Mennonites Trail

Voivodeship

Warmińsko-Mazurskie

Kingdom

At the Vistula Lagoon

Start:

Raczki Elblaskie (by the pomp station, near teritorial border of Elbląg)

End:

Stare Pole

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The trip starts close to the southern border of Elbląg, near the pump station in Raczki Elbląskie. In this village, not far from the road on which the trail runs, the lowest natural depression (1.8 metres below sea level) in Poland is situated near Lake Druzno. In the surroundings you can find areas situated even lower, but they were formed as a result of human activity during peat excavation works. The trail of the trip leads through plain areas of Żuławy Wiślane. The area still contains the remains of the material culture of Mennonites – a group of Protestants who left the Netherlands as a result of religious persecutions and found shelter in Poland in the middle of the 16^th century. Descendants of those settlers lived in Żuławy until 1945. Mennonites had the status of independent peasants and most of them were wealthy. Riding through local villages, it is worth looking at the architecture of the Mennonite households, which consist of the residential part and the farming part, including most imposing arcade houses that belonged to the wealthiest families. If you are keen on technology, you should also see numerous canals and ditches and hydrotechnical equipment that helped to maintain the floodplain in a condition enabling residence and agricultural use. Most of them were built by the Mennonites, who had arrived from equally wet lands of the Netherlands. In Tropy Elbląskie, Jezioro, Rozgart and Markusy, there are Mennonite cemeteries. In the Jezioro village, you can also see a former Mennonite temple built in years 1898-99 in neo-Gothic style and a neo-Gothic Catholic church, which once belonged to the Protestants. There is also a former Mennonite church built in 1890 in Rozgart. Today it is used by the Catholics. It is worth looking at the free-standing bell-tower with the structure extending toward the bottom, which helps to stabilise the facility on a difficult ground. Close to the nearby dam, there are buildings of one of the many intermediate pumping stations in Żuławy. The trip ends on the railway station in Stare Pole. From there, you can go by train to Malbork or return to Elbląg or continue the trail towards Malbork.

Trail option :

You can arrive in Gdańsk along the “Mennonites’ Trail,” dividing your trip into a few days.

The length of the entire trail is almost 200 km.

Surface and marking of the trail:

MARKED TRAIL

The trail runs on asphalt roads and fully overlaps with the PTTK trail.

Attractions on the trail: