We have remarked before in hidden europe that great ports have their own peculiar appeal. Whether it be Bilbao or Brindisi, Cádiz or Constanta, cities with wharves and warehouses can be fabulously exotic places. Foreign voices mingle on quaysides and in cafés. The docks where cranes work by day become ghostly arcades by night. Behind the waterfront, there is the jumbled chaos of commerce, places where wealth and poverty sit cheek by jowl, and out beyond the docks, the mud coloured nooks where the water rats run.
But what of the onetime ports whose fortunes have faded? Europe is dotted with little havens whose names are no longer writ large on the navigation charts. Places like Rye in southeast England or Ribe in Danish Jutland, where the evolution of landscape over many centuries has left onetime ports without easy access to the sea. In Poland, the small town of Frombork was never a major port. But it made a modest income through fishing, some coastal shipping lines and the diligent industry of export and import. hidden europe has visited this Polish outpost that found itself curiously inconvenienced by the redrawing of post-war borders.
In the still of an autumn morning, a lone swan patrols the inner harbour. From his lookout, Pawel scans the still waters in the bay, his eyes running the length of the distant spit: from the small Polish resort of Krynica Morska up to the Russian border and beyond. At one minute to nine, Pawel puts down the binoculars, and, just as every morning, he runs down the steps from the coastguard station and across to the neat enclosure that houses an array of meteorological instruments. There he takes the day's readings, entering details of temperature, visibility and other observations into a notebook. It is a routine that has been enacted at Frombork's harbour for as long as Pawel can remember.
Two concrete breakwaters push out from the harbour into the shallow waters of the lagoon. One hundred years ago, Frombork had a different name: Frauenburg. In those days, the town made a good living from exporting timber. And, especially after the arrival of the railway in 1899, tourists would come from Berlin and other German cities to enjoy days of Baltic sunshine. They expected nothing more than a week or two of recuperation. An excursion by boat across to Kahlberg on the spit perhaps, where the children might play happily on the sand dunes, or walks in the forests behind Frauenburg, and long summer days enjoying East Prussian hospitality under the shadow of the town's great red-brick cathedral. Then the visitors would buy little pieces of amber as souvenirs and return to their normal lives back in their home cities.
It was an accident of nature, a single storm, that opened this great lagoon to the sea.
This is a port that finds itself strangely isolated from the open sea. The shallow-draft barges that exported wood could reach the Baltic only by sailing north across the lagoon to reach the single opening through the great Vistula (Wisla) spit between Neutief and Pillau. Today Pillau is the Russian naval port of Baltijsk.
It was an accident of nature, a single storm, that opened this great lagoon to the sea.
But history often finds a way of subverting nature, and post-war politics sealed off the port at Frombork from the wider world. East Prussia was split in two, its northern half being ceded to Russia. The former capital of East Prussia, Königsberg, which was within that northern zone, was renamed Kaliningrad (Калининград). The southern portion of the former German territory became part of Poland. Frauenburg became Polish Frombork, and for more than four decades there was not a whole lot to do in Frombork harbour beyond scanning the horizon and taking the daily meteorological readings.
The redrawing of the map of Europe did not entirely scupper Frombork’s potential as a Baltic port of some note. A few boats came and went, mainly just to ferry visitors over to that part of the spit which still lay in Polish waters. Kahlberg, once no more than a fishing village among the dunes and pine forests of the Vistula Spit which a#uent Germans had developed into a desirable coastal spa resort, took on a new life as a Polish summer holiday village. Nowadays, winter in Frombork is as dead as ever, but the town where Copernicus lived and worked is reemerging onto the Baltic travel map with new summer ferry links to nearby Russia.
On the west side of the harbour, a new blue prefabricated building serves as the terminal for the summer boats to Kaliningrad. “Welcome to the European Union” says the multilingual sign where, on bright summer mornings, the day trippers queue and fuss over whether their Russian visas are all in order. With a journey time of just seventy-five minutes on a red hydrofoil, it really is feasible to spend an afternoon in the run-down Russian exclave that now finds itself nudging European Union territory on three sides. But interest in cultural expeditions for a glimpse of post-Soviet decay is dwarfed by an appetite for quick boat trips offshore, just far enough to enter Russian waters, where, once the invisible demarcation line is crossed, the onboard duty free shop is opened for cheap vodka and cigarettes.
