Szczecin Audio Tours

Szczecin has been Polish, Danish, Swedish, Prussian, and German in turn, a city whose identity has been reassigned by each major European power that got close enough to want it. The last reassignment happened in 1945, when the Potsdam Agreement transferred what had been the German city of Stettin to Poland, resulting in a complete population exchange: the German inhabitants were expelled and Poles from the eastern territories, including many from Lwow, arrived to take their place. New people in old German buildings, rebuilding a Polish identity from scratch. This dynamic, still close enough to feel, gives the city an energy that is hard to find elsewhere.

On 30 August 1980, the first of the August Agreements that legalised the Solidarity trade union was signed in Szczecin's shipyard, beating the Gdansk agreement by three days.

The Szczecin Dialogue Centre, an underground museum complex that opened in 2016 in a bunker beneath Jasne Blonia park, tells the story of the city's passage through the 20th century with the kind of honesty that was impossible under communism. The Ducal Castle of the Pomeranian Princes, rebuilt after wartime damage, sits above the Oder River and houses the city's historical museum.