Port Gate
Your walk begins at a Baroque showpiece: the Port Gate, known locally as Brama Portowa, standing where Independence Avenue, Wyszyńskiego Street and Victory Square meet. Take a moment with the façade. Its elaborate sculptures are the work of Bartholomé Damart, carved from sandstone brought from Pirna in Saxony, while the bricks behind them were made in Liège, in today's Belgium. Materials from half of Europe, assembled for one city entrance.
The gate was ordered by King Frederick William I of Prussia in 1724 and built between 1725 and 1727 to designs by the military architect Gerhard Cornelius van Wallrawe, with masonry by Hans Jürgen Reinecke. It was not decoration alone: it sat in the fortification walls as one of the ways into the city, covered by the Royal and Passau bastions nearby.
Its names tell their own story. It opened as the Brandenburg Gate and became the Berlin Gate in 1732, because the road leading out of it ran to Berlin. That name had belonged to another gate on Wyszyńskiego Street, which was pulled down the same year. When the walls came down in the 19th century, this gate was spared and handed over to the city.
In 1902 the city placed the Amphitrite Fountain by Reinhold Felderhoff in front of the gate's eastern side, by then bricked up: the Greek sea goddess, nude, on a chariot pulled by two galloping horses above a wide, shallow basin. Some religious conservative women protested against her nudity. Today the gate serves as a community theatre venue, so the outside is what you get unless you come for a show.
From here it is the longest leg of the day so far: 1640 m, about 24 minutes, to the Szczecin Philharmonic, a building that could hardly be more different.
