Old and new, and new that looks old, in Szczecin, Poland

As EU expansion and budget airlines open up eastern Europe, it’s only a matter of time before adventurous short-breakers discover that not every city follows the familiar templates of Prague or Krakow – and the pronunciation doesn’t get any easier. Ask for the centre of Szczecin (pronounced ‘shchechin’) and you won’t end up at a quaint market square but at a giant roundabout. A Polish town still trying to shake off a German name, the streets are modelled on Paris and the old town is currently being built. And though the beer is half the price even of Warsaw’s, there isn’t a stag party in sight. Yet.

Strategically located on Poland’s north-west border where the Odra river meets the Baltic Sea, Szczecin was originally a small settlement built on the site of a fortification some 700 years ago. The city walls were eventually pulled down in the 1870s – and with large parts of the medieval city destroyed in World War I, it is these developments that characterise Szczecin. A model of 19th century town planning, tree-lined avenues and leafy squares are traversed by wide main streets designed for Prussian military parades. Most of the old town only dates back to the 1970s, while the oldest-looking buildings turn out to be reconstructions, as private enterprise rebuilds with a firmly anti-communist aesthetic.

We’re in the centre of the old city and nothing is old,” says Mathias Enger, a German native who now works as a local tour guide. “Soon we’ll have the newest old town in Europe.”

Adding to the confusion of old, new and new that looks old, Szczecin’s streets are also testament to a turbulent history that has seen the Danes, Swedes, Prussians and Germans taking control before the city finally returned to the Polish state.

“Everything else looks like it comes from another country, but this is undeniably Polish,” says Enger as we approach the Pomeranian Dukes’ Castle, one of the city’s main tourist sites and now a cultural centre and seat of regional government. The culture and region in question however are West Pomerania, a ‘euroregion’ that encompasses parts of eastern Germany and southern Sweden. Zygmunt Mayer, marshall of the West Pomeranian Voivodship or province, speaks proudly of the 185km of coastline, the 3000 lakes of clean water, the National Parks, spas and golf courses – but for the future of Szczecin the key is location, location, location. While Mayer outlines plans to develop a central European transport corridor from the Baltics into Europe, across town in the City Hall, tourism bosses are making plans to capitalise on the World Cup in neighbouring Germany. With Berlin only a two-hour journey away (day-trip bus tickets cost only 60zl – about £10), accommodation will be discounted for the Cup as opposed to the hike in rates expected in Germany.

With this kind of enterprising spirit, unemployment in the region may still be Poland’s highest at 25%, but the signs of rapid political and economic change are everywhere. A few tell-tale old aluminium frames remain, but most of the shop windows are shiny and new. As consumerism runs rampant, these are however already losing ground to new shopping malls, causing finance minister Teresa Lubinska (a native of Szczecin) to tell the UK’s Financial Times in an interview that she didn’t actually want hypermarkets and malls in Poland. Disgruntled investors needn’t worry though. Judging by the packed escalators at the glitzy Galaxy Centre, there are plenty who don’t share her opinion.

“The only thing certain in the last 15 years has been change,” says Enger. “But to understand Poland you have to see more than just a new country in Europe – you have to understand what it was like to live with 50 years of communism.”

In 1946, Churchill brought the city, under its German name, to world attention with his famous quote: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”. Thirty-five difficult years later, the first inklings of change appeared at the Szczecin shipyard, where a concert was held last week to commemorate the worker uprising of December 10, 1971.

We end our city tour at the vast square before City Hall, where a statue marks the spot where in 1978, Pope John Paul II addressed a crowd of thousands, all realising for the first time they were not alone. Opposite, three eagles rise in a sombre totem of the communist attempt to forge Polish identity through stone. “Between these two monuments is Poland’s progress towards democracy,” says Enger. Amid Szczecin’s ancient castles and shiny new shops, the past still looms large. So too, however, does the future.”