Source: Baltic Transport Journal 6/2017

1. Heritage corner
72 | Baltic Transport Journal | 6/2017
T
he best way to understand why
Poland desperately needed a sea-
port, would be to take a look at the
map depicting the country's mid-
war borders. After regaining independence
and getting its borders safe, Poland had,
all in all, over 140 kilometers of seacoast
(without Gdańsk, Szczecin-Świnoujście, or
Elbląg). It was necessary to give the country
a breath of fresh air, a possibility of inde-
pendent trade, and a window of opportunity
for recovering economy. Sounds good, but
where’s the port? Oh, wait…
So, it was clear for the Polish political
establishment that a new port had to be
built from scratch, and soon. In the 1920,
Rear Admiral Kazimierz Porębski, Head
of the Maritime Affairs Department at
the Ministry of Military Affairs, ordered
the engineer Tadeusz Wenda to find
the best place where a seaport could be
located. Wenda chose Gdynia. It may not
have been the small village people some-
times claim it was, but it wasn’t a bus-
tling metropolis, either. At the time, only
about 1,300 people lived there. Two years
later, in 1922, an official bill establishing
a port in Gdynia was passed by the Polish
Forsomeports,it’sjustnotpossibletotellmuchabouttheirexactorigins.Precisedates,firstshipcallingever,
themainbuilder,andotherpreciousbitsofinformationareforeverhiddenbehindthedarkcurtainofhistory.
They developed organically and grew over centuries. But this is definitely not the story of the Port of Gdynia.
parliament. This is the formal date of birth
of this Polish port.
At the same time the construction pro-
cess began, with a big role later played by
a Polish-French consortium, which was
responsible for the port’s expansion. And
here again we meet Tadeusz Wenda, who
also designed the port and was engaged
in many activities around it (what’s inter-
esting, Wenda also helped to rebuild the
port after WWII). Among many other
contributors, we must definitely mention
Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, who supported the
construction in its crucial moment. He is
now remembered as the father of Gdynia
– his decisions as a Trade and Industry
Minister (1926-1930) broke the deadlock
in the construction period.
Let’s now take stock of Gdynia’s ini-
tial equipment base: two gantries for load-
ing coal and iron, a rotary car dumper,
four mobile cranes, as well as four electric
cranes (Gdynia going green before it was
cool?). When it comes to the first ship under
a foreign flag (French, to be exact) calling
at the new facility’s quay, it was Kentucky,
arriving in 1923, when the port was still at
a very early stage of its development.
From the ground up
by Maciej Kniter
Soon Gdynia became an important
point on the shippers’ map. In the 1930s
it was directly connected to cities such as
New York, and continents such as South
America. In 1926, when British coal export
to Scandinavia ceased in the wake of a
miners’ strike, Poles stepped into the gap,
shipping out Polish coal via Gdynia and
soon conquering the Scandinavian market.
Gdynia was and still is perceived as the great
economic project of the interwar Poland.
A lot of people moved here to find a better
future, and the port was at its core.
Was building Gdynia a success? By all
means. As early as in 1932, Gdynia first
overtook its neighbour, Gdańsk in turno-
ver results. In 1936, Gdynia handled 7.7
million tonnes of cargo, while in 1938 as
many as 6.5 thousand ships berthed at
the port’s quays (the total length of which
exceeded at the time 8.8 kilometers). And
it was not only the port that grew rapidly.
At the onset of WWII, the city had 130
thousand inhabitants – 100 times more
than in the early 1920s! This is of course
just a draft of Gdynia’s history, but per-
haps the port’s 100th
anniversary will be
a good occasion to elaborate? ‚
Photo:WikimediaCommons/HenrykPoddębski