At 4:48 on the morning of 1 September 1939, a German battleship opened fire on a small Polish garrison in the harbour of the Free City of Danzig. Those were the first shots of the Second World War. Forty-one years later, in the same city, a shipyard electrician climbed a wall and started the movement that brought down every communist government in Europe. Between those two events, Gdańsk was almost entirely destroyed and then rebuilt, brick by brick, from paintings, by people who had never seen the original. In this episode, we pull apart a Baltic port city that keeps getting flattened and rebuilt by forces beyond its control, and ask what identity even means when the city, the population, and the country around it have all changed multiple times.

The First Shots How Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office defence became the opening acts of the Second World War, and why the city where it started is also the city where the Cold War ended.

Amber and the Hidden Economy The material that built Gdańsk's Hanseatic wealth, funded its architecture, and still threads through the city's economy and identity today.

Rebuilt from Paintings The extraordinary story of how a city destroyed by ninety percent was reconstructed by settlers from Lwów who had never lived there, working from Dutch and Flemish paintings of what the buildings once looked like.

Solidarity's Complicated Legacy The shipyard strikes, the European Solidarity Centre, and the awkward domestic reality of a revolution that changed the world but still divides Poland.

The Tricity Why twenty minutes on a commuter train from Gdańsk to Sopot to Gdynia tells you more about Polish resilience than any museum.

Cities is a podcast that pulls cities apart to find the decisions, accidents, and arguments that made them what they are. One city at a time.

Hosted by Gary Bills