Every design for Kościerzyna

In 1284 a document handed "Costerina" and twenty-one other villages to Princess Gertruda, youngest daughter of Duke Sambor II – and the town still calls its central hill after her. Kościerzyna has stood in the south of the Kashubian Lake District ever since, its coat of arms showing a bear beneath an oak.

To belong here is to carry Kashubia with you. The town was a centre of Polish life through the long years of Germanisation, and the writer and activist Aleksander Majkowski worked here; his statue, Pomnik Aleksandra Majkowskiego, stands as a reminder. Families from Kościerzyna who sailed to Winona, Minnesota from 1859 onwards took the same attachment with them. Lakes ring the town, the railway junction has given it the much-loved Muzeum Kolejnictwa, and Kościół pw. Świętej Trójcy has seen generations of townspeople through their Sundays.

For anyone who grew up here, the map holds the walk to school, a summer ride on the miniature railway and an evening by the lake – a small Kashubian town remembered street by street.