After 17 years of standing prepared for a potential conflict that thankfully never occurred, this military ship was peacefully decommissioned. So how did it land on this beach with its hull slowly rotting away?
The ORP Wicher II and ORP Grom II were warships built by Soviet Russia in Leningrad, modern-day Saint Petersburg. They served in the Soviet Baltic Fleet before being transferred to the Polish Navy. After performing their missions to the Republic of Poland, both ships were decommissioned in the 1970s. But the question remained of what to do with these huge chunks of metal. The answer that the Polish government agreed upon was to run it up on a public beach as a breakwater—great for simplicity but not so much for tetanus prevention.
The remains of the Wicher lie slightly further out into the water, but the Grom remains rotting away on the beach. It has become a habitat for spiders, a destination for photographers, and an example of human-made engineering slowly being reclaimed by nature.
