Kamień Pomorski

Kamień Pomorski, a spa town of 8 921 inhabitants as of 2015, occupies a strategic position in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship of north-western Poland, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Situated some 63 kilometres north of Szczecin and lying just six kilometres from the open coast, it serves as the administrative seat of both an urban-rural gmina and Kamień County. As the second seat of the Archdiocese of Szczecin-Kamień and the deanery of Kamień, it combines spiritual significance with its maritime setting, offering a singular blend of historical resonance and natural charm.

The origins of Kamień Pomorski’s name reach deep into the Slavic Lechitic tongue. Translated into English as “Pomeranian Stone,” its earliest documented forms—Civitas ducis Camina, Castrum magnum Gamin and In urbe Games—reflect a series of medieval Latin renderings, while local variants such as Chamin and Camyna appear in ecclesiastical bulls of 1140 and 1188. Over time, Camin emerged as the settled toponym, a testament to centuries of linguistic evolution on Poland’s Baltic frontier.

At the heart of the town’s identity lies the Royal Boulder, a glacial erratic of some twenty metres in diameter, which rests within the channel of the Dziwna River. Known for centuries as a navigational marker, it achieved legal protection as a natural monument in 1959. Beyond its physical presence, it has inspired three enduring legends. The first recounts how Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth stood atop the rock in 1121 to greet passing sails. A second tale transforms the boulder into a cursed toad, petrified by the Slavic deity Trzygłów after wreaking havoc in the bay. The third involves a devil, a giant and a fateful rooster’s crow that revealed a demonic ruse; the giant’s hurl of the stone left the devil immobilised beneath its crushing weight to this day.

Archaeological evidence attests to a Lechitic Wolinians settlement at Kamień Pomorski as early as the eighth century, with the construction of a defensive stronghold in the tenth. The nascent Polish state absorbed the settlement during the reign of Mieszko I around 967. The town first enters written record in 1124, soon rising in prominence as the initial capital of the Duchy of Pomerania. By 1176 it had become the seat of a bishopric, and in 1180 a mint began striking coinage, underscoring its economic and ecclesiastical importance. The Dominicans assumed a role in local religious life by 1228, and in 1274 the settlement acquired Lübeck city rights, binding it into the commercial networks of the Hanseatic world.

The vicissitudes of Central European politics left their imprint on Kamień Pomorski. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ceded the town to Sweden, only for it to pass to Brandenburg-Prussia in 1679. With the founding of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, it remained under Prussian sovereignty—and, from 1871, within the German Empire—until the upheavals of the Second World War. The Potsdam Conference of 1945 restored the town to Poland, realigning borders that had shifted across centuries.

Excavations conducted between 1959 and 1961 uncovered a trove of early medieval jewellery, shedding light on the region’s material culture. These finds, alongside the enduring Royal Boulder, anchor Kamień Pomorski’s sense of continuity with its deep past. Yet the town’s character also derives from its maritime and lagoon environs. Set on the backwaters of the Dziwna Strait, it overlooks both the Karpinka and Promna bays of the Kamieński Lagoon, with Chrząszczewska Island lying just beyond Promna. These waters facilitate sailing, kayaking, windsurfing and fishing, drawing enthusiasts to its sheltered creeks and open coves.

The climate of Kamień Pomorski bears unmistakable maritime influence, classified as an oceanic regime (Cfb in the Köppen system). Summers remain cool under the sway of Baltic currents, while winters, though overcast, are milder than those of inland locales at similar latitudes. Annual mean temperatures range between 7 °C and 8.3 °C; August is the warmest month, and January the coldest. Temperature extremes have varied from lows of –19.2 °C to highs of 33.1 °C. Precipitation totals between 550 mm and 650 mm each year, and the growing season extends for some 210 to 220 days. Prevailing winds blow chiefly from the south-west and north-west, shaping both weather patterns and seafaring conditions.

Kamień Pomorski’s status as a health resort dates to recognition of its medicinal resources: healing brine springs and peat deposits. Today, spa treatment harnesses chloride-sodium and iodine-rich brines drawn from the Edward III spring, along with medicinal waters high in ferrous compounds. Peat, harvested some 800 metres southeast of the sanatorium office, supplements the therapeutic repertoire. The spa’s medical regime encompasses rheumatic, cardiological, respiratory and neurological disorders, with specialised care in orthopaedics, trauma and paediatric ailments. Five facilities deliver these treatments: the Spa Hospital “Mieszko,” the now-closed Feniks Natural Medicine Institute, the Gryf Sanatorium subdivision, the Chrobry Health Resort and the Dąbrówka Health Resort.

