Day 9: The Teutonic Order

[Sunday, June 16]

[Click on any photo for a bigger view]

Today was our first long travel day with the tour. We would be heading northwest from Warsaw. Our destination by the end of the day was Gdańsk, but we would stop in Malbork to visit the Malbork Castle, the largest Medieval castle in Europe. Before hopping on the bus, we bade farewell to the Westin breakfast buffet. I will say that all the hotels we stayed at in Poland (I am writing this after the completion of the trip) had great breakfast buffets. They all had good variety, and in particular usually had several kinds of meat, including not a few pork selections. Besides bacon, there were always at least couple of sausages to choose from. Besides kielbasa, Westin also had a spicy red sausage similar to chorizo. I wasn't going to lose any weight on this trip.

Every day started with a hearty breakfast

We boarded the bus and started the long day's ride. Our Tour Manager, Jolanta helped while away the time on the long ride. On our journeys between cities, Jolanta would stand and talk for a time about a variety of subjects: contemporary life in Poland; her memories of Poland before the fall of Communism; relations with other countries in the EU and NATO, particularly Germany; Polish culture, history, geography, topography, agriculture, wildlife; a bit about reading Polish signs and pronouncing Polish place names. It was all very interesting and never 'too much'. She was a sweet lady, but could be imposing when she wanted to be. If the tour was ever in a position where something had gone wrong, she would walk right up to the whatever the roadblock was and use her powers of persuasion to fix the problem.

Jolanta also knew where all the best toilet facilities were. She always made sure we had plenty of pit stops, and planned the bus trips and site visits with this in mind. Public toilets aren't always as good as they are in much of the US, and they're also not usually free. Jolanta knew which ones were clean, free, and capacious (to get our large group through quickly). She decided, strategically today, that we should eat lunch a little early because the roadside restaurant she had in mind served traditional Polish food and had good bathrooms.

It had started to rain pretty hard and we were still about 45 minutes from Malbork Castle. We stopped at a roadside restaurant that would be the equivalent of an interstate truck stop. Decent, inexpensive food, lots of bathrooms. It was in an area called Nowa Holandia (New Holland). The area was named for Dutch settlers who were brought in to that area some centuries ago to help with drainage and canals. Some parts of the Vistula delta are actually below sea level, and the ground needs to be drained well for effective farming in the fertile soil there. The food was hearty Polish food: sausages, bigos (a cabbage and meat stew), breaded cutlets, pierogi, etc. It was served by weight: go up to the head of the buffet line and order from the serving pans full of food, and your tray is then weighed. Jolanta helped people figure out the Polish on the signs overhead. Her recommendations were good. Nobody left hungry.

After a post-lunch pit stop (there wouldn't be restrooms all over the castle grounds), we got back on the bus for the remaining ride to Malbork Castle.

Jolanta holds forth

Dutch themed roadside restaurant in Nowa Holandia

Malbork Castle is an imposing brick fortress built starting in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights on the Nogat River, a delta branch of the Vistula. At the time of its completion in 1406 it was the largest brick fortress in the world and is the largest castle by area in the world. The castle had several lines of defense including an inner and outer wall made of millions of bricks, dry moats for transporting supplies and cattle inside the defenses in preparation for a siege, wet moats, and many defensive towers and gates.

The Teutonic Order was a Catholic religious institution founded as a military society. Its members were largely Germanic. They took part in the Crusades in the Middle East. After the defeat of the Crusaders in the early 12th Century, the Teutonic Knights were repurposed to provide protection to Christians in central Europe, which were often under attack from invaders from the steppes of central Asia. At that time they were engaged to pacify and Christianize the various Baltic tribes in Lithuania and Prussia. (Prussia, southwest of Lithuania on the Baltic, though often thought of historically as a German state, is named for the Prus, a warlike Baltic tribe that inhabited the area.) The Teutonic Knights were invited by Polish dukes to protect the settlements along the Vistula River up to the Baltic Sea. They established a network of many fortresses. Their capital from 1309 to 1466 was Marienberg, what is now Malbork. Malbork was a hell of a fortress: it was never taken by force in the Middle Ages.

A recurring theme in our tour was this: inviting the Germans is inviting trouble. The Teutonic Knights were the beginnings of Poland's centuries-long struggle against domination by Germans. The religious order soon began extorting, seizing, and otherwise making trouble in the region. The Poles united to try to eject the Knights. The Knights were decisively defeated at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, one of the most important dates in Polish history. Without that victory, the evolution of the Polish state to become one of the largest and most powerful in Europe would never have happened.

After their defeat at Grunwald, the Knights returned to their fortresses, which was then besieged. The siege failed, but the Knights were slowly strangled economically. They had come to depend on mercenaries to aid in the defense of their fortresses, but soon the mercenaries could not be paid. The mercenaries then essentially made the Knights prisoners in their own fortress. Meanwhile, Polish dukes raised money in Gdańsk, a rich city at the mouth of the Vistula, to pay the mercenaries to leave the castle, leaving it unviable. The Knights left Malbork and within years, their presence in the Baltic was greatly diminished.

The tour of the castle took about two hours. It was raining, so luckily much of the tour was indoors. Despite the weather, the grounds and buildings were surprisingly crowded with tourists. Our local guide for the day was Bogusz, an academic authority of the castle and the Teutonic Knights. He gave a very good tour.

Outer fortifications at Malbork

Looking toward the inner walls from within the outer walls.

Great meeting hall at Malbork

Depiction of the Battle of Grunwald, the beginning of the end for the Teutonic Knights

Another view of the great meeting hall

Statues of some of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order

Imposing view

Mortars, which were propelled by catapults

Water well within the innermost defenses of the castle

Local guide Bogusz enlightens us on ornate door decorations

St. Anne's Chapel inside the castle

Altar decoration

The Knights had balls of stone

The Nogat River outside the castle

After the castle tour, we got back on the bus to go to Gdańsk, about an hour away. On the way, we passed through farmland and villages of the Vistula delta. In the villages, we began seeing stork nests. White storks are very large, migratory birds. Their winter range is in Africa, but they breed in parts of Turkey, Iberia, and central Europe. Poland hosts about 25% of the world's white storks during their breeding season. They build very large nests high atop dead trees, but also on rooftops and power poles. Poland has taken to encouraging birds to nest where they will not be a danger or nuisance, and building special structures to lure them to build their nests there. Storks have a mythic association with babies, even in the US (probably due to European immigration), where there are few native storks of any kind.

Stork nest

We arrived in Gdańsk late in the afternoon. The tour provided dinner at the hotel, which was very close to the reconstructed Medieval main city. The rain had stopped. We took an evening stroll to the historic part of town. There was a lot of interest there, but we'd get a tour the next day