Gdynia is an often overlooked neighbor of the famous Gdańsk.
Together with Sopot and Gdańsk they make Trójmiasto (Tricity). I live here for 7 years now and this agglomeration together with Kashubian surrounding is my fav place in the earth. Worth visiting if you want to see Poland
I could never see the touristic appeal of Gdynia, but it is (or at least used to be) the very best city in PL to live in. I wouldn’t trade growing up there for anything. Unfortunately life displaced me to my least favorite city :)
Fun fact: Bond villain Ernst Blofeld is from Gdynia!
As is half of my family, incidentally. In fact, the names of some of my relatives are written on the wall inside the museum pictured in the article. I lived there for 10 years. Lovely place to live.
Nobody cares about or wants to wonder at modernist architecture. These are at best nice buildings to live and work in. The prices have already caught up with German and Dutch cities and are ridiculous relative to still lowish Polish salaries, assuming you're even employed nowadays. Nothing to see there.
> This would be a new Poland. Wilson called for it to include ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’ (this would become difficult to ascertain and haunt the future of the region)
I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers: 2 come from modern day central Ukraine (Vinnytsia), 2 come from modern day Belarus (Ashmyany).
It's very hard to explain to people how weak the whole concept of nation state used to be in Eastern Europe till ww2.
From Eastern Germany to the Urals, every place you would go it was a deeply cosmopolitan mix of Germans, Jews, different Slav ethnicities and depending on the regions significant Romanians, Hungarians, Turks and some other minorities.
You would cross from one village to the other and the language would change, and in minor centers neighborhood and districts changed architecture and language. Different ethnicities also generally mapped to different professions and status. And those changes didn't really look like gradients, more like dispersed bubbles.
Ethnic tensions were always present, everybody literally hated and tolerated each other with Jews generally being the common scape goat.
My grandparents coming from modern day Ukraine vividly remember the violence and terror caused by UPA, the nazi-sympathizing Ukrainian militias. My mother's grandma could not forget till the day she lived (died in 2004) what she saw in her childhood village when Ukrainians came and started a massacre that saw her losing a brother, countless cousins, uncles and friends.
Of course, Poles have been the aggressors too, just a few decades before, when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s and had its own share of ethnic violence against Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
The same happens in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The Russians see in Ukrainians the accomplice of their biggest trauma (the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany).
The Ukrainians see in Russia the perpetrator of their biggest trauma (the 1920s Holodomor).
No side ever says sorry, no side ever takes responsibility, no side can move on. And Eastern Europe keeps being unhealed from its traumas and carrying this in modern age.
And a man that would rather see the world burn than step out (Putin) plays on those traumas he very well understands for his own personal lust of power.
The history of Eastern Europe is very interesting, in how that came to be. A combination of pure immigration and settlement of peoples from the more populous low countries and Rhine valley to Eastern Europe. There was expulsion of Jews from central and western Europe, leading them to migrate to Eastern europe for the comparative religious tolerance. Then there was the hanseatic league, which created German cities, settlements and districts throughout the East to bring goods west as part of a vast trade network. Then German miners and engineers being brought east to exploit mineral wealth. This isn't taught much in the western schools, but its fascinating confluence of factors that lasted hundreds of years in early modern europe that created this total lack of homogenous populations in eastern europe.
I'm Slovak, and when I was a kid, I was really wondering what is the thing that makes people Slovak, what is the unifying thing. And only later in life I realized, that there is not much to it. It's just people that happened to be living in this area and stayed throughout the different times. Many cultures came and left. All the slavic languages we kind of fluid for a very long time, the standardization is recent, if you look at it from global point of view. The sad part is, this is not really even taught in local schools. And I also find it fascinating, that it's such a wild blend of cultures and yet the country/nature where the people lived formed them to something unique.
Worth mentioning that recently Gdynia celebrated its 100th birthday. On top of that, the city center has UNESCO heritage status https://www.reuters.com/world/gdynia-polands-interwar-modern...
