Gdynia
— — a country building itself a window to the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city raised from a Kashubian fishing village in the 1920s, when Poland had a corridor to the Baltic but no harbour of its own. Construction began in 1921; town rights came in 1926. The result is a working seaport with a downtown of clean modernist white blocks, balconies turned toward the water. Gdynia sits at the northern end of the Tricity, between Sopot and the open sea, and still moves more cargo than any other Polish port.
Gdynia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gdynia stands on the southern shore of the Bay of Gdańsk, in Pomeranian Voivodeship, at the northern end of the Tricity agglomeration with Sopot and Gdańsk. The population is roughly 246,000. The modern city was raised from a Kashubian fishing village starting in 1921, after the Treaty of Versailles gave the new Polish state a corridor to the Baltic but assigned Danzig to a Free City under League of Nations control. Town rights were granted on 10 February 1926, and the deep-water port opened in stages that decade.
The harbour was carved out of low coast under the engineer Tadeusz Wenda, beginning in 1921 and dredged steadily through the 1930s. By 1934 Gdynia handled more tonnage than any other Baltic port. The Skwer Kościuszki pier runs straight into the water from the downtown grid, with the moored museum ships ORP Błyskawica and Dar Pomorza sitting at its end. The Gdynia container terminal is now Poland's largest, and the deep-water Baltic Hub is being expanded eastward into the bay year by year.
Downtown Gdynia is one of Europe's most coherent built ensembles of 1930s modernism. The Functionalist style took hold because the city grew up exactly when it did: white concrete blocks, curved corners, balconies turned toward the water, porthole windows borrowed from the ships at the pier. The PLO Building of 1937, the Bankowiec apartments, and the seafront ZUS building are all listed monuments. The downtown ensemble was placed on Poland's national heritage list as a Pomnik Historii in 2007 and proposed for UNESCO consideration in 2019.