Biskupia Górka, Gdańsk

Biskupia Górka is both a hill and a lived-in neighbourhood, rising close to Gdańsk’s historic core. As you walk along its streets, the residential character is part of the story: wartime military importance has given way to homes, local memories, and gradual renewal. The hill reaches 60.8 metres above sea level, and that elevation made it strategically valuable.

Fortifications appeared here during the 17th century, when the area belonged to the Diocese of Włocławek. In 1639, an ingenious cableway carried earth toward the city’s defences. It used about 120 buckets and seven supports for the loaded line, making it the largest construction of its kind until the 19th century and the earliest multi-support cableway.

Walk on and look for the district’s tenement streets, including Na Stoku, where a house dating from 1900 once contained a bakery between the wars and has since been restored. Another renovated house on Biskupia Street reopened in 2024 with five modern apartments; previously, its flats shared a toilet on the stairway. The most sobering chapter belongs to 4 July 1946, when eleven guards and kapos from Stutthof, including five women, were publicly hanged here after the camp’s initial trial. Today, residents preserve the neighbourhood’s memory through an association founded in October 2016, gathering photographs, documents, objects, and recollections of Biskupia Górka.