a pretty impressive rescue ship in the harbour of ustka - the orkan.
not far away from dębina ( about 18 km ) the city of ustka was waiting for our visit on a very stormy day. ustka is a small city known for being a very hospitable seaside destination to tourists, with a big harbour at its core through which the river słupia flows into the baltic sea. the harbour alone was worth seeing, i liked the mix of small and big boats, ships and yachts you could find there. there were some interesting ships like the rescue ship above, but also historical-looking ones! the harbour was basically what charmed me most about this little town. i love a good harbour situation in any seaside city, there's something so exciting about it, like it is a gate out to the world! it's also often a very industrial place, which i associate with technical feats of historical and modern times, rusty metal elements and futuristic looking naval vessels! all of which is super neat in my eyes. add to that a historic cityscape with interesting architecture and you'll have me hooked.
as mentioned, the day started out super stormy. we wanted to check out the piers and moles which reach out far into the sea, but we had to interrupt these attempts because it almost blew us away 😅 it was less bad when you were walking in the inner-city parts, so we decided to check out the city core first and later visit a bunker museum. the windy weather subsided a tiny bit over the course of the day, so we eventually made a tiny walk ( but never reached the end ) on the 500 meter long moles. you'll see why in a moment.
let's first check out the harbour, though!
sometimes i just like taking detail pictures of boats and ships, nothing really deep there, except that i like maritime motives a whole lot.
the first two things that you notice when you wander around the harbour is a swing pedestrian bridge leading over the słupia and ustka's lighthouse from 1892. the swing bridge took me by storm, its design was really slick and elegant and breathed the air of futurism. it seems like the bridge is also one of a kind in europe, so that too made it special!
looking up the single pylon, which sits at one end of the bridge. inside this pylon is an electric motor which is the main force that makes the bridge swing in one direction to open up the passage route. the bridge is opened for 20 minutes every hour to let shipping vessels through.
you traverse the bridge through an open tunnel, opening up views on each side.
the bridge was built in 2013, opened up in 2014 and was designed by hydro-naval, a local company that specializes on developing steel constructions.
it's funny that this picture looks so windstill ( when you leave out the kite surfers ). it really was super windy, sand was flying everywhere and you could only stand in the wind with your back to it, the other way round you had to fight to get two steps forward. ( here's a little video i made and a horrible photo of me in the wind 😂)
so we returned back to the lighthouse! it's about 20 meters tall, so not the biggest one, but that doesn't mean it's super cute anyway! apparently you can climb up as well, and enjoy a view, but we didn't do that.
this is the swinging bridge when it was open for passage. actually, there was a tourist ship going out, but it returned a few minutes later, declaring that the wind was still too strong to try ship the waters outside of the harbour. even though the sun started to loom here and there, it would take a few hours until the wind finally leveled out a bit.
we began exploring ustka instead and immediately i found the most cute mosaic wall i have ever seen! big and tiny fish swimming in the waves of the sea! i reckon it's a work from the 1970ies or 1980ies, mosaics are a sure sign of eastern bloc art and design. ( turns out i was right, it was made at the end of the 1970ies by an artist called irenę zahorską. ) the entire mosaic was made out of ceramic elements ( mainly fragments of plates, cups, jars etc. ).
ustka has always been quite popular with tourists, even at the turn of the 20th century. you could find a plethora of wonderful villas throughout the city, aged in a really charming way! they had beautifully carved wooden elements and some boasted really good wrought-iron balustrades. this villa called 'erna' was built in 1890.
this house was utterly charming, despite its dilapidated look 😍 it seems the city wants to renovate some of these old-school villas in town, but when we visited, many of them still looked a little rusty and abandoned. almost a shame, but also, the ramshackle look was pretty much what made them so enticing.
would you look at that glorious entrance area? absolutely adored it and with a little bit of renovation skills this might be a real beauty!
another less run-down building, this time with a lot less wood in the facade and more clinkers! this one can actually be dated to a construction time between 1902 and 1905.
most beautiful iron flower 😍
the city hall of ustka captivated me with an art nouveau / historicizing appearance. it was built in 1911-12 by one friedrich engelbrecht and actually was intented to be a school building, not a city hall and used as such until 2004.
a detail shot of the clock and the decor that was put all over the wooden eaves lines.
the neogothic church of the holy saviour was erected between 1885 and 1888, the architect was franz draheim. brickstone churches are usually a favourite of mine and i would've really liked to enter it, but what did we do? we moved on 😂 so i don't have anything additionally exciting to tell about this pretty church.
