Blog 9 Swinoujscie Szczecin

I am having to jump a few locations or I will get too far behind. We sailed South through the inland waterways of Germany where eagles dare - we saw three - and stopped over at Wolgast and then on to Ueckermunde where jane had her birthday. We had lunch out in the quaint square and to be sociable I sketched the scene which I have to include out of place in this Poland episode in order to keep up.

Since writing the draft of this piece on Poland, I've fundamentally changed my mind about how I felt but decided to leave the next two paragraphs as I wrote them but add that now I wonder what right I or we have to suggest how another country should be - maybe they don't want what I want.

It would not have been fair to give my first impressions of Poland based only on the very first town, and a town hugely shaped by its industrial sized docklands - Swinoujscie is a seaport which is Polands doorway into the Baltic states as well as being as close as you can get to Germany. Its character is probably as unrepresentative of the country as Portsmouth is to England.

With difficulty I have tried to sum it up but finally came to think that it is somewhere you would want to leave if you had the opportunity. The colour of cement and concrete paints a stark and bleak character on its face. There are too many unkempt men with folded back eared dogs, too much wasteland where weeds are the victor and too many hungry little shops that have lost the will to thrive. Towering over all this, are hundres of concrete box like apartments, each with a tiny balcony, a satellite dish and a coloured panel which unintentionally adds uniformity to humdrum lives. One day, someone will discover that they have huge potential for tourism in the extensive waterfont presently used purely for military and industial purposes - neither of which seem to bring revenue in to the town.

So my change of heart came from partly from thinking about Poland's history in the last 80 years, its high unemployment and mass migration and partly the following experience in Szczecin.

Szczecin is a large city on a wide river and while having a number of impressive and historic buildings, a lot of the city has been ravaged by a string of wars going back to 1800. We walked a 7 Km route around the featured treasures and have to say that some of them were a bit of a push, "In this building Catherine the Great was born and ruled....." but it is now a modern insurance office building. However we went into the Cathedral Basilica of St James which was built for the first time in 1187 but war damaged many times and yet again rebuilt after WWII, with soaring columns and flooded with light. Inside this wonderfully entrancing place a wedding was in progress, the couple were making their pledges to each other in whispers which floated to every corner of the cathedral. Outside it was a very hot bright day but in the cool nterior sunlight poured through the most spectacular modern stained glass windows I think I have ever seen - to me they were reminiscent of the jewel like art which Russia was so good at with astonishing use of colour and flowing line, like silks moved by a breeze. I was near captivated by the ceremony, beauty and light when a lone voice began to sing, so fine and pure, then accompanied by a violin and finally the organ - the music filling the vast space and enhancing every spiritual aspect of the experience - I was absolutely knocked out and have more to say about it than I can write just now