So where is Anna’s crane? That’s one of several questions that spring to mind when you gaze on the site of the erstwhile Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, even if the area is now just another European postindustrial wasteland waiting for the funds to turn it into an office and leisure development.

Back in July 1980, the dismissal of a crane operator called Anna Walentynowicz for political agitation led to the occupation of the shipyards by the burgeoning Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa. They delivered a charter called the Twenty-One Demands, which, astonishingly, the communist regime was forced to accept by the following month. The writing was on the shipyard wall.

If you subscribe to the casual view of catastrophe that has a butterfly flapping its wings causing the entire population of China to stamp their feet (or something like that), you can’t help but be drawn to the seductive historical resonances of the Lenin shipyard and wonder whether Walentynowicz’s recalcitrance led, by incremental challenges to a decadent authoritarian system, to the downfall of the Soviet socialist system.

A quarter of a century after that first flexing of the Solidarity muscle, Gdansk is a vibrant central European metropolis with an air of chic energy. Visitors drawn by its iconic position in recent European history might expect to find a tough Baltic port, a Polish Liverpool or Glasgow.

They will be happily amazed by the pristine beauty of the old town, an atmospheric quarter redolent of the aesthetic delights of Amsterdam or Prague.

It would be an easy mistake to assume the fabulous medieval and Renaissance lines of old Gdansk are well-preserved. In fact they were levelled by the Russians in the second world war, a conflict that had started when the Germans arrived at Westerplatte at the northern edge of the city on September 1, 1939. In the years after the war the citizens collected the rubble and replaced every brick where it had come from.

For an instant sample of Gdansk’s rich heritage, start in the benign tourist-trap splendour of the Dlugi Targ, part elegant avenue, part town square. The town hall is an imposing testament to the city’s wealth and importance from the 14th century, when it was built. Inside you will find a museum that will fail to conceal that Gdansk’s history is almost entirely German. Ever since the start of the 14th century, when the Teutonic Knights established themselves here, until 1945, when the victorious allies arbitrarily picked up Poland and shifted the entire country 125 miles to the west, this was Danzig.

The Germanic origins of the city is recognisable in the architecture of the restored townhouses lining the picturesque streets running parallel to Dlugi Targ.

Looming behind the town hall is St Mary’s, the largest brick church in the world, its scale defying visitors to take an adequate photograph of its towering mass. It served as a refuge and rallying point during the days of martial law in 1981, accidentally confirming the church as the focus of opposition to the state.

You can climb the tower and survey the full extent of the city over the shipyards, up the river and canals towards the Baltic.

Head northwest into the old town, the Stare Miasto, and encounter the Great Mill, the Teutonic Knights’ most imposing civic legacy to the city, the biggest medieval mill in Europe. The knights weren’t the most enlightened of employers, using slaves to turn the mill wheels. It was still milling flour until the middle of the last century. Now you can admire it from the canalside bars and coffee houses before taking in the merchants’ mansions and Renaissance houses that give way rather abruptly to Soviet-era housing blocks and a scruffy shopping centre.

More by luck than design, my visit coincided with the annual St Dominic’s Fair. A festival of joyful consumption, you could be more inclined to associate it with the Mediterranean until you encounter the Polish food stalls.

The temperatures might be pushing the high 20s, but the locals are queuing up for daunting-looking golonka, pig’s knuckle in thick sauce with cabbage and dumplings, fat kielbasa sausages, or bigos, the salty cabbage and meat stew.

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