Monument sights in Gdańsk
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Westerplatte
Westerplatte is a long peninsula at the entrance to the harbour. When Gdańsk became a free city after WWI, Poland was permitted to maintain a post at this location, at the tip of the port zone. It served both trading and military purposes and had a garrison to protect it. WWII broke out here at dawn on 1 September 1939, when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began shelling the Polish guard post. The garrison, which numbered just 182 men, held out for seven days before surrendering.
The site is now a memorial, with some of the ruins left as they were after the bombardment, plus a massive monument put up in memory of the defenders.
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B
Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers
Just in front of the shipyard gates, on Solidarity Square, the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers commemorates the workers killed in the riots of 1970. Unveiled on 16 December 1980, 10 years after the massacre, the monument is a set of three 42m-tall steel crosses, with a series of bronze bas-reliefs in their bases. The first monument in a communist regime to commemorate the regime's victims, it became an instant symbol and landmark.
One of the plates contains a fragment of a poem by late Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz: 'You who wronged a simple man/Do not feel safe. A poet remembers./You can kill one, but another is born.'
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C
Neptune Fountain
According to legend the Neptune Fountain, next to the town hall, once gushed forth with the trademark Gdańsk liqueur, Goldwasser. As the story goes, it spurted out of the trident one merry night and Neptune found himself endangered by crowds of drunken locals. Perhaps that's why in 1634 the fountain was fenced off with a wrought-iron barrier. The bronze statue was the work of another Flemish artist, Peter Husen; it was made between 1606 and 1613 and is the oldest secular monument in Poland.
A menagerie of stone sea creatures was added in the 1750s during the restoration of the fountain
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