Gdansk

Gdansk Group Trip – Day 3 (St. Mary’s Church – Gdansk Cathedral)

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Our first stop of the day was at St. Mary’s Church, which is the co-cathedral for the area along with Oliwa Cathedral. I’ve written about this building before, but it’s a magnificent and grand structure. I’m always quite taken by the height of the aisles, but the history of it bouncing between the Catholic and Lutheran traditions for centuries is fascinating and it has only been Catholic once again since 1945. Many of the artworks from the church were in the care of the National Museum in Warsaw and were only returned back here in the 1990s.

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This is new since my last visit, the burial place of Paweł Adamowicz who served as the Mayor of Gdansk between 1998 and 2019 when he was assassinated. He was killed at a charity event by a man with mental health issues, a tragedy that I remember sent shockwaves throughout Poland and beyond.

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Steve found a leaflet about the Polish camino, he’s done numerous of these long walks in Spain and so he was surprised and delighted by this. My next problem was getting Bev and Susanna out of the building as we’re returning later in the weekend if possible to climb the tower, but fortunately they eventually noticed my passive aggressive hints they needed to leave for the moment.

Anyway, more about this building in later posts, although I’ve written before about the Astronomical Clock and the story that Soviet troops smashed their way into vaults of the building.