRED
posted by ultimatetraveler at 12:05 PM
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