3 The Baltic’s Edge: Architecture and Art in the Service of Polish Maritime Policy, 1918–1939 Małgorzata Omilanowska Introduction After World War I many radical structural changes took place in East- Central Europe. Many new countries that had not existed on the map were established, such as Czechoslovakia or Latvia, and many others regained independence after years of political dependence on major powers, like Hungary or Poland. All those countries, faced with an enormous quantity of tasks of a political, economic, legislative and organizational character, were also to quickly embrace the challenge of constructing or reconstructing their identity, this including their visual identity. Poland’s challenges seemed the greatest – not only did it have to reconstruct its state structure, but also to harmonize three prior partition zones which for a century had operated fully independently of one another, under three distinct powers: Russia, Austria and Germany or Prussia. In the process of shaping the new politics of the independent Polish state, Polish maritime policy was to play a substantial role. The story of the shaping of Polish maritime policy is all the more fascinating as Poland was not really a country with a maritime tradition (Troebst 2002). In early modern times Poland’s access to the sea was possible thanks to the harbour in Gdańsk, yet the city at the time within the boundary of the state, did not really integrate with its other regions, remaining in essence German-speaking and Evangelical. The construction of the royal military harbour and of a Polish navy which fought one sea batle, had been but episodic. As a result of the partitions of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, all of the Baltic coastline that had once belonged to Poland, had ended up within Prussia, and later the German Empire. TRICIA CUSACK.indb 37 4/11/2012 3:38:05 PM