Pomerania Culture & Language

Pomeranian culture is maritime and mercantile, layered with a Kashubian substrate and dominated now by a single political story.

Amber

Baltic amber — fossilised resin from forests of forty million years ago, washed up along this coast and now also mined — has been worked in Gdansk since the Middle Ages and traded south to Rome long before that. The city has a guild, an amber museum, and the Mariacka street of workshops; pieces containing trapped insects are the prized ones. The reconstructed Amber Room, looted from Tsarskoye Selo in 1941 and never recovered, was made from stone quarried along this coast.

Brick Gothic

St Mary’s in Gdansk holds around 25,000 people and is the largest brick church in the world; Malbork is the largest castle by area. The absence of building stone on the plain produced an architecture of enormous brick volumes, and Pomerania has the best of it.

Kashubian culture

The language has official regional status, is taught in schools and used in some church services. Kashubian embroidery uses a fixed palette of seven colours, and the snuff horn and the diabelskie skrzypce, a devil’s fiddle, are the folk instruments.

Solidarity as heritage

The shipyard gate, the monument to the fallen shipyard workers of 1970, and the European Solidarity Centre are treated as national patrimony.

Astronomy and the thermometer

Gdansk’s merchant wealth funded science as well as art. Johannes Hevelius built an observatory on the roofs of his brewery in the 1640s and produced the first detailed atlas of the moon; his wife Elisabeth, who continued the work, is among the earliest women known to have published astronomical observations. Daniel Fahrenheit was born in the city in 1686, and the scale still bears his name.

Gdynia modernism

A whole city built in the 1920s and 1930s in a confident international style.

Polish is the language and is spoken by everyone.

Kashubian is the region’s own: a West Slavic language, the only one in Poland with official regional language status, spoken by perhaps a hundred thousand people inland from the coast. It is taught in schools, used in some church services and on bilingual signs around Kartuzy and Wejherowo, and it is not readily intelligible to Polish speakers.

German is understood by some and widely heard from visitors, many with family connections to the region before 1945.

English is widely spoken in the Tricity, particularly among younger people, and less so inland.

Useful Polish: dzien dobry, dziekuje, prosze, przepraszam, na zdrowie. In Kashubian, dobri dzen for good day is a gesture that will be noticed.