THE FIRST TIME I RECALL hearing about Stettin, or Szczecin as it is called in Polish, was in the famous speech Winston Churchill gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, when he sounded an early alarm in the Cold War. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent,” declared the former British prime minister. My mind’s-eye view of Stettin became even grimmer when I learned that much of the city had been reduced to ashes in World War II.
So imagine my surprise, 75 years after Churchill’s address, when I discover how stunning parts of this riverport in northwest Poland are today. Its handsome old Paris Quarter, laid out by German architect James Hobrecht in the 1880s according to a French blueprint, is replete with beautiful fin-desiècle apartment buildings. The new Philharmonic concert
