“Go to Hel” - not exactly the thing i’d normally write on a postcard to my parents. But there it was. Plucked from a list of phrases milked with mentions of Hel. Note the missing ‘l’ at the end of this word. Not a typo. This missing letter, stands to distinguish the multi-columned monument of Hell - the Enternal Fire of the Damned - to the singular column of Hel - the Quiet Fishing Seaside Resort of the Polish.

A Bit of History
Hel is at the tip of the Hel peninsula, stretching about 35km out into the Baltic Sea. It stretches back towards Gdánsk, a city absorbed in Polish history stemming from its main position as a port to the Baltic.

The peninsula’s skeleton is thus. The railway and road provide the backbone. This is surrounded by a thick layer of forest where many Poles spend a happy hour searching for the seasons’ mushrooms and berries. The forest layer is further surrounded by an epidermus of beautiful white sands. The peninsula was not always this structured, and was once a set of small islands. A polish king decided to protect the peninsula with sea walls, thus creating the towns chalupy and kruznica that are there today.

Gdánsk, meaning town located on Gdania river, was at one point known as the german translation, “Danzig”. At this point Danzing was under the order of the rather funkily named Teutonic Knights. The city remained Danzig until right after the Second World War when it was flattened by the Red Army and returned to Polish possession. Nice!

Our Trip
It takes a while to get to Hel. There isn’t a Highway to Hel, only a single carrige way road that follows the railway line to the tip of the peninsula. We flew into Gdánsk airport but missed out on actually seeing the city itself thanks to bus No. 110 chugging along at 20m/p/h to Wrzeszcz station. From there, a 2 hour train journey took us up past the famer’s fields of Gdynia and, the excellently named, WÅ‚adysÅ‚awowo, and then along the Hel peninsula to Hel.

Hel station

Arriving at the luminous station we were greated, as the guidebook said, by landowners asking if we wanted rooms. We’d already booked somewhere so declined offers to ‘ein room’ and wandered on up the main road. After thinking my worst thoughts had come true, we finally found our residence for the next 6 nights. After taking in the view - a dilapidated house filled with pigeons and peacocks - we took off in search of nutrition.

okocim

“The Fish is Hel is amazing!” Beautiful buttery halibut. Absolutley delicious. Another favourite of mine was Zurek served in a bread bowl, a traditional polish ’sour’ soup with potatoes, whey and sausage. The beer was pretty darn good as well - Okocim replacing Zywiec as one of my favourite beers. Krupnik vodka is still my favourite with its honey colour and way it silks on the tongue… .

The town of Hel has a rather quaint personality that makes someone like me feel like they have gone back in time. Cute little café’s and ice cream places perch along the boardwalk and main road. Local’s sell seashell necklaces and fluffly seal’s. Wooden changing huts line up along the beach and the place is filled with a calm you would attach to 1950’s england.

Nevertheless, Hel’s personality has fluxuated over history. The only church in Hel, has, as nico stated, ironically been turned into a museum. Occupied by Russia, Germany and Poland, the small town has adopted it’s varied owner’s architecture and cuisine. In the late 1800’s it was officially cited as a seaside resort for polish holiday-makers only to change during the Second World War when it was the main polish defense against the german ships. The battle of the Hel peninsula was the longest lasting of all the polish attempts to fight off the germans.

The one thing that has remained constant is the traditional man-powered fishing boat. Fish is at the heart of Hel’s commuity and it can be seen in the religious fresco’s of christ preaching to his disciples in a fishing boat, and read in the weather beaten faces of the local fishermen. Having read the book Cod a while ago, the significance of fish is something that I find very interesting. While in Hel I was reading The Fish Can Sing by the icelandic Halldór Laxness. Slow to begin with, it was the perfect book to read while in the fishing village of Hel. The themes of fish, community, simplicity, culture and nature swam in my mind and with nico’s paragraph’s from “No Logo”, the hooks of privitisation and capitalism hung hungrily in the air.

I would suggest go to Hel soon. Go to Hel before Poland becomes too developed and absorbs too much of west europe’s languidity. Go to Hel and eat fish!

Hel's sea

More on Hel from wikipedia
Nico’s story