The Secrets of Szczecin

You stand in the courtyard of the largest secular Renaissance building in Pomerania, five wings of cream-coloured stone framing two courtyards beneath green copper towers. For five centuries, the Griffin dynasty ruled the Duchy of Pomerania from these walls. But the castle's most consequential resident arrived in 1729 as a baby named Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst. Her father had been appointed garrison commander of Stettin, and the family settled into the castle's upper apartments.

Sophie grew up here, learning French and gazing out over the Oder — until, at fourteen, she was summoned to Russia to marry the heir to the throne. She would reinvent herself as Catherine the Great. When the last Griffin duke died without an heir in 1637, the castle passed through Swedish and Prussian hands, survived Allied bombing in 1944, and was painstakingly reconstructed through the 1980s. Today the bell tower offers a panoramic view of the city Sophie left behind.

Tilt your head back. The tower of St. James rises 110 metres above you — second in Poland only to the basilica in Licheń — and yet what you see is essentially a modern creation wearing medieval clothes. The original church was founded in 1187, and over two centuries it grew into a massive hall church of red brick. The Treaty of Stettin was celebrated here in 1570, ending the Northern Seven Years' War between Denmark and Sweden.

Then came the night of 17 August 1944. Allied bombers turned the interior into an inferno; the tower burned down to a stump. Reconstruction began only in the 1970s, and the soaring tower you see today was completed in 2008. Take the elevator to the panoramic terrace near the top: on a clear day, you can see all the way to the German border.

The cobblestones of Rynek Sienny — the Hay Market — have been trodden by merchants since the 1200s. By the fifteenth century, the timber shed had been replaced with the Gothic stone hall you see today: a courtroom on one floor, a trade exchange on another, and a jail in the cellar. In December 1570, Danish and Swedish diplomats sat inside these walls for nine days, hammering out the Treaty of Stettin.

The square was obliterated in 1944 and left as grassy voids for decades. The town hall was reconstructed in 1975 and now houses the Szczecin History Museum. Underneath it, in the original Gothic cellars that survived the bombs, the Wyszak Family Brewery produces craft beer — served in the very vaults where medieval prisoners once awaited judgement.

This ornate brick facade on Kurkowa Street is one of the last surviving examples of burgher architecture in Szczecin — and it tells a cautionary tale about lending money to royalty. Hans II Loitz, banker and city mayor, commissioned the mansion between 1539 and 1547. The Loitz family ran the largest banking operation in Pomerania, financing Hanseatic trade routes from Antwerp to Novgorod.

But in 1571, their most important client died. Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg, had borrowed enormous sums and never repaid them. The debt was simply erased. The family went bankrupt overnight and fled. After reconstruction in the 1960s, the house was handed to the Academy of Fine Arts — meaning the mansion built by a bankrupt banker now teaches students how to create beauty from nothing.

Stand in front of this Baroque arch and consider its identity crisis. When Gerhard Cornelius van Wallrawe designed it between 1725 and 1727, on orders of Prussian King Frederick William I, it was called the Berliner Tor — the Berlin Gate — because the road passing through it led straight to the Prussian capital. The Swedes had just sold Stettin to Prussia, and the new owners wanted everyone to understand who was in charge.

The gate was part of a ring of 18th-century fortifications that encircled Stettin until 1841. Only two gates survived: this one and the King's Gate nearby. After 1945, the Berlin Gate became the Port Gate — Brama Portowa — because the road no longer led to Berlin in any political sense. Today it houses the Szczecin Chamber Theatre.

You are standing at the centre of an urban experiment. Eight broad avenues radiate from this roundabout like the spokes of a wheel, lined with linden trees and flanked by fin-de-siècle apartment buildings whose ornate facades would not look out of place on a Parisian boulevard. In the 1860s, as Stettin burst beyond its demolished fortress walls, city planners laid out a new district inspired by Haussmann's transformation of Paris.

A local legend claims that Haussmann himself designed the square, but the real author was James Hobrecht, a Prussian planner who also designed the expansion of Berlin. Astrologers later noticed something stranger — three of Szczecin's main star squares map perfectly onto Orion's Belt. Coincidence? Almost certainly. But stand in the centre at dusk, when the streetlamps ignite along eight converging avenues, and the constellation theory feels oddly plausible.

The jagged white form in front of you looks like an iceberg that wandered inland from the Baltic and decided to stay. Its translucent ribbed-glass facade glows at night, its zigzagging roofline echoes the peaked gables of the old Hanseatic houses that once stood here — all erased by bombs in 1944. This is the Mieczysław Karłowicz Philharmonic, designed by Spanish-Swiss studio Barozzi/Veiga, and in 2015 it won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture — the Mies van der Rohe Award.

The victory stunned the architecture world. The jury praised how the building heals its urban context: the main hall seats 1,000 in near-perfect acoustics, and a chamber hall for 200 nestles below. Walk around the building at dusk: the facade shifts from opaque white to luminous amber, turning the entire structure into a lantern — the architectural thesis statement of modern Szczecin.

This sweeping green rectangle, flanked on both sides by 213 London plane trees — the largest cluster of this species in Poland — feels like a breathing pause in the city's dense urban fabric. Jasne Błonia (Bright Meadows) was laid out in 1925–1927. After 1945, the space became a gathering point for the new Polish community trying to build an identity in a city that until recently had been someone else's.

Two monuments dominate the meadow. The Monument to the Deed of Poles (1979) shows three bronze eagles taking flight. Further along, a statue of Pope John Paul II marks where he celebrated Mass on 11 June 1987, drawing hundreds of thousands. But the meadow's most turbulent moment came in December 1970, when Szczecin's shipyard workers marched here during the strikes that would eventually help crack communist rule.

Walk to the stone balustrade and look down. Nineteen metres below, the western branch of the Oder slides past. This magnificent terrace — 500 metres long, lined with pavilions, fountains, and monumental staircases — was built between 1902 and 1921 on the initiative of Hermann Haken, Stettin's longest-serving mayor. The terraces were constructed on the rubble of the 18th-century Prussian fortifications that Haken had ordered demolished.

Originally called the Hakenterrasse, the promenade was renamed Wały Chrobrego after 1945, honouring Bolesław I the Brave, the first king of Poland. Three monumental neo-Baroque buildings flank the terrace. Stand here at sunset: the river, the cranes of the port, and the sky turning amber behind the Philharmonic's glass spires. Few cities in Europe offer a waterfront panorama this dramatic.

This elegant Baroque palace on Staromłyńska Street was designed by the same architect who built the Port Gate — Gerhard Cornelius de Walrave — and commissioned by the same king, Frederick William I of Prussia, in 1726–1727. It served as the session hall of the Pomeranian provincial authorities and doubled as a royal residence whenever the king visited Stettin.

After 1945, when the German population was expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from the east, the building became part of the National Museum. Today it houses the Museum of Regional Traditions, tracing Pomeranian culture from the medieval amber trade to the traumatic population exchange of 1945–1947. It is a fitting final stop: a palace built by conquerors, now curated by the people they never imagined would inherit it.