80 Cities
03 Tricity — Gdansk / Gdynia / Sopot
The Gdańsk Shipyard area, where anti-communist riots and strikes broke out in 1970 and 1980, is being redeve loped, but the traces of history are still there.
Lech Wałęsa
Leader of the Solidarność movement in the 1980s, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, President of the Republic of Poland 1990-95
When I was a little boy, I saw Gdańsk as a big city with a seaport and shipyards. I knew that the Second World War had started there. I also heard that there were many historical sights in Gdańsk. This is how much I knew then. In the late spring of 1967 I got on a train and went to the seaside. I got off the train at the Gdańsk Główny railway station. A minute later I bumped into a friend from my old neighbourhood who talked me into working in the shipyard. I met my wife Danuta in Gdańsk and this is where our children were born…So that is how
I became a Gdańsk man out of my own choice. Today, many years later, having visited so many cities in Europe and the world, I can say that I would never swap Gdańsk for New York, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo or Moscow… At the end of the 20th century, Poland gave Pope John Paul II to Europe and the world. Gdańsk, on the other hand, gave the Solidarność movement to its nation, as well as to Europe and the entire world (…). excerpt from: Gdańsk Lecha Wałęsy / Lech Wałęsa’s Gdańsk, Piotr Adamowicz, Andrzej Drzycimski, Adam Kinaszewski, Gdańsk 2008.