Historyczna brama nr 2 Stoczni Gdańskiej, Gdańsk

These gates are Historic Gate Number Two of the Gdańsk Shipyard, widely treated as the yard’s main entrance because management buildings lie close by and routes from the old city and main railway station converge here. On December sixteenth, nineteen seventy, troops fired on striking shipyard workers as they left through this gateway; two people were killed and eleven were hurt. Before the memorial to the fallen shipyard workers existed, this gate became the chief place where those deaths were remembered.

During the August strike of nineteen eighty, religious images and a portrait of Pope John Paul the Second covered the gate, while the gatehouse displayed boards setting out the workers’ twenty-one demands. On August thirty-first, Lech Wałęsa used this gateway to declare the strike finished and announce the Gdańsk Agreement. Tanks crushed the gates during martial law in December nineteen eighty-one, when authorities moved against the striking workforce; the replacement built afterward is the gate you see now. The site gained protected-monument status in nineteen ninety-nine and became part of a European Heritage Label award for the historic shipyard complex in twenty fourteen.