Gdynia obiecana is the story of a city created from scratch, where it was possible to start with “a clean slate: to overcome the differences between the partitions, to overcome backwardness, to escape from national vices, from rural poverty and metropolitan unemployment, to leave behind ethnic feuds and class conflicts, to avoid urban mistakes and historical constraints that hindered the development of other cities. Here, a new generation learned new skills and professions related to the sea and international trade. Here, as if in a laboratory, a modern Polish urbanity and maritime Polishness, unencumbered by any bad or good tradition, could emerge. Here Poland was to escape forward, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The problem is that it took itself on this journey”.
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Grzegorz Piątek - writer, publicist, critic, architect by profession, expert on the history and architecture of Warsaw. A two-time winner of the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw: for the biography of the President of the capital Sanator. The Career of Stefan Starzyński (WAB, 2016) and for the bestselling book The Best City in the World. Warsaw in the reconstruction of 1944-1949 (WAB, 2020), which made it to the list of 20 books of 2020 of the Polityka weekly.
