Lech Walesa going back to Gdansk reminded a friend of that lovely city, formerly Danzig, and also of its lovely surroundings. He then went on to reminisce, first about the surroundings. It is on the Baltic, of course, and he stayed on his holiday, not in the city, but at Zoppot, a fine seaside resort with great stretches of white sand, with woods where open-air theatre is practised in the summer and where gambling is there if you want to lose money in a casino, where a big pier or boardwalk juts far out into the sea, and all within a tram-ride of the city itself.
The heart of Gdansk is a busy enough port, but also one of the most elegant of cities as far as architecture goes. You have to marvel at the fact that, towards the end of the war, the advancing Russians levelled the old Danzig, not with aerial bombardment but using artillery, which effectively destroyed the old buildings with centuries of history behind them.
After the war, of course, the city reverted to being Polish and the people, without benefit of modern machinery, using hods, ladders and all that, rebuilt the old streets and alleys exactly like the original, guided, of course, by photographs.
One difference, perhaps. In the old times, merchants had, directly behind their dwelling quarters, store rooms for whatever goods they dealt in. These rear quarters were not rebuilt.
In some cases the builders reconstructed not the houses as they were before the second World War, but the houses as they were in the 18th Century. The Poles have a great sense of history.
But while admiring architecture and art and Memling's great triptych The Last Judgement - almost worth going to Gdansk to see it in the Marienkirche - you can explore lovely countryside all around (readers of Gunter Grass will remember), and even the woods a couple of miles from the centre of the old city. A tourist guide to Danzig/Gdansk carries many reminders of the past, including, some discerning drinkers will be glad to read, an old advertisement by a firm known as "Der Lachs" (the salmon), founded in 1598, which produced in the city a famous liqueur, Danziger Gold wasser.
They brought the know-how to western Germany as the Russians advanced, and now continue to make the same from there. Impossible to get in Dublin. Or to interest anyone in trying.
Finally, one fact older readers, or the young who read modern history, will be aware of: for three stormy years in the 1930s the League of Nations High Commissioner, who became a target of Nazidom (and fought hard for minorities there), was an Irishman, Sean Lester, from our own Department of External Affairs, as it then was.