Gdańsk, the shipyard where Solidarity began

Some places where history changed look the part. The gate of the old Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk does not. It is an ordinary industrial gate. But in August 1980 it was the centre of the world's attention, and what happened behind it led, by a long and winding road, to the end of communist rule in Poland and far beyond.

The strike

The strike at the shipyard began on 14 August 1980. The trigger was the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator at the yard. The workers downed tools in protest, and very quickly the strike became about much more. Its leader was Lech Wałęsa.

Strikes spread along the coast, and the workplaces formed a joint strike committee, led by Wałęsa, which on 17 August drew up a list of twenty-one demands. They were remarkable demands to make of a communist state: free trade unions independent of the party, the right to strike, the release of political prisoners. The demands were written on wooden boards and put up on the shipyard gate for everyone to read.

On 31 August, in a hall in the shipyard, Wałęsa and the deputy prime minister, Mieczysław Jagielski, signed an agreement that accepted the right of workers to form trade unions independent of the Communist Party. It was a concession without precedent in the Soviet bloc. The men and women who had gone on strike in a single shipyard a little over a fortnight earlier had changed what was possible in their country, and everyone on both sides of the table knew it. Within weeks a national union had formed, taking its name from the strike bulletin, Solidarność, Solidarity, and at its height it had close to ten million members.

The crosses and the boards

Outside the gate today stands the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970, three tall steel crosses, some forty-two metres high. It commemorates the workers killed when the authorities put down protests on the coast in December 1970, ten years before the great strike. It was unveiled on 16 December 1980, on the tenth anniversary, and it is often described as the first monument to the victims of communist oppression to be put up in a communist country.

Next to it is the European Solidarity Centre, opened in 2014, whose permanent exhibition tells the story of the strike and of the movement that grew from it. The original boards with the twenty-one demands are now on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

The old city

Gdańsk has much more than the shipyard. Its old city lies along the River Motława, and on the waterfront is the Crane, a medieval port crane rebuilt in the mid-fifteenth century after a fire, which loaded cargo and set the masts of ships. It is now part of the National Maritime Museum.

At the mouth of the harbour lies Westerplatte, usually counted as the place where the Second World War began. Early on 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived in the port on a supposedly friendly visit, opened fire on the small Polish garrison there. The defenders, under Major Henryk Sucharski, held out for about a week. The site is now a memorial park, and at the entrance to the little guardhouse museum stand two of the battleship's enormous shells, each 280 millimetres across, which say more about the odds the garrison faced than any caption could.

So Gdańsk can claim, with some justice, to have seen the first shots of one great conflict and the beginning of the end of another.

Tours and cruises that call at Gdańsk

Explore Worldwide's seven-night Highlights of Poland includes Gdańsk and Sopot, with Warsaw, Wroclaw, Zagan, Ksiaz Castle, Krakow, Wieliczka and the Kazimierz District. It has departures in every month from March to September.

Ambassador Cruise Line's fourteen-night Scandinavian Cities & Baltic Discoveries sails from London Tilbury in August, calling at Copenhagen, Gdynia, Gdansk, Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, Warnemünde, Berlin and Fredericia.

Fred. Olsen's ten-night Countries & Cultures of Northern Europe sails from Southampton in September, with Brunsbüttel, Kiel, Trelleborg, Gdańsk, Ventspils, Klaipeda and Copenhagen on its itinerary.

If you have one day in Gdańsk, divide it. Spend the morning in the old city and the afternoon at the shipyard and the European Solidarity Centre. Then stand at the gate for a moment, and think about what a list of demands on a wooden board can do.