Where Empresses Are Born and Iron Curtains Begin
Szczecin sits at the mouth of the Oder River, barely 150 kilometres from Berlin — a city that has been Slavic, Pomeranian, Swedish, Prussian, German, and finally Polish, all within a single millennium. Known as Stettin until 1945, it was the birthplace of Catherine the Great and the northern anchor of Churchill's Iron Curtain.
Today Szczecin brands itself the "Floating Garden," a green metropolis where water and parks cover more than half the city, its award-winning Philharmonic rising like an iceberg of light from the ruins of wartime destruction.
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." — Winston Churchill, 1946