Gdansk Letter: Huge green cranes still turn above the docks in Gdansk, and trucks roll in and out of the former Lenin Shipyards, where the Iron Curtain began to crack in August 1980.
But the cradle of Solidarity, the first free trade union in communist eastern Europe, cannot survive only on memories and the tourists that come to recall a strike that sent shockwaves through the Soviet bloc, and led nine years later to its collapse.
Poland is now the largest member of the European Union, and Brussels is casting a close eye over the state aid that Warsaw has pumped into its Baltic ports for years, desperate to keep them alive as it fights the highest unemployment rate in the bloc.
The huge shipyards in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin employ some 20,000 people, and Poland has spent hundreds of millions of euro propping them up with funds that the EU says must now cease, unless the cash is accompanied by major restructuring.
But for many Poles, including the former Solidarity activists who now run the country, the Gdansk shipyards cannot be treated as simply another business, subject to the competition laws laid down by Brussels.
"The European Commission acts within the framework of European law," said Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who rules alongside his twin brother President Lech Kaczynski, with whom he worked in Solidarity to bring down the communist government.
"But if you ask me the question: am I ready to defend - at all costs - the shipyards where I spent weeks as a Solidarity demonstrator? The answer is, I am ready to defend them. At all costs."
A Warsaw law graduate rather than a Gdansk docker, Jaroslaw Kaczynski joined an underground pro-democracy movement in 1976, but did not tell his younger brother in case he jeopardised his own law studies by following him into the group.
Lech did just that after finishing his studies, and both Kaczynskis were in Gdansk supporting Solidarity leader Lech Walesa when, on August 31st, 1980, the communist authorities snapped under the pressure of a nationwide strike that began at the Baltic port.
Many of the concessions they made then to Poland's workers - including the right to form free trade unions - were officially rescinded when martial law was imposed the following year, but the momentum was with Walesa and Solidarity.
The communists finally sat down at the round-table talks with Walesa and his colleagues in 1989, for negotiations that ended in partially free elections that same year, and sparked revolution against Kremlin-backed governments across the region.
In power, Solidarity soon disintegrated as a political party, and the Kaczynskis founded a centre-right group that opposed the conciliatory line of the round-table talks, by which former communists and democrats agreed to build democratic Poland together.
In 1993, during his tenure as president, Walesa sacked the twins as senior advisers, sealing an enmity between them that lingers to this day.
On the anniversary of the Solidarity strikes this year, having failed to receive an invitation from President Kaczynski to an official commemoration ceremony, Walesa denounced the twins as "populists and demagogues".
"The Kaczynskis' method is to tear everything apart," he said. "But I don't think they will manage to destroy everything before someone smarter replaces them." But Walesa did agree with the twins on one thing: the need to save Gdansk shipyard.
"The shipyard is the mother of freedom in Europe," he said. "You do not give up on your mother. Everything should be done to save it." Gdansk today is a beautifully restored Hanseatic town, buzzing with foreign tourists who arrive daily on budget flights from across Europe.
The waterfront is awash with cafes and bars that offer respite to the visitors and inevitable property-buyers who hunt bargains in this Baltic gem, and in the beach resorts of Gdynia and Sopot a few miles away.
The pristine city is hard to reconcile with the grainy images of the moustachioed Walesa rallying his supporters at the docks; of a priest saying Mass for the strikers from the makeshift altar of a flatbed truck; and of the celebrations after officials gave in and made concessions to Solidarity, when Poland and the world had feared bloodshed.
Those images are gathered at a museum at the shipyard, and include pictures of the young Kaczynskis from the time when Polish politics was black-and-white - with the communists or against - and it could not be imagined that one day Brussels would threaten to close the docks at Gdansk.
The Kaczynski government has outlined a plan to restructure and partially privatise Gdansk and other shipyards, but analysts say they do not go far enough, and that if the shipyards are to be saved, politics and nostalgia must bow to cold economics.
"The government's plan will not solve any of the yard's problems," said Ireneusz Jablonski of the Adam Smith Centre, a think-tank in Warsaw.
"Politics must get totally out of the shipyards and it should be treated as a regular company - not a stage for political parties."