Gdynia is an often overlooked neighbor of the famous Gdańsk. Together with Sopot and Gdańsk they make Trójmiasto (Tricity). I live here for 7 years now and this agglomeration together with Kashubian surrounding is my fav place in the earth. Worth visiting if you want to see Poland
Yeah it’s a cool city. I especially like it for the modernist buildings:
https://modernizmgdyni.pl//en
I could never see the touristic appeal of Gdynia, but it is (or at least used to be) the very best city in PL to live in. I wouldn’t trade growing up there for anything. Unfortunately life displaced me to my least favorite city :)
> wide to the hopeful Baltic Sea beyond
What a great phrase.
Fun fact: Bond villain Ernst Blofeld is from Gdynia!
As is half of my family, incidentally. In fact, the names of some of my relatives are written on the wall inside the museum pictured in the article. I lived there for 10 years. Lovely place to live.
Nobody cares about or wants to wonder at modernist architecture. These are at best nice buildings to live and work in. The prices have already caught up with German and Dutch cities and are ridiculous relative to still lowish Polish salaries, assuming you're even employed nowadays. Nothing to see there.
> This would be a new Poland. Wilson called for it to include ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’ (this would become difficult to ascertain and haunt the future of the region)
I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers: 2 come from modern day central Ukraine (Vinnytsia), 2 come from modern day Belarus (Ashmyany).
It's very hard to explain to people how weak the whole concept of nation state used to be in Eastern Europe till ww2.
From Eastern Germany to the Urals, every place you would go it was a deeply cosmopolitan mix of Germans, Jews, different Slav ethnicities and depending on the regions significant Romanians, Hungarians, Turks and some other minorities.
You would cross from one village to the other and the language would change, and in minor centers neighborhood and districts changed architecture and language. Different ethnicities also generally mapped to different professions and status. And those changes didn't really look like gradients, more like dispersed bubbles.
Ethnic tensions were always present, everybody literally hated and tolerated each other with Jews generally being the common scape goat.
My grandparents coming from modern day Ukraine vividly remember the violence and terror caused by UPA, the nazi-sympathizing Ukrainian militias. My mother's grandma could not forget till the day she lived (died in 2004) what she saw in her childhood village when Ukrainians came and started a massacre that saw her losing a brother, countless cousins, uncles and friends.
Of course, Poles have been the aggressors too, just a few decades before, when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s and had its own share of ethnic violence against Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
The same happens in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The Russians see in Ukrainians the accomplice of their biggest trauma (the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany).
The Ukrainians see in Russia the perpetrator of their biggest trauma (the 1920s Holodomor).
No side ever says sorry, no side ever takes responsibility, no side can move on. And Eastern Europe keeps being unhealed from its traumas and carrying this in modern age.
And a man that would rather see the world burn than step out (Putin) plays on those traumas he very well understands for his own personal lust of power.
The history of Eastern Europe is very interesting, in how that came to be. A combination of pure immigration and settlement of peoples from the more populous low countries and Rhine valley to Eastern Europe. There was expulsion of Jews from central and western Europe, leading them to migrate to Eastern europe for the comparative religious tolerance. Then there was the hanseatic league, which created German cities, settlements and districts throughout the East to bring goods west as part of a vast trade network. Then German miners and engineers being brought east to exploit mineral wealth. This isn't taught much in the western schools, but its fascinating confluence of factors that lasted hundreds of years in early modern europe that created this total lack of homogenous populations in eastern europe.
I'm Slovak, and when I was a kid, I was really wondering what is the thing that makes people Slovak, what is the unifying thing. And only later in life I realized, that there is not much to it. It's just people that happened to be living in this area and stayed throughout the different times. Many cultures came and left. All the slavic languages we kind of fluid for a very long time, the standardization is recent, if you look at it from global point of view. The sad part is, this is not really even taught in local schools. And I also find it fascinating, that it's such a wild blend of cultures and yet the country/nature where the people lived formed them to something unique.
> I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers
You probably mean great grand parents. You can only have 2 grandfathers.
This is very well put, IMO.
And I feel that the Balkans are even more representative, although my perspective may be skewed because I live there.
Going out for hikes through the Kashubian hills you can still find the old border markers from WWII era where the German border was.