The March of Time -- Returns and Introductions to Poland: Northern Exposure

It was a little bittersweet to realize that we'd be leaving Warsaw for good, as I'm not sure when -- if ever -- I might return. We joked that it would be very ironic if Anna ever ended up being posted to Warsaw. On the positive side, it is an entirely different city now and I think it would be a great place to live and work nowadays.

Do I Have To Get Up Yet?!

We were to have our longest travel day of the tour, leaving Warsaw and heading northward to Gdańsk, on the Baltic Sea. Along the way, we were to visit the medieval Marlbork Castle. The heat from the day earlier had returned with a vengeance, so it wasn't a bad day to be on the air-conditioned bus.

The official name of our first stop is the Castle of the Teutonic Order in Malbork, also known as Marienburg, as this area of Poland was under Prussian and German control for several centuries. It is a 13th-century Teutonic castle and fortress located in the town of Malbork, and is the largest castle in the world measured by land area and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is made entire of red-clay bricks, as there is no natural stone in the area. It is technically, too, the largest brick structure in the world, comprising approximately 60 million bricks. It was originally constructed by the Teutonic Knights, the German Catholic religious order of crusaders. The Order named it Marienburg in honor of Mary, mother of Jesus. In 1457, during the Thirteen Years’ War, it was sold by Bohemian mercenaries to King Casimir IV of Poland in lieu of indemnities and it then served as one of several Polish royal residences and the seat of Polish offices and institutions, interrupted by several years of Swedish occupation, fulfilling this function until the First Partition of Poland in 1772. From then on the castle was under German rule for over 170 years, until 1945.

It was clear at Marlbork that we were still at the height of the local travel season in Poland, as schools would not open until the first week of September. The visitors' center was packed, almost exclusively by visiting Poles and Germans. They had a strict capacity control system in place, with timed tickets, to the lines outside had us worrying about crowds inside the castle, but our concerns were unnecessary. We learned that the lines were caused by people without reservations, waiting for first-come, first-served and no-show tickets.

We had a local guide who took us through the castle for almost two full hours, and I feel like there was still more we could see. There were large areas of the castle where you could see heavy cracking and parts of the building beginning to cleave. It was evidently built on wooden stilts, as the water table was quite high centuries ago. The Germans dammed the neighboring river in the early 20th Century, to help control flooding, but that resulted in the water table dropping, and the wooden support beams -- which had been underwater -- are now rotting and collapsing as they dry out. There is evidently a huge study underway to see what can be done -- if anything -- to reverse the process, as if left unchecked, large parts of the castle will become unsafe to visit.

Arriving at Malbork

Outside the Perimeter Moat at Malbork

Showing Damage After World War II

The Lighter Brick Shows Reconstructed Areas

Original Paint Somehow Survived

Our home for the next two nights was to be the city of Gdańsk, or Danzig, as it was known when it was part of Germany. I had only visited here once during my tour, and that was only for a day. I remember taking the train up from Warsaw with my parents and sister-in-law, when they visited. My brother had gotten very ill -- we suspected it was food poisoning -- and he wasn't up to making the trip. I have few memories of that visit, other than that it was cold and gray, and I remember the train being shabby. We did not drive back then, as the road infrastructure was quite poor. It is less than 300 miles between the cities, but it would have taken all day to get there. In the preceding 28 years, however, Poland (and the European Union) have poured billions of dollars into building roads and transit infrastructure. Beautiful German-esque highways now crisscross the country, many of them toll roads. It was very inspiring to see such evidence of improvement during our bus days. I made the drive from Warsaw to Krakow and the Tartar Mountains several times during my tour, and remember how small and inadequate the highways were. The one exception was the main East-West highway, that linked Warsaw to Berlin. I made that drive a couple of times before. While certainly not at Western standards at the time, they were at least fairly well maintained. I remember, too, that every 50 miles or so the highway would sudden widen from two lanes in each direction to six or eight, for a mile or so. Those were built-in runway infrastructure, which were to accommodate Soviet bombers during a conflict with NATO. I have no idea if those areas still exist, but I saw no evidence during our trip.

We rolled into Gdańsk around 5:30pm, and it was a long day on the bus and we welcomed the reprieve. Our hotel was a Hilton, located right on one of the canals in the center of town. Great location and very nice hotel. The three of us enjoyed "sundowner" cocktails on the rooftop bar, which was hopping, particularly for a Sunday night. We could see all the people walking the promenade on both sides of the canal, and it was clear that there were a lot of families and tourists visiting. Dinner was as a group, in the hotel, which was also welcome, as it was so easy to eat and crawl into bed.