Trip 38 — Usedom Walk
Day 2: Świnoujście Beach to Koserow
Tuesday, 14 November 2023
Today: 31642 steps/24.43 km/15.18 mi/4h 45m
Total: 37510 steps/29.20 km/18.14 mi/5h 35m
If there's one upside to Usedom's short autumn daylight hours and mostly cloudy skies (and there may be only one), it's that the light is nearly always beautiful. Świnoujście has a lot of parks, and the sun casts a glow on the yellow leaves from midway up the sky and makes the tree trunks shimmer in watery ripples. It spotlights buildings as it wishes, sometimes conspiring with the clouds.
I say that based entirely on my first full day in the country, a day when I was spared most of the rain, but it did make a good impression.
In the compact park named for the composer Frederic Chopin, an iron piano frame holds a flowerbed, and the hills and trails make the park seem larger than it is. In the large Park Zdrojowy, which separates Świnoujście Centrum from the beach area, eight walking paths converge on a central fountain. Nearby are two 19th-century brick forts, which were invisible on my dark arrival walk but took their commanding pose when I retraced my steps in the daylight.
The Museum of Sea Fishery (or, for sufficiently contorting mouths, the Muzeum Rybołówstwa Morskiego) is more a natural-history and city museum than one devoted to marine life and industry. The explanation of the Baltic Sea described it as high in salinity, heavily polluted, not particularly life-sustaining, and poor for fishing; herring, perch, cod, and flounder are some of the common catches. A couple of the museum's rooms held models of fishing trawlers from the past few centuries, plus implements and navigating equipment.
The upper floor provided a history of the town, pronounced "shvina-OOee-shcheh" (with a big glottal stop on the "OO," and don't worry too much about the "ee" after it). Świnoujście has about 40,000 people and occupies 44 islands, but only three are inhabited. Located at the mouth of the Świna Strait, it's been an important shipping port for a thousand years. It became popular as a spa town in the 19th century, more so when healing springs were discovered at the end of the century. The train line that runs through Usedom, ending at Świnoujście Centrum (the only Polish station), is known as the BÄderbahn or "spa railway."
A promenade runs parallel to the beach, and in between are hotels, smoked-fish stalls, and seafood restaurants (where I enjoyed a fine baked zander, a kind of Baltic Sea perch and also a fine Scrabble word). As elsewhere in Europe, people eat outside in the cold, warmed by heating lamps and blankets provided by the establishments. It doesn't hurt to have a glass of glÜhwein, either, costing around 15 złotych.
(As in Russian, the Polish plural form of an item with a number in front of it depends on the number. The singular is złoty; the plural is złote if the number ends in 2, 3, or 4 and there isn't a 1 in the tens place — such as 3, 22, 104, and 1593 — and złotych otherwise, such as 5, 12, 100, and 5814. Fraction? Złotego. Yes, in English, people just write "zloties," another fine Scrabble word. But to type "zloties" when I've gone to all the trouble of typing "Świnoujście" just reeks a bit childish, as though I expect the number to be shown in fingers. "How many zloties?" "This many!")
Today's walk started with gentle rain that struggled to persist. I took the promenade west, past the end of the town, through beech and pine forest, and well into Germany. On the landward side, mansions overlooked the sea. When I reached Ahlbeck, fishing huts from the 19th century had been turned into casual restaurants.
When the promenade ended, two hours into my walk, I had three options: to follow the bike route around to Ückeritz, to climb up and walk along the cliffs, or to continue under them, along the beach. For variety's sake, I took the beach, as I'd be climbing the Streckelsberg later and I'll be heading through Ückeritz in a few days.
I stayed on the beach for two more hours. There was a bulge in the land far ahead, and the cliff was slightly higher. Was that the Streckelsberg? I thought so, but then it seemed too far away, then too close, then too far again. The beach was short on features and the distance was hard to estimate.
The rain had stopped, and the sun even poked through for a few seconds. There were people about every ten minutes, some with their dogs. The sand was reasonably packed, so it wasn't too hard for walking. One restaurant broke the monotony, and I wouldn't have minded a break, but it was going to get dark soon and I didn't want to get caught up on the cliff.
ile of rock that accumulated as it was pushed by a glacier. (The Baltic Sea is even newer.) I took the first staircase up from the beach; there were similar access points every few minutes along this cliff.Of
course that bulge was the Streckelsberg, a moraine that grew around 16,000 years
ago — a p
The path was wide and strewn with leaves; it did not stay near the cliff edge, and it was not dangerous. It was in the forest up here that Mary Schweidler of Wilhelm Meinhold's book found the amber that she sold to bring the people of Koserow out of poverty during the Thirty Years' War — a fortune that aroused enough suspicion to implicate her in witchcraft. Baltic amber came from the resin of pine trees in what's now Scandinavia; the resin, acted upon by the elements, became stone and drifted here over millions of years.
A plaque on the cliff summarized the Mary Schweidler story. Nearby was a pyramidal structure of wood planks that came together at the top. Was that the place where she was to have been burned? (It would have been much higher, of course, because of the erosion over 400 years.)
I descended to Koserow just before it became dark. In the evening I found the stone church where Mary's story was allegedly discovered, but the entrance was hidden by trees and the long building was unlit. I couldn't decide whether it looked eerie or comforting.
And I may not have found any amber myself (except in the Świnoujście museum), but at least I could start dinner with an amber spritz.
Go on to day 3
