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To Hel and back on Polish coast

One of Hel's beaches, facing the Baltic Sea / Pictures: Steve McKenna

I'm on a train zipping across a skinny, pine-forested slither of land poking into the Baltic Sea.

And I can't seem to shift the smile off my face. After all, it's not every day you go to Hel and back.

The town of Hel sits at the end of an eponymous peninsula, which, come winter, blasted by icy Siberian air, literally does freeze over.

On this August afternoon, however, Hel is warmish (23C) and incredibly pleasant.

A short walk from Hel's tiny train station, I find tanned bodies lounging on silky sand dunes and beaches, and market stalls laden with souvenirs made of Baltic gold (amber) and pun-riddled postcards expounding Hel's virtues ("Loving Hel" and "With love from Hel").

They're a bit tacky but, at just a zloty ($0.35) each, hard to resist. Popular with Polish holidaymakers - and a few English-speaking travellers (who love taking selfies in Hel) - the town draws its share of German tourists.

Families and friends from all nationalities congregate in Hel's cluster of open-air restaurants and beer gardens. On good terms now, Poland and Germany were enemies in the Battle of Hel, which raged on the peninsula in September 1939, one of the first conflicts of World War II.

Following a month of attacks from the Luftwaffe and nazi ground troops, the outnumbered Poles surrendered to Hitler. Six years later on Hel, about 60,000 German soldiers were caught in a bottleneck by Soviet forces and laid down their arms.

Hel's most picturesque buildings survived the war unscathed, including a row of half-timbered 19th century fishermen's cottages.

The town's oldest building, a Gothic church dating from the 1420s, now houses the Museum of Fishery - a quirky repository of picturesque boats and stuffed seabirds.

You can overnight in Hel - there are cosy guesthouses, plus caravans and camp sites - but most visitors day-trip from the Tricity, a sprawling urban region of coastal Poland home to the three notable cities: the deep-sea harbour and modern business hub of Gdynia, the spa resort of Sopot and the historic port city of Gdansk which was devastated by wartime battles but has been rejuvenated to become one of Poland's prettiest cities.

Travelling up to the Baltic coast from the capital Warsaw, I stopped off in another photogenic city that's quite unique for Poland: architecturally, it survived World War II virtually intact, eluding the bombs that rained down on Gdansk and company. With its Gothic charms and towering red-brick buildings, Torun has an air of Tallinn about it - though it attracts only a fraction of the crowds who flock to the Estonian capital and bustling seaport.

Hugging the banks of the Vistula, Poland's longest river, which runs through the country and empties into the Baltic, Torun was settled as early as 1000BC by Iron Age Lusatian tribes. It boomed during the Middle Ages under the Teutonic Knights, a Germanic military order modelled on the Catholic crusaders who fought for the Holy Land.

The Knights built a fortress by Torun's riverfront in AD1233, using it as a base for invading the neighbouring pagan state of Old Prussia. They also sparked Torun's rise as an important centre of trade after aligning the fledgling town with the Hanseatic League, a powerful economic and defensive bloc in the Baltic region (which included Tallinn, and other famous ports such as Hamburg, Bruges and Copenhagen).

The Knights' castle now lies in ruins - it was plundered after Polish kings and Prussian princes forced them out of Torun in the mid-15th century - but the town's UNESCO World Heritage-listed old quarter is remarkably well preserved, and endearingly pedestrian- friendly.

Roving its cobbled streets and squares, and exploring its winding nooks and crannies, I get the sense that I've stumbled on to a medieval film set - though my daydreams are jolted when I round a corner and bump into a group of SLR camera-carrying Italian tourists. As well as foreign leisure seekers, I hear smart-suited types conversing in German and English.

Forbes Magazine has claimed Torun is the most attractive place to do business in Poland. The old town's market square isn't a bad place for a working lunch - or for watching the world go by over coffee (I'm pleasantly surprised that they serve good flat white-style drinks here).

Alfresco cafes, bars and restaurants spill out on to the cobbles lorded over by an enormous town hall. While it has Renaissance and baroque tinges, the hall has a tower that dates back to AD1274 - one of several eye-catching monuments in Torun.

Elsewhere in town, there are three huge Gothic churches, elaborately decorated medieval merchants' mansions and burgher tenements, giant granaries (one of which houses a boutique hotel), and the so-called Leaning Tower.

Formerly part of Torun's defence walls, with 54 other fortified towers, it's tilted due to the unstable clay ground. However, it's one of Torun's more humble abodes that often attracts the most attention. A stepped-gabled Gothic property on the quiet Copernicus Street hides an atmospheric little museum dedicated to the life and work of Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer born in Torun to an affluent merchant in AD1473. Copernicus' groundbreaking observation that the Earth rotated around the static Sun (and not the other way round) outraged the Catholic church, which condemned him as a heretic and insisted he'd be damned by eternal hellfire.

Copernicus' legacy is seen throughout Torun. Statues and shops, universities and restaurants are dedicated to him - - and you can even buy Copernicus- shaped gingerbread men. Torun has been a hotbed of pierniki (gingerbread) since the Middle Ages and in the town's Gingerbread Museum you can bake your own using centuries-old recipes. With its medieval charms - and smart wine bars and beerhouses, set in vaulted Gothic cellars - I find Torun pleasant and extremely underrated.

It's handily linked, by rail, to the big Polish cities. Krakow is a seven-hour journey but Warsaw, Poznan, Lodz and Gdansk are all less than three hours away.

And, of course, a little further up, Hel awaits.


  • fact file *

·For more information on Hel and Torun, and other Polish destinations, see poland.travel/en.

·To check Polish rail timetables and fares, see http://intercity.pl/en.