loved this timber-framed art nouveau building, which is actually a hotel! the whole region is known as 'the land of the checkered houses', and you will notice it more and more as i go through our vacation pictures. timber-framed houses can often be found in german realms as well and since these lands had a german majority once, it doesn't really surprise that you will find these influences, too.
quite an odd mix of styles on this building - it was home to a branch of the polish mail service.
i think whatever happened here can't be explained properly 😂 it's like a 1930ies new objectivity designer met a 1990ies post-modern one and they both agreed that this might be a good idea. it is not, but it certainly is an interesting choice!
these cute timber-framed fishermen houses were built at around 1785 and are listed as monuments. their layouts do look quite different from the studwork buildings i am used to, with very wide gables instead of germany's narrow ones of the same time. also, these buildings are quite solitary, kind of creating a very rural feeling, that of a farmer's village perhaps.
this gorgeous former granary building is home to the baltic contemporary art gallery ( which i didn't know while we were there, otherwise i would've probably peeped through the windows out of curiousity ).
it's also home to a restaurant! from the side you can see that the old granary ( 1910 ) was modified in a post-industrial way, with upper fixtures that look like they were added more recently.
by now the sun was shining more thoroughly and we decided to return to the moles and beach. it was still windy af, but at least it was more tolerable. we stayed a while and watched the many wind surfers try their luck out on the waves.
we even almost made it to the end of one of the moles! i quite like the fair sky blue, deep sea blue, concrete grey and sunshine yellow colour scheme here 😍
on the other side at the western beach the waves broke against the second mole. it was quite spectacular how high the spray went!
on a different section of the same mole, more close to the actual beach than the sea, sand was blowing over the mole walls - leaving little heaps of sand on the path and making it difficult for people to walk out further! also, it seems like it's pretty dangerous to walk here, especially when the winds might be blowing this heavily as they can send you right into the port basin. needless to say, we didn't try that out 😅
the view back towards the docks! the harbour is mainly used by fishing and sports boats, and of course touristic vessels.
we made our way back to were we had initially started, on the western side of the harbour. we wanted to check out a former world war 2 structure - the blücher bunker.
the entrance of the bunker's museum was decorated with all kinds of found paraphernalia of the time, from metal scraps to bombs ( ? - i think that's what the thing in the middle is, but it could also be part of an anchor sinker or something ), to advertisment props and torpedos ( ? - i am really bad with warfare equipment 😂 ).
the bunker was a secret military FLAK construction for the german wehrmacht built in 1942. flak stands for 'fliegerabwehrkanone', which is an anti-aircraft gun. the flaks were mounted on top of the bunker. it never got detected while it was in operation due to being hidden underneath a forest, and the citizens of ustka never even knew it existed for the longest time! inside the bunker is a museum which tells all kinds of stories of the soldiers that worked and fought here with lots of descriptive and demonstrative props collected from the second world war. it was quite interesting to learn about it, but i didn't look at the premise with adoration in mind, instead i recalled all the horrors that took place back in those times and how the wehrmacht was the biggest cause to it all. i really hope that people visiting the museum will look at the exhibitions with that in mind because i couldn't find a critical voice in the handling of the exhibition. instead the museum offered re-enactments and military paraphernalia, which was kind of strange for me, coming from germany where museums that are about that era of time are curated most carefully and with the utmost respect to the pain and despair of all those murdered by the regime. i just hope that visitors don't fall into the trap of trying to romanticize the life of those soldiers and view it in a factual way as a document of a time that was extraordinarily cold and cruel and a big cause of intergenerational trauma.
the bunker is hidden underneath a 12 meter high dune, which was also covered with pine tree woods.
one of the 4 still existing flak emplacements.
you had a pretty neat view on ustka's harbour from above the dune!
charming fishermen's harbour with stately villas from the turn of the century.
the juxtaposition of modern versus ancient makes this photo completely irresistable to me 😍 also... look at how troubled the sea is! the waves were quite a sight.
the area where the bunker can be found on was always a military area and used even by the polish army. it is quite massive. you can find a lot more remnants there. we never quite had the time to explore more of the western beach and part of town, though we had planned to return to ustka for more exploration this year for summer vacation, but thanks to corona, that plan was thrown in the wind... again.
an entrance into the bunker. i liked the patterns in the concrete!
i have to say... these ruinous battery command structures are quite cool-looking. somehow apocalyptic, innit?
after our museum visit we explored the harbour a bit more. i really, really loved the fishermen's harbour with all the smaller boats and the fishing ships!
