Poland's Wedding to the Sea was the ceremony held at Puck on 10 February 1920, when General Józef Haller, commander of the Pomeranian Front, threw a ring into the Bay of Puck. It closed the Polish takeover of the Pomeranian lands granted by the Treaty of Versailles and marked Poland's return to the Baltic.
For almost a century and a half there had been no Polish coast at all. Then, in a few weeks of January and February 1920, Polish troops marched north through Pomerania behind the departing German garrisons, and on a February afternoon a general on horseback rode down to the bay and married his country to the sea. This is the story of that day, the land behind it and what Poland built on the shore, part of our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921.
What was Poland's Wedding to the Sea?
It was the state ceremony that closed the takeover of Pomerania. On 10 February 1920, in the small fishing port of Puck, General Józef Haller threw a ring into the bay as a sign that Poland had returned to the Baltic.1
Historians give it pride of place. Józef Borzyszkowski calls the wedding the high point of the return of Pomerania, an event that passed into legend at once, and the military historian Mariusz Kardas calls the ceremony at Puck the most important event of those days.2
Why did Poland need access to the sea?
The demand went back to World War I. On 8 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson told the American Congress, in the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points, that an independent Polish state should be erected with free and secure access to the sea. Borzyszkowski notes that the program stirred the Polish national movement in Pomerania that year.3
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, gave Poland most of the Prussian province of West Prussia, the land the Poles call Pomerania. It did not give Poland Danzig (Gdańsk), the great port at the mouth of the Vistula. The city and its surroundings were to become a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, inside the Polish customs frontier and with Poland guaranteed free use of its port.4
The treaty came into force only on 10 January 1920, after Germany ratified it, and only then could Poland take over the land. The history of the treaty itself belongs to another story. Here it matters that the coast Poland gained was short and that the largest towns of the province, Danzig and Elbing, stayed outside it.5
How did Polish troops take over Pomerania in 1920?
The task went to the Pomeranian Front under General Józef Haller, the former commander of the Blue Army, while the Greater Poland Front moved in from the southwest. The handover had been agreed with the German side in the autumn of 1919, so that German troops could withdraw on a fixed timetable while Polish units moved in behind them.6
The march began on 17 January 1920 and ended at Puck on 10 February.7
Toruń, chosen as the capital of the new Pomeranian province, was taken over on 18 January. Haller arrived there three days later, on 21 January, for the official celebration of Pomerania's return, and issued a proclamation to the people of Pomerania.8
The rest followed in stages: through Kociewie, with Starogard and Tczew, at the end of January, and in the first ten days of February through the Kashubian districts, Kartuzy and Wejherowo, down to the coast. This last stage ran from 4 to 10 February, and some units reached the sea before the ceremony was held.9
How many soldiers took part is not settled. Andrzej Kotecki of the Independence Museum in Warsaw, using ration strengths, puts the Pomeranian Front at 940 officers and 26,307 men, with five armored trains and nine aircraft. Mirosław Golon of the Institute of National Remembrance writes of about 90,000 soldiers assigned to the whole operation, many of whom were sent east only weeks later, to the front of the Polish-Soviet War.10
Why was Puck chosen?
Puck, Kotecki notes, was then the only port on the Polish coast, and the town had old ties to Polish history on the Baltic. The great port of the region, Danzig, was out of reach.11
According to Kardas, the plan for the day was drawn up with Antoni Miotk and Teofil Baniecki, Polish activists from the Puck district. The program adopted at the Front's headquarters in Toruń on 3 February 1920 foresaw a flag raising, the dipping of the regimental colors in the water, a field Mass and a commemorative post, with a trip to the open sea at Wielka Wieś, today Władysławowo, the next day. The anthropologist Monika Golonka-Czajkowska also stresses how carefully the program had been written, with every role set in advance.12
What happened at Puck on 10 February 1920?
On the way north the special train from Toruń stopped at Danzig station. There Józef Wybicki, a leading figure among the Danzig Poles and the starosta of Pomerania's provincial self-government, handed Haller two rings, a gift of the city's Polish community. Most accounts describe them as platinum. The folder by Krzysztof Korda and Cezary Obracht-Prondzyński speaks instead of gold-plated wedding bands inscribed with the names of Danzig and Puck and the date.13
At Puck, Kotecki writes, the general was met at the station by local officials, Kashubian fishermen in their working dress and a company of the 1st Naval Battalion. A procession then went to the shore, led by a fisherman carrying a church banner of the Virgin Mary, with Haller on horseback behind it. The ceremony took place at the seaplane station on the bay, where, Golonka-Czajkowska adds, a tall white mast had been put up for the flag.14
Haller spoke first. "Now free worlds and free lands lie before us," he told the crowd, and a Polish sailor would be able to reach anywhere under the sign of the White Eagle. Interior Minister Stanisław Wojciechowski spoke for the Chief of State and the government and recalled the times when Poland had ruled on the Baltic.15
Then, in the accounts of Kotecki and Golonka-Czajkowska, the priests blessed a white and red Polish ensign, and it was hoisted on the mast. A field Mass followed, with a sermon by Father Józef Wrycza. After the Te Deum Haller threw one ring into the sea and put the other on his own finger. At the end, Golonka-Czajkowska writes, a commemorative post carved with the Jagiellonian eagle was blessed.16
Haller himself remembered the order differently. In his own recollection the naval ensign went up after the Mass, to gun salutes and the national anthem, as an old Kashubian fisherman with an oar handed over his watch on the coast to a young Polish sailor, and only then did he speak and throw the ring.17
Among the guests were the Pomeranian voivode Stefan Łaszewski, Leon Janta-Połczyński for the Ministry of the Former Prussian Partition, Rear Admiral Kazimierz Porębski of the navy, deputies of the Sejm and crowds of local people, who stood in the rain.18
One detail surprises. The ring was not in the program. Both Kardas, following the historian Daniel Duda, and Golonka-Czajkowska, citing the accounts of witnesses, show that the throwing of the ring was added at the last moment. Yet it soon became, in Golonka-Czajkowska's words, the most important moment in the national story of Pomerania's return.19
How much coast did Poland get?
