The early-modern centre of Gdynia has been officially submitted as a Polish candidate for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The application for entry, prepared by the City Hall of Gdynia and recommended by the Committee for World Cultural Heritage in Poland at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, was signed by the Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage, General Conservator of Monuments Jarosław Sellin. 

The documentation was handed over to the director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris. The justification emphasises that the centre of Gdynia demonstrates a significant exchange of cultural and social values and a breakthrough in the development of architecture and urban planning that took place in the 1920s and 1930s, when a completely new concept of “a building that is so different from those that preceded it that a new architecture becomes a fact, not a possibility” was born. 

The architecture of the Gdynia centre demonstrates in a representative way the multiplicity of formal threads of early modernism in contrast to other modernist complexes created both before and after World War II.

The centre of Gdynia maintains to this day a high integrity of attributes attesting to the integrity of its cultural heritage. It encompasses all the main elements of the spatially coherent and distinctive early-modern premise from 1926-1939, which remain highly legible and well protected.

Each year, States Parties to the World Heritage Convention can submit one nomination for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The first step is to verify the application for completeness. If it is successful, a substantive assessment process follows, which takes at least 1.5 years. The application is then discussed at a session of the World Heritage Committee, where a binding decision is taken.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński