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Published: April 11th 2008
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Gdansk will be among the venues when Poland and Ukraine host football’s 2012 European Championship. A charming city it may be, but there is much work to do before it is ready for an influx of foreign visitors on such a huge scale.
The first thing you notice on arrival in Gdansk, which along with its smaller neighbours Gdynia and Sopot makes up the Tri-City area on Poland’s Baltic coast, is the lack of infrastructure.
There is no rail service to take passengers from the small airport to the city centre and the only road is a single lane, potholed strip which twice a day fails to cope with the rush hour traffic.
I visited with three friends, including two brothers whose grandparents fled to England when the Poles re-took what was then the German city of Danzig during the latter days of World War II. The purpose of their visit was to make a film of their family history, mine was to get a taste of a previously unseen country.
It was an inauspicious start. The pint of beer sipped contentedly at the airport as three of us waited for the fourth to arrive on a
later flight, became a nagging, leaden weight on my bladder as our taxi took an eternity to battle its way through the late Friday afternoon traffic, each pothole emphasising the folly of the decision to ‘wait until we get to the hotel’. The point was rammed home further when our driver revealed as we reached the centre that he’d never heard of our hotel. Ninety minutes after starting our 10km journey, we finally arrived.
Gdansk is rich in history, having changed hands numerous times over the centuries. The first shots of the war were fired here, as the Germans seized control of the city from the waters of the Baltic, overcoming stiff Polish resistance at Westerplatte. A fittingly bleak monument stands on the windswept headland overlooking the spot where the SS Schleswig-Holstein began the bombardment, which my friends’ ancestors, only a few miles away, believed to be a firework display.
In the 70s it was the birthplace of Lech Walesa’s solidarity movement, the trade union of shipyard workers whose demonstrations against their working conditions began the process which led in time to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Walesa went on to become the country’s first democratically elected president and is still revered in Gdansk, where he has offices in the Main Town.
Comprehensively flattened during the war, Gdansk was beautifully reconstructed over a 20-year period thereafter. The focus of most visitors’ attention is Dlugi Targ, or Long Market, in the heart of the Main Town. Lined by restaurants and cafes, this peaceful, pedestrianised street runs the length of the city’s historic centre.
It was here that we met Martin, an Englishman living in Gdansk for the best part of a decade. A friend of a friend of a friend, Martin greeted us like family and patiently showed us around the city, helping us to track down the tenement building which had been the ancestral home and was to be the focal point of the film.
He then arranged to meet us at his local bar out in Sopot, where we were acquainted with some fine Polish beers and the local speciality - bison grass vodka mixed with apple juice to create, in effect, a liquid apple crumble. This, I discovered, was perfect as a painkiller for those who, for example, had earlier chomped halfway through their tongue whilst getting to grips with a particularly toothsome meal. Tomato Soup, in my case.
The breakfast buffet after the apple crumble before was too much to contemplate, but by lunchtime my queasiness had subsided, enabling me to sample the culinary delights Gdansk has to offer.
The restaurant we chose was just off Dlugi Targ and lived up to its promise of ‘big portions at low prices’. For just £2 I was furnished with a platter of tender pork steaks (five of them), with a mountain of fried potatoes and a host of pickles. Outstanding.
In the afternoon, it was time for football. Lechia Gdansk v Katowice in a crumbling bowl which would have looked out of date in the 70s may not be everybody’s cup of sporting tea, but it was real, gritty, down to earth and thoroughly enjoyable.
Any Pole who knows his ball control from his ball-cock (and vice versa) has long since headed west to find more gainful employment. What they have left behind is a husk of a league, with standards which make you feel like you could probably join in without anyone noticing.
This is even more evident in the country’s second division, where these two once-mediocre clubs now shamble about to no great effect. We laugh as the overweight, lumbering centre forward takes to the field before kick-off. We look on in astonishment as he outpaces an unsightly centre half to score from 20 yards. We laugh some more at a series of mishaps and pratfalls which would have been equally at home in a Big Top.
At the final whistle (a 2-0 victory for Lechia), the small crowd goes wild, as they have done for much of the match. This is the joy of watching football at this level - the colour, the smoke bombs, the passion, the deep, manly and frankly quite disturbing chanting.
This stadium will be put out to seed once the new venue for the 2012 tournament is constructed. Just as soon as the local authority can unearth some builders to replace those who are now in Germany, Britain or Spain, work will commence.
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