Wrzeszcz

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Grunwaldzka street in Gdańsk Wrzeszcz, Dec 2003

Wrzeszcz (pronounced: ['vʒεʃʧ], formerly German: Langfuhr) is one of the boroughs of the Northern Polish city of Gdańsk. With a modern population of more than 65,000 in an area of 9.9 km² (population density 6,622), Wrzeszcz is the most populous part of Gdańsk.

The name Wrzeszcz, which is a bit unusual even to Polish ears, comes from the old name of the area, Wrzost, which derives from wrzos, an archaic Polish word for heather. The area of modern Wrzeszcz used to be forest and fields of heather.

Historical sources mention Vriezst in 1261 AD, and by the end of the 13th century the Cistercian Monks of Oliwa owned four or five water mills on the Strzyża, the stream running through Wrzeszcz. In 1412 AD, this suburban village was granted to Gdańsk city councillor Gerd von der Beke, an ally of the Teutonic Knights.

Early area landowners included the Bischof family, who held the increasingly residential settlement in the late 16th century and early 17th century, and the Koehne family, which started acquiring possessions in the Wrzeszcz area in 1616 AD. Gdańsk patrician Zachariasz Zappio acquired most of the land between today's Slowackiego and Do Studzienki streets and built a palace there. When King Jan III Sobieski visited the palace in 1677 AD, the little valley where the palace was located was renamed Dolina Krolewska, or King's Valley, to commemorate the occasion. Strictly speaking, in the 17th century the name Wrzeszcz referred only to a small market square, 130 m by 35 m, on what today is known as Aleja Grunwaldzka (Grunwald Avenue).

Between 1767 and 1770, Gdańsk mayor Daniel Gralath made a personal project of turning the two kilometers of old road between Wrzeszcz and Gdańsk proper into the four-lane, tree-lined Grand Avenue, as it was then renamed. Each lane of the avenue was lined by 350 trees imported from the Netherlands, and the entire cost of the project was the immense sum (for the time) of 100,000 guilders.

In the 18th century, residential construction aimed at the wealthy city folk took precedence. The erected residences were mostly classical style with beautiful gardens and the obligatory tree-lined driveways. By 1804, Wrzeszcz had about 900 residents, most of them working in breweries, distilleries, retailers, and factories making wajdaz (a kind of ash used to bleach cloth).

On December 6th 1807, under French occupation, the [Gdańsk-Prussian] convention ceded Nowy Port, Oliwa, Wrzeszcz, Ostrów, Siedlce, and Hel to Gdansk.

From the mid-19th century onwards, Wrzeszcz grew to become a fashionable and wealthy borough with beautifully decorated city villas for wealthier residents and even spacious accommodation for local labourers. In 1872, Wrzeszcz was joined to Gdańsk by a horse-drawn tram along the Grand Avenue.

In 1904, the Gdańsk University of Technology (Politechnika Gdańska) Grand Hall was built, soon followed by the city hospital, which is now the medical academy.

World War II was relatively kind to Wrzeszcz, as only a few buildings suffered damage. More destructive to the beautiful buildings was the communist regime's postwar policy of eradicating evidence of the borough's wealthy capitalists. Buildings were allowed to fall into disrepair and owners were evicted and their houses separated into tiny apartments which were then leased to people without means to maintain them.

Buildings that survived in good repair include the consulates of Germany, China, and several other countries, as well as some houses whose owners resisted eviction during the communist era.

The borough is now developing rapidly. A great deal of commercial activity (particularly banking and shopping) now takes place in Wrzeszcz. A number of international firms such as Citibank, ING Bank, Fortis Bank, and Shell have chosen to locate their offices there rather than in the Gdansk city center, large shopping centers such as Galeria Bałtycka and Centrum Handlowe Manhattan are opening along Grunwaldzka Street, and extensive military properties have been sold to housing developers. Traffic on Słowackiego and Grunwaldzka is jammed daily.

German author Günter Grass was born in Wrzeszcz in 1927, when the area still retained its German name, Langfuhr, and the area is the setting of two of his early novels, "The Tin Drum" (1959) and "Dog Years" (1963).