crazy fishing boat! quite extraordinary what can fit onto a small boat like this and how much stuff they carry with them.
by the way, the river słupia is a big component of the harbour water, it flows directly into the baltic sea here. can i mention again how much i loved the colour coordination throughout the harbour? so. freaking. good!
nearing a davit ( on the right ). on the other side of the słupia the houses of the harbour boulevard were creating a lovely scenery 😍
hello, seagull friend 😘
the davit combined the local timber-frame construction with the typical brickstone aesthetic of the baltic sea quite well 😍 it was built in 1930.
an abandoned place par excellence and only a minute away from the transfer station - a former grain silo! i would've LOVED to explore this! it was originally built in 1907, but had to be renovated in 1915, where it had probably been encased in roughcast.
the building actually is owned by somebody, but that somebody doesn't care for it at all and lets it fall into ruins, but not without making a big ruckus about other buildings on the premise! like the davit for example, the city of ustka wanted to repair it and use it for public purposes. but according to the owner it doesn't belong to the city, but stands on his property, therefore it's his. good to know that people stay the same assholes everywhere on this planet, no matter their origin. i mean, why do you care about that davit so much, when you don't even care about the amazing granary you have on your hands? fucking property sharks, y'all, i hate them so much.
not far away from the silo are some more old port facilities. this building from 1886 is called 'ghost storage' because there are stories about dead people wandering the halls. it had once been a storage facility for alcoholic booze, but apparently was also used to execute soviet soldiers during world war II. they found the corpses of three soldiers after cleaning out the facility in 1945... and i guess that was the birth hour of the ghost story!
in the vicinity of the main train station we stumbled upon these concrete figures lying in the grass. do you want to guess what their story is? because i immediately had to think of world war II again. but they are actually part of a memorial for firefighters, created by the artist marek kuś. i don't know anything about the intention and background of these figures, but i kept thinking about crime scene edge drawings. and i kinda couldn't bring that into context with firefighters, unless you view these as dead ones? would be a rather macabre memorial, though.
returning to the port on the eastern side of the river, you're gonna find a shipyard. there was a rather huge ship waiting to get inspected and worked on! it barely fit into the shipyard!
promenading on the bulwar portowy ( port boulevard ) ❤
there was a super cool sailing ship in the docks that looked like an ancient galleon! i've seen similar ones in other polish harbours, as well, so i reckon they weren't original, but actually modern ships just looking vintage. of course they're for touristic cruises out to the sea. the ship is called 'dragon', which its figurehead on the front of the ship clearly indicates!
and the dragon is obviously killed by a dragon slayer 😢
the UST-40 at your service!
this fishing trawler satisfied my love for rusty old things!
this was the last photo of our day in ustka, we would of course end it with dinner in a cozy restaurant called 'tawerna portowa'. the food they served was super delicious and the people serving us were great and were quite happy with us trying to order in polish 😂! would totally recommend revisiting this place!
we left ustka quite nourished and made our way back to dębina, but not without stopping at a little beach about 4 kms away from home! poddąbie beach belongs to a tiny village with the same name and it was a very beautiful one! the village is absolutely engrossed in tourism, though, so there's nothing else to see except of hotels, a summer camp and very few actual resident homes.
when you want to reach the beach you have to walk through a big patch of pine and beech woods until you finally make it to the cliff line. the cliffs are very steep here so you will only get down to the beach via a staircase.
the woods were super charming! ( they always are on the coast of the baltic sea, to be honest, even in germany 😅 ).
the sun was about to set and the light she gifted us that evening was utterly, heart-stoppingly breathtaking! the waters were still in uproar and the wind still very heavy, but it all made you feel even more entranced. it made you feel alive.
i was reminded of the colour scheme of hokusai's painting 'the great wave off kanagawa' 😍
moody baltic sea beaches have a special place in my heart. the sun was about to leave us again and clouds would bring us some new rain, but not before illuminating everything in this absolutely perfect pastel rose light!
i mean, my heart still aches for this.
and how couldn't it? i want to go back to the sea so badly...
the roaring sea. i wish you could listen to the waves crashing and wind howling in this picture!
there are no words anymore to describe what i feel when i look at these pictures, so i will keep quiet and let you enjoy the next few photos in peace and hope that you will understand the atmosphere that i love so dearly.
the stairs up to the cliffs.
these tiny pathways leading along the coast are some of my favourite things in the world ❤
the last light of the day illuminating the woods.
i hope you enjoyed the little exploration we had through the city of ustka and maybe found respite in the photos of the sea at poddąbie beach!
until next time, stay curious ❤
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