Mariacka runs about 200 m from the Gothic arch of the Mariacka Gate on the Motława to the east end of St Mary’s, a canyon a few metres wide between four-storey houses. It is the best-looking street in Poland and it is almost entirely a reconstruction, and both of those things are worth knowing before you walk down it.
The feature to come for is the przedproża. The ground here is waterlogged and would not take deep cellars, so merchants raised their storage partly above street level and put a terrace in front of each house: a platform reached by a flight of stone steps, edged with balustrades and carved posts, with the cellar mouth underneath. Every house on Mariacka has one, which is true of no other street in the city. Along their edges run the rzygacze — the ornamental spouts that throw roof water clear of the steps, carved as dolphins, fish heads, dragons and worse. They are at eye level from the roadway and almost nobody looks at them.
What is old here. Mariacka was destroyed in March 1945 along with the rest of the centre. One tenement survived, along with some of the przedproża and the battered shells of the Mariacka Gate and the Naturalists’ House at the Motława end. The rubble was cleared in 1952–53 and what was left of the old architecture was inventoried and stored; the houses were rebuilt from the mid-1950s, with the terraces, carving and ornament reconstructed afterwards, and stone that had been salvaged reset where it could be. So the street plan and the terraces are genuine; the facades above them are careful 20th-century work built to an idealised 17th-century picture rather than to what stood here in 1939.
The cellars and ground floors under the terraces are amber shops and small galleries — this is where the Gdańsk amber trade actually happens — with cafés on the terraces themselves. It costs nothing to walk and it is at its best empty: before about 09:00, or late in the evening when the shops shut and the lamps are on.