The figures depend on how the shore is measured. The Institute of National Remembrance gives 147 kilometers: 74 along the Hel peninsula, 24 on the open sea and 49 along the Bay of Puck. Przemysław Olstowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences gives 140 kilometers, counting the whole circuit of the Hel peninsula. Both stress that it was a modest strip of coast without a major port.20
Danzig, the natural port of the Vistula basin, stayed outside Poland. Under the treaty it became a Free City under the League of Nations, with rights for Poland in its port and in its customs.21
How did the Germans see it?
For Germany the treaty was a heavy blow. The German Historical Museum's LeMO portal sums it up: in the east, Posen and West Prussia went to Poland. The Westpreußisches Landesmuseum, the museum of the former province, writes that West Prussia ceased to exist when the treaty came into force on 10 January 1920.22
Only in a small part of the province, east of the Vistula, did the people vote on their future in 1920, and there more than 90 percent chose to stay in Germany. Before that, Borzyszkowski notes, local Germans backed by Berlin had campaigned hard for West Prussia to remain in the Reich, even printing an appeal to the Kashubians in German and Kashubian.23
Many Germans did not stay. The Westpreußisches Landesmuseum speaks of hundreds of thousands who left their homes. Olstowski estimates that, with Germans moving to the Reich and Poles arriving from other regions, 25 to 30 percent of the population changed by the mid-1920s, above all in the larger towns.24
On the days of the handover the German garrisons left by a timetable agreed with the Polish side. Borzyszkowski notes that they left each town on the eve of the Polish entry, sometimes with an ominous "Auf Wiedersehen", and adds that on the whole the leave-taking passed without tension.25
How did the Kashubians and the rest of Poland see it?
In Pomerania the welcome was enthusiastic. Towns and villages were decked out with flags and welcome gates. Yet Stanisław Wojciechowski, who came as the government's delegate, recalled in his memoirs that Warsaw greeted the news of the coast's occupation with indifference.26
Joy soon gave way to disappointment. Both Olstowski and Borzyszkowski describe how the behavior of the army toward civilians in 1920, and newcomers from the other partitions taking posts in the administration, turned many Kashubians against the new authorities within months.27
What came next: the navy and Gdynia
Poland had a navy before it had a coast. On 28 November 1918 Piłsudski ordered the creation of a Polish navy and named Colonel Bogumił Nowotny head of its section in the Ministry of Military Affairs. The 1st Naval Battalion, formed at Modlin under Captain Konstanty Jacynicz, took part in the takeover of Pomerania.28
The next step was a port of Poland's own. On 23 September 1922 the Sejm passed a law authorizing the government to build a seaport at Gdynia, then a Kashubian fishing village, in stages, so that a smaller port could work while it grew.29
Gdynia received town rights in 1926, by a government decree dated 10 February, the sixth anniversary of the wedding. In the words of a Sejm resolution of 2019, Poland built a modern seaport and the city of Gdynia as a consequence of its return to the Baltic.30
How is the Wedding to the Sea remembered?
Haller kept his tie to the coast. In 1924 a wooden villa was built for him and his family at Wielka Wieś, and the resort that grew up around it was named Hallerowo in his honor. The house, known as the Hallerówka, is now a branch of the Museum of the Puck Region with an exhibition on the general.31
The ceremony was copied. On 18 March 1945, at the end of the battle for Kolberg (Kołobrzeg), which had lasted since 4 March, Corporal Franciszek Niewidziajło threw a ring into the sea and swore that Poland would never leave it. The words of that oath became a fixture of the communist authorities' propaganda. Golonka-Czajkowska argues that the new authorities modeled the Kołobrzeg ceremony on Puck while leaving Puck out of the official story. The Sejm, for its part, declared 2020 the Year of Poland's Wedding to the Sea in Puck for the centenary.32
Artists returned to the scene too. Two who were there, Henryk Uziembło and Julian Fałat, recorded it, and Wojciech Kossak later painted his own version. In Gdynia the street that leads from the station to the sea is called 10 Lutego, 10 February.33
Read more in our profile of Józef Haller, in the story of the Greater Poland Uprising that freed the neighboring province, and in our page on Polish Independence Day. The day itself is on our list for 10 February in history.
