Bydgodszcz , Poland

The Buildings on the Brda River, with the 2004 tightrope sculpture

Railway station

We went to Bydgoszcz for half a day just to roam around the city from our busy  schedule of PMAS17 in Torun. But I am happy that we made that effort. Bydgoszcz or Bromberg  is the 8th largest city in Poland, on the Brda and Vistula rivers. One day is good to see all the city, but half a day was good to walk around it. We took a  Bit city train from Torun taking 40 minutes to reach. We did not take any city pass, but started walking from the Bydgoszcz główna which is the main train station. On the left you can see the wall paints  showing the medicine dept. of Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika of Torun.

 

Bydgoszcz Canal is a canal, 24.7 km long, between the cities of Bydgoszcz and Nakło in Poland, connecting Vistula river with Oder river, through Brda and Noteć rivers.

Nordic haven apartments

 Above you can see the modern  Nordic haven apartments, one of the biggest in the city.

Below is the Opera Nova,  existing since 1956, started the construction of a new building in 1974 which was to consist of three main halls, situated on the Brda river . The Opera Nova has become a cultural showcase of Bydgoszcz . Considering the short history of the Opera, its success has been astounding; a large number of famous opera singers have performed here and theatrical troops from the Wrocław Opera, Theater of Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev & Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon have also made appearances.

Opera Nova

Bydgoszcz tram

The  Old Port Granary built in 1835

The main Post Office in Śródmieściedistrict (New Town)

Three granaries

Bydgoszcz is an architecturally rich city, with neo-gothic, neo-baroque, neoclassicist, modernist and Art Nouveau styles present, for which it earned a nickname Little Berlin. The notable three granaries on Mill Island and along the Brda riverside belong to one of the most recognized timber-framed landmarks in Poland. . Built  near 19th century, they were originally used to store grain, but now house exhibitions of the City’s Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum. It  also represents  the official city emblem .

Old market square

Memorial to struggle & Martyrdom

In World War II,  German invasion of Poland led the  Jewish citizens of the city sent to Nazi death camps or murdered in the town itself. Bromberg-Ost, was a women’s subcamp of Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (Gdańsk). A deportation camp was situated in Smukała village, now part of Bydgoszcz. An estimated 3,700 citizens of Bydgoszcz – Jews and non-Jews – died during the Nazi occupation. The monument  (<Left )called ” Memorial to struggle & Martyrdom in the Bydgoszcz region” was erected to remind the history.

 

 

 

Bydgoszcz town hall

 

Stare Miasto :The old town of Bydgoszcz

  

 

 

The door in the left leads to a building where Dr Jan Biziel lived, who risking his own life sheltered and treated the polish freedom fighters in the Wielkopolska uprising  in 1919.

 

Equestrian monument of Casimir the Great

Downtown Bydgoszcz

The eagle hotel :Hotel pod Orłem

“Hotel pod Orłem” is an icon of the city’s 19th-century architecture,  designed by the distinguished Bydgoszcz architect Józef Święcicki, the author of around sixty buildings in the city. Completed in 1896, it served as a hotel from the very beginning and was originally owned by Emil Bernhardt, a hotel manager educated in Switzerland. Its façade displays forms characteristic of the Neo-baroque style in architecture.

In the downtown, in 2005 a statue of Marian Adam Rejewski,  Polish mathematician and cryptologist was unveiled on the centennial of Rejewski’s birth. It resembles the Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester. Rejewski reconstructed the Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine sight-unseen in 1932. The cryptologic achievements of Rejewski and colleagues Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski enabled the British to begin reading German Enigma-encrypted messages at the start of World War II, seven years after Rejewski’s original reconstruction of the machine. The intelligence that was gained by the British from Enigma decrypts  helped to the defeat of Germany.

Gdanska street

 

Memorial to Rejewski in Bydgoszcz.

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