Pomnik Poległych Stoczniowców 1970, Gdańsk

These immense crosses with suspended anchors form the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of nineteen seventy, beside Gate Number Two of Gdańsk Shipyard. Each of the three structures reaches forty-two metres and carries an anchor of roughly two tonnes. At the base, relief panels bring shipyard life into the memorial’s design.

The monument honours at least forty-two people who died during the December nineteen seventy unrest in Poland’s coastal cities. Nearby lay the place where Kazimierz Stojecki, Jerzy Matelski, Andrzej Perzyński and Stefan Mosiewicz were killed. Henryk Lenarciak proposed this memorial the following year, but construction only became possible after the August agreements.

Strikers and residents of the Gdańsk area contributed funds, while officials attempted to delay the project and alter whom it commemorated. The dedication came on the sixteenth of December nineteen eighty, exactly a decade after the killings. Its creation followed the Gdańsk Agreement, and it became the earliest memorial to people persecuted by communist rule erected within a communist state. The scale and industrial materials make grief feel inseparable from the shipyard itself.