Four days in Gdańsk: where the war began and communism ended

Come in through the stone gate at the western end and walk the whole length of the main street to the water. It takes ten minutes at a normal pace and about an hour at the pace anybody actually walks it, because every house front on it is different and most of them are reconstructions of something specific.

The town hall in the middle has the best view in the city from its tower and a council chamber downstairs with a gilded ceiling that was carried out of the building and hidden before the bombing. The museum inside also has the photographs of 1945, which are worth looking at before you admire anything else: the street you just walked up was a trench of broken brick.

At the bottom, the gate opens onto the river and the crane, a wooden hoist inside two brick towers that was lifting masts into ships when Gdańsk was one of the busiest ports in Europe. Eat on the far bank, looking back at the row of gabled warehouse fronts, which is the view the city puts on its postcards and has earned.

Walk north out of the old town for fifteen minutes and the scale changes completely. The shipyard gate is still there, with the plaques listing the twenty-one demands the strike committee posted on it in August 1980, and behind it a rust-coloured building shaped like a ship's hull under construction holds the museum of what happened next.

It is a good museum and an unusual one, because it is about a negotiation rather than a battle: the strike, the sixteen months of legal Solidarity, martial law, the underground years, and the round table that ended it in 1989. Go up to the roof afterwards and look out over the cranes; that part costs nothing.

Then south again to the war museum, which is mostly underground beneath a leaning glass tower. It opened in 2017 and tells the war from the civilian side, which is a deliberate choice and one that caused an argument about the museum's direction that reached the government. Allow three hours; most people come out having spent more.

The train from the main station takes about fifty minutes and runs often. Get an early one: the castle is enormous, the audio guide runs most of an afternoon if you follow it properly, and the last hour before closing is when the coach parties leave and the courtyards empty.

The Teutonic Order built this as its headquarters after moving from Venice in 1309, and kept adding to it for a century and a half until it covered 21 hectares of brick on the bank of the Nogat. It is not a castle in the storybook sense. It is a fortified state capital: three castles inside one wall, a refectory heated by hot air under the floor, a chapter house on vaults that spring from a single central pillar, and a defensive circuit designed by people who expected to be besieged and were.

Poland took it in 1457 by paying the garrison's unpaid mercenaries, which is the sort of detail the audio guide is good on. The Germans held it again from the partitions until 1945, when artillery took out about half of it, and the rebuilding has been going on ever since.

Do Mariacka first, before the shops open properly. It runs from the water up to the church and every house on it has a raised stone terrace out front with steps and a gargoyle waterspout, which is what a Gdańsk merchant's front garden looked like. It is the one street the rebuild got completely right.

Then take a boat. Water trams leave from the waterfront by the crane and run down the harbour past the shipyard, the container terminal and the fortress at the bend, which is forty-five minutes of working port and much more interesting than the bus.

At the end is the spit where the shooting started on 1 September 1939: a wooded park, a few smashed concrete bunkers left where they fell, and a monument on a mound. Around 180 Polish soldiers held it for seven days against a battleship and repeated assaults. There is very little to look at and it is still worth going, which is true of most of the places where something began.