Hala MOS im. Tadeusza Kościuszki

The Hala MOS im. Tadeusza Kościuszki is a hall. The windows are tall and plain, letting in the light of the Baltic coast.

You can see them there still, peering over the parapet of the years. The windows are tall and plain, letting in the light of the Baltic coast.

It has seen harder things than a match day. During a rock concert in the late 1980s, the floor gave way under the weight of jumping fans. A radiator was ripped from the wall during a handball game, flooding the court. Tomasz Adamek and Krzysztof Włodarczyk used to put up a show here for the Canal+ cameras, but that is long gone. The hall was originally opened in 1977 after being built by the workers of the Wielki Proletariat Works. It has carried a few names since then, shifting from the Municipal Centre of Sport and Recreation to the Inter-School Sports Centre, though nobody calls it anything else.

It sits at the end of ul. Tadeusza Kościuszki, a street named after a Polish general who lived a long time ago. The hall itself does not have a tower or a roof that catches the eye, just a flat expanse of concrete. The capacity was always small, five hundred souls or so, enough to hear every footstep. When the ceiling lets go, it lets go, but the place remains.