Szczecin: Small-Group Walking Tour with Castle Terrace｜Poland

Szczecin confuses people, and that is the best reason to walk it slowly.

You step out of the station into wide chestnut-lined avenues converging on star-shaped squares that look borrowed from Paris. A hundred metres on stands a red brick Gothic cathedral the war reduced to an empty shell. Further still, above the river, port cranes. Three cities in one walk, and all of them are called Szczecin. Until 1945 they were called Stettin.

This walk answers one question the whole way through: why does this city look like this?

We start at the baroque Port Gate, built in the 1720s not to defend the city but to announce that Prussia now owned it. Then we sit down almost immediately, at Bar Pasztecik, unchanged since 1969, where they fry Szczecin's own snack on machines that were once Soviet army equipment meant for making dumplings. Crisp outside, soft inside, served with beetroot broth in a glass.

The through-line of the day is the three town halls. The neo-Gothic Red Town Hall of 1875 stands above the river in the New Town, the district laid out as Szczecin stretched east toward its railway - Prussian ambition from the years when Stettin was Berlin's seaport. Down by the Oder, a genuine 15th-century Gothic one, ringed by elegant townhouses that look 18th-century but were built in the 1990s to fill the emptiness left by the bombing, and we say so plainly. Three town halls, three centuries, a city whose centre kept moving.

Inside St James' Cathedral, the silence sounds different once you know the vault above you was rebuilt from nothing and the spire only returned to its full 110 metres in 2008.

Then we climb to the Pomeranian Dukes' Castle, seat of the Griffin dynasty for five centuries, and stop in the courtyard beneath an astronomical clock from 1693. A few steps away once stood the house where a girl from Anhalt-Zerbst was born in 1729. She became Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. The whole tangled identity of this city fits inside one biography. Your ticket to the Ducal Terrace, the largest viewpoint in Szczecin, is included.

On Solidarity Square the Philharmonic Hall, white and sharp as an iceberg, won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2015. Beside it, sunk into the ground, Europe's best public space of 2016. The square dips underfoot, and that is not decoration: we are standing where workers were shot in December 1970.

We finish on Chrobry Embankment, a five-hundred-metre terrace built above the river so that Stettin would be seen from the water and remembered. After five hours in narrow streets you suddenly get the whole city at once, from above, in a single frame. We save it deliberately for last.

Eight guests maximum. No flag overhead, no megaphone, no ticking off a list. Five hours for four and a half kilometres is not an oversight, it is the point. We sit down twice for real, and if a place holds us, we stay longer.