Elbląg - Interlude - An Introduction

(does that make the other entries "ludes"?)

Elbląg is located in northern Poland, some 80km from Gdańsk. There are six direct trains from Gdańsk each day, and a number of others you can take and change at Malbork.
The town lies just south of the Vistula Lagoon, having been established when the lagoon was a bit bigger than it is now. It is also at the northern end of the Elbląg Canal (fancy that!) which is a pretty spectacular piece of engineering (more later).

Poland had been through a several administrative re-divisions since 1991, and for a time Elbląg was the capital of the province. These days it's 'just another town' holding the dubious title of Highest Unemployment Rate in Poland.

There is no record of when Elbląg was founded, but it was first mentioned as "Ilfing" in The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan which was written in Anglo-Saxon in King Alfred's reign using information from a Viking who had visited the area. (thank you Wikipedia).

The Teutonic Knights founded the town proper (calling it Elbing) as part of their occupation of the northern part of Poland. This was also an interesting event: the King of Poland was in a spot of bother back in the 13th Century, so asked the Teutonic Knights for help, and offered them a little bit of land in return for ousting some pesky enemy. The Teutonic Knights said thanks very much and moved in, took over the whole region and generally made a nuisance of themselves for a couple of hundred years. They were eventually ousted in the 15th Century.

Being so close to Gdańsk, Elbląg has often been caught up in the territorial struggles surrounding that city. As it also has access to the Baltic Sea through the Lagoon (the mouth of which is still controlled by Russia), the town itself has been pretty hot property. To summarise, it has been passed backwards and forwards between German, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian rule.

After WWI Elbląg was made part of East Prussia (Ost-Preussen), so was officially German. It's strategic place with access to the Baltic made it a great place to build U-Boats. When the Soviet army liberated Elbląg in 1945, they did so by the tried and true method of reducing it to rubble, although, much of the work had been done before they got there by the Western Allied bombers. After WWII most of the German population fled Elbląg became part of the new Republic of Poland, and was repopulated with Polish people from the bits of Poland that the USSR had taken for themselves.

As with many places in Poland, Elbląg still feels a little like the Post-war reconstruction is still a work in progress, and one finds all over the world, a lot of the money seems to go to the wrong places. That said, there has been some significant investment in recent times.
A new Tramline was built (Sydney people take note - trams are NOT evil!) and brand spanking new trams purchased for the whole network. There are also a few medium-high density housing estates that look quite new. These are much more socially sustainable than the old tower blocks, but I don't know how much of that is public housing, so it's unclear whether the investment is really helping those that need it. There are still plenty of tower blocks around and as you'd expect, those areas are pretty much no-go after dark.

The Elbląg Canal
The Elbląg Canal is one of the Seven Wonders of Poland and a UNESCO Memorial to World Culture Inheritances (umm... ok). It's about 80km long, starts in Ostróda and runs south to Elbląg via a bunch of little lakes. It's significance and brilliance is in the way the problem of altitude difference is solved. In the upper sections (south) there is a series of locks, which is quite normal for this sort of thing. In the lower (northern) sections, however, they take the boats down the hill on rails! (Why didn't they do this in Fitzcarraldo??) There are five of these slipways over a 10km length of the canal. They still work, but only in Summer, and only for tourists. It's the only example of this method in Europe! The story goes that a German Engineer (for it was in Germany back in the 19th Century) came up with this idea for getting from the Port of Elbląg to the forests around Ostróda. Most people thought his idea was crazy and it took years for anyone to give him any money to build it. In the end it was the King of Prussia who funded it, not because he thought it was a particularly good idea, nor because the new canal would be vitally important for trade and economic reasons, but because nobody had done it before. Good on him, I say! For more info and pictures, check out this site, or this one. Anoraks might also like this video (I love it!) and this one!

This entry has been compiled with the help of Wikipedia, LonelyPlanet, Michael Palin, conversations and personal observations.