HOUSE HISTORY
We became the owners of Stara Wędzarnia in July 2005, after a year and a half of looking for the perfect plot to build our guest house on and free ourselves from working in heartless corporations. At the time Stara Wędzarnia was not what it is now – it was an old derelict fish smokehouse, an ugly shack with remarkable brick chimneys.
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It was built at the end of the 1920s, beginning of the 1930s, probably by a company from Hamburg. The architecture of the chimneys is absolutely unique in Poland; they resemble a lot of smokehouse chimneys from Bornholm. Before World War II there were at least 4 smokehouses with chimneys like that in Górki Wschodnie. The first owner of our smokehouse was a German called Otto Bartsch (the spelling of his surname has been determined after talking to people who lived in town before the war). His smokehouse was the biggest of several functioning in Ostliche Neufahr (the historical name of Górki Wschodnie). Unfortunately, Mr and Mrs Bartsch had no children, therefore it is very hard to determine their fate after the war. The only thing we know is that after the dispossession brought about by a decree of the regional nationalization committee in December 1946, they travelled, through Federal Republic of Germany, to the United States.
After the Second World War the smokehouse belonged to a few fishermen cooperatives, one after the other (for example to the ”Rybitwa” Fishing Cooperative, the ”Front Narodowy” Cooperative Society and the ”Jedność Rybacka” cooperative). The boats delivering fish to the smokehouse moored at a big wooden quay and there were times when the cooperatives employed up to 150 people. In August 1987 the smokehouse became the property of the Kryński family and it functioned as a fish processing plant until the end of the 20th century.