Russians now make summer outings to Frombork too, and Russian language versions of the menu are beginning to appear in the cafés on the main street. And in 2006 Frombork tourism received a little boost when a Swiss company operating a small cruise ship, the MS Polonaise , starting including Frombork in its schedules. Every landing ushers in another boat load of curious German tourists who step nervously ashore to explore the small port town that was once so German but which now seems so very foreign.
Some of the German visitors who come on the MS Polonaise bring fading memories of schooldays or childhood holidays in East Prussia. Walking up from the harbour towards the town, some of the visitors place a flower by the memorial to the many thousands of Germans who fled from Frombork and neighbouring communities in early 1945. Anxious to escape from approaching Russian forces, the civilian population ventured out onto the frozen lagoon. Many perished on the ice, slipping through cracks to their deaths. Others reached the Vistula Spit, only there to freeze amid the dunes and pine woods.
Frombork Cathedral (right) and the Vistula Lagoon (photo © hidden europe).
Post-war Frombork was in a derelict and destitute state, its entire population composed of migrants from further east. Some had been deported from Poland’s lost territories, land that became part of Ukraine or Lithuania. Others came from much further afield, walking many thousands of kilometres to reach this former German homeland which, so the rumours went, was a land with rich forests, good soil and some of the finest apple orchards in all Europe. The migrants arrived in Frombork to find a place that teetered on the edge of both Europe and starvation. The books abandoned by German families were burnt to create a little warmth. The German statue of Nicolaus Copernicus was torn down.
Mere survival evolved into mild suffering and eventually to modest success as Frombork made its way in the world. Settlers who once spoke very different dialects learnt to understand each other. The timber yards had closed, the port was empty, but Frombork’s cathedral stood proud on the hill overlooking the town centre. Boy Scouts from all over Poland came to the town for summer camps, and helped rebuild some of Frombork’s finest buildings for the celebrations in 1973 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus. A new railway station was built, a hapless affair of concrete and glass; its architectural shortcomings were offset in part by a heliocentric mural that played up the Copernicus theme. The few possessions that Frombork’s post-war settlers had carried with them on their long walks across Europe were consigned to lofts and cellars, from where they were eventually rescued to form a fine exhibition of the small domestic comforts and practical tools that had meant so much to the new arrivals when they first started to trim back Frombork’s unkempt orchards in the spring of 1946.
Today Frombork is one of the most amiable small towns in the Baltic region. Boats with names like Free, Akord and Nikolaus bob in the harbour, where the lone swan keeps an eye on any comings and goings. The last boat of the season has left for Kaliningrad, and for over six months the ticket office will stay closed. A lone fisherman in an army jacket sits at the end of the pier and looks out across the lagoon to Russia. The young woman who looks after the museum of odds and ends that refugees brought to Frombork after the war tries to keep warm in the onetime carriage house next to the cathedral that now serves as home to the exhibition.
Frombork’s most famous son, Copernicus, has left an uncanny legacy in the Baltic town that was his home for almost forty years. For the people of Frombork seem to have a knack of seeing the universe anew, and well do they know that their small port is not at the centre of things. For a time after the opening up of Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast — for years it was forbidden territory for foreigners — Frombork folk, like others in Polish border communities close to the Russian border, made a decent trade in cross-border selling. A simplified visa regime facilitated travel across the border for residents of both Poland and Russia. Notions of ‘common Baltic space’ began to circulate and many locals were hopeful about the future. But the European Union had its own ideas and in the run-up to Poland joining the Union in May 2004, there was a tightening up of Poland’s border with Russia. Unsurprisingly, Russia responded in kind.
Frombork makes a living as a minor way station on the route to Kaliningrad, and many are the coach parties of Germans, often with lost Königsberg connections, who stop off here overnight before leaving early the next morning to cross the border into Russia. They come, knowing a little of Copernicus perhaps, and find a devoutly Catholic community. The streets fall silent at six in the evening as almost the entire population gather in the cathedral for Mass. Mieczysław Orłowicz, who did so much in the early twentieth century to promote Polish tourism, wrote enthusiastically about this Polish cathedral on the sea: “so much charm that among the old Polish cathedrals only the Wawel Cathedral [in Kraków] can be compared to it.” We are rather inclined to agree.
The location of Frombork on the lagoon.