The town’s ecclesiastical architecture offers a window onto its medieval eminence. The Co-Cathedral of St John the Baptist, a Romanesque-Gothic basilica, stands as both a parish church and co-cathedral of the Szczecin-Kamień Archdiocese. Designated a Poland Historic Monument on 1 September 2005, the complex includes a Renaissance bishop’s palace rebuilt in the sixteenth century, an eighteenth-century rectory and sacristan’s house, the Dean’s Manor (or Kleist House), two residential canonries, a 1934 home for retired priests, an 1907–09 school now serving as a primary school, the House of the Young Ladies’ Institution from 1691–94, a thirteenth-century Gothic cloister and vestiges of medieval fortifications. Each structure evokes the town’s layered spiritual and civic narrative.

Beyond the cathedral precinct lies the Old Town, whose medieval layout, largely destroyed in 1945 and overhauled during the 1960s, nonetheless retains its historic core as a registered monument zone. The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, first erected in the Gothic style and later refashioned in the Baroque idiom, presides over the Market Square where the Gothic town hall presents a three-arcade facade richly adorned with stone ornament. Nearby, the district courthouse and former jail, along Tadeusza Kościuszki Street, recall the town’s judicial heritage, while rows of tenement houses line the square and its environs with vestiges of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century domestic architecture. Remnants of city walls arc around the old quarter, punctuated by the fourteenth-century Wolin Gate, now home to the Museum of Stones, and the adjacent Piast Tower.

Scattered within the civic grid lie traces of even earlier occupation: the Slavic cemetery from the pre-Christian era and the fourteenth-century St Nicholas’ Church—a branch church expanded in the seventeenth century to serve congregants unable to attend the cathedral. These elements affirm Kamień Pomorski’s emergence at the confluence of pagan tradition and medieval Christendom.

Natural monuments within the town further attest to its heritage. A quartet of small-leaved limes grows alongside the cathedral wall on Cathedral Square, while two field elms stand on Wolności Street. Within the cloister yard towers a five-century-old arborvitae, and nearby an oak known as the Wiesław Oak, some 350 years in age, presides over silent cloister walks. A century-old holly completes this arboreal gallery, each tree protected as a living relic.

Economically, the town’s waterfront continues to sustain maritime pursuits. Fishing boats lie alongside pleasure craft in a small port, and passenger tourism has grown in recent years, even as traditional transshipment functions have receded. The hotel “Under the Muses” offers accommodation, while the town’s health resort status underpins its year-round visitor economy.

Connectivity binds Kamień Pomorski to regional and national networks. Provincial Road 107 bisects the town, linking it southward to National Road 3 and eastward toward Dziwnówek on the coast. To the south, Provincial Road 106 connects to Golczewo and National Road 6, while Provincial Road 103 extends toward Trzebiatów. A railway station provides regular service to Wysoka Kamieńska and Szczecin, and plans envisage a Berlin–Szczecin–Baltic waterway, which would restore a grand fluvial-maritime link across the Oder and the Dziwna.

Throughout its millennium of continuous habitation, Kamień Pomorski has borne witness to the ebb and flow of tribes, dukes, kingdoms and nations. Its stones—whether the glacial boulder in the river or the stones of its cathedral cloister—speak of human endeavour and divine aspiration. The layering of pagan legends over Christian ceremonies, the survival of medieval walls amidst modern blocks, the coexistence of healing springs with the bustle of a small port: all converge in a place that balances past and present with unforced grace.

Kamień Pomorski stands today not as a relic sealed in time, but as a living town where heritage informs contemporary life. The therapy offered by its brine and peat springs draws those in search of bodily renewal; the cathedral’s ancient stones draw pilgrims and seekers of aesthetic solace; the lagoon’s placid waters draw those who find their own truths upon wind-scanned waves. Its streets, framed by arcades and gate towers, beckon to the pedestrian who moves at a human pace, reminding all who pass beneath the Wolin Gate that history is not merely to be read, but to be inhabited.

In balancing its dual identity—of solemn cathedral town and leisure spa resort—Kamień Pomorski exemplifies the layered complexity of Pomerania itself. It preserves the memory of Slavic chieftains and medieval bishops, of Swedish governors and Prussian kings, of twentieth-century dislocations and postwar rebirth. Yet it does so without ostentation. Its narrative unfolds in stones and springs, in legends spoken by fishermen at dawn, in the silent watch of oak and lime. Thus, in the meeting of land and sea, of legend and record, Kamień Pomorski reveals itself as a place where the weight of history is light enough to lift the spirit, and where every tide brings the promise of renewal.