OVSC38

## OrbisVision Song Contest #38  *Beyond Borders*

 Nocturnes, Op. 9: No. 2 in E-Flat Major by Frédéric Chopin, performed by Tzimon Barto.
 Stabat Mater, Op. 53: I. Stala Matka bolejaca (Stabat Mater dolorosa) by Karol Szymanowski, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
 Polonaise from the film "Pan Tadeusz", composed by Wojcech Kilar.
 **Grand Final:**
 Justyna Steczkowska performing "Sama" and "WITCH-ER Tarohoro"

## Participants

### Debuting

 Bermuda
  French Polynesia

### Returning

 Cocos Islands
  Czechia
  Denmark
  Georgia
  Hungary
  Ivory Coast
  Monaco
  Mongolia
  Morocco
  Nigeria
  Puerto Rico
  Serbia
  Ukraine
  US Virgin Islands

### Withdrawing

 Albania
  Belarus
  Brazil
  Croatia
  Haiti
  Iceland
  Malta
  North Korea
  Romania
  Singapore
  Spain
  Trinidad and Tobago
  Turkmenistan
  Tuvalu
  United Arab Emirates
  Zambia

## Voting

### System

Each country awards a set of 1 - 7 points, followed by 8, 10 and 12 points for their top 3 favourite songs

After their record-breaking victory in Manchester, the OrbisVision Song Contest returns to Poland, with two cities hosting together for the very first time, Gdańsk and Sopot!

This is the 2nd time Poland has hosted the contest, the first time two cities have co-hosted, and the 22nd time a European county has hosted.

The contest will consist of 3 shows, 2 semi-finals and a Grand Final.

46 countries have confirmed their participation.

## Location

### Host cities

#### Gdańsk

Gdańsk is the largest city and capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship in northern Poland.

A strategic and highly influential port for nearly a thousand years, Gdańsk was a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights and later became an influential city within the Hanseatic League during the Middle Ages.

Largely destroyed in the Second World War, Gdańsk was splendidly rebuilt in the aftermath as one of Europe's most beautiful port cities.

Today, Gdańsk has a population of 460,000 and is Poland's largest northern city, drawing numerous visitors into its historic city center, its outstanding museums and its expansive beaches spread along the coast of the Gulf of Gdańsk, making it a popular summer destination for many Poles and foreign visitors alike.

In addition to tourism, Gdańsk is also the republic's principal seaport, handling large amounts of imports and exports from the city's harbor.

The city, along with neighboring Sopot and Gdynia to the north, is part of the Tricity (*Trójmiasto*), an urban conurbation of nearly 750,000.

As Poland's main northern port at the mouth of the Vistula River, Gdańsk is a key departure and arrival point for visitors and trade along the Baltic, especially to and from Scandinavia.

Along with trade, shipbuilding was a key signature of the city's economy in the past. While trade remains a key component to Gdańsk's economy, the shipbuilding industry has declined in recent decades, giving way to tourism.

First recorded as a settlement in 997, Gdańsk was likely founded by Duke Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty, capitalizing on Baltic trade routes as well as establishing a Piast presence on the Pomeranian coast.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the town expanded to the north and south after outgrowing its original borders. As Piast Poland politically disintegrated due to inheritance issues, the town became one of the centers for the independent Duchy of Pomerelia.

Under its duke Swietopelk II, Gdańsk was granted Lübeck city rights in 1235 as German-speaking merchants took up residence in the growing town.

By the end of the 13th century, Gdańsk was reincorporated into the reformed Polish kingdom under Przemysł II.

A conflict between Poland and Brandenburg in 1308 led to the intervention of the Teutonic Knights, a German Roman Catholic military order located to the east in Prussia.

Originally allied with Poland, the Knights turned against their allies and seized Gdańsk, instigating a massacre of many of the town's residents.

Under the Teutonic Knights, Gdańsk (then increasingly known by its German name Danzig) was consolidated into a monastic state. Initially stagnating under the Knights' religious militarism, the order realized Danzig's importance to Baltic trade could no longer be ignored.

Teutonic controls over the town were relaxed by the mid-14th century, allowing Danzig to join the Hanseatic trading alliance. Now within the Hanseatic League, a degree of prosperity arrived, yet discontent with the Teutonic Knights increased.

53 of the region's prominent nobles and clergymen in 1440 formally signed into the Prussian Confederation, a group opposing the rule of the Teutonic state.

After the Thirteen Years' War in 1466, which saw Polish forces defeat the Knights, the town was reincorporated back into the Polish kingdom, although endowed with significant autonomy.

By the 16th century, ethnic Germans constituted a majority in Danzig, with Slavic Polish and Kashubians a minority. Despite initial suppression by the deeply Catholic Polish state, Danzigers largely embraced Protestantism as the Reformation spread from northern Germany.

During this period, one of the high points of the Renaissance in Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus visited and worked in the city, with the abstract of his work, *Narratio Prima* published first in Danzig in 1540.

Danzig's prosperity, however, would be severely interrupted by both the Thirty Years' War and the Swedish Deluge between the 1630s to 1660, causing the city's decline.

Danzig faced yet another crisis in 1734 when besieging Russian and Saxon soldiers forced the city into a humiliating surrender after the city sided with Stanisław I over Augustus III during the War of the Polish Secession.

Danzig fiercely resisted the First Partition of Poland by the nearby Kingdom of Prussia in 1772, though it was later annexed by Prussia in the Second Partition of 1793.

Briefly a Napoleonic client state from 1807 to 1814, Danzig remained in Prussia and later the German Empire for over the next hundred years. Under Prussia and Germany, Danzig industrialized, becoming a key German commercial port.

With the collapse of the German Empire and the rapid creation of the Second Polish Republic at the end of World War I in 1918, tensions between the new Weimar German and Polish governments ran high as both groups laid claims over Danzig.

Concurring with ethnic Polish uprisings against German rule in Silesia after the war's end, the Treaty of Versailles forcibly split Danzig from the rest of Germany, establishing a semi-independent Free City of Danzig administered by a high commissioner from the League of Nations with an elected assembly.

The treaty additionally established a customs union between the free city and Poland, as well as giving Poland rights over all railways within the free city's territory. In response to the treaty and semi-international rule, the German majority became hostile to the free city's creation, resenting its separation from Germany.

Popular anger spilled into a wave of anti-Slavic sentiment felt throughout the city in the 1920s and 1930s, targeting the city's Polish and Kashubian minorities.

The Nazi Party gained an electoral foothold in Danzig in 1933; its platform called for Danzig's reunification with the rest of the Third Reich.

The opening salvos of World War II began at Westerplatte (on the city's outskirts) on 1 September 1939 when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein attacked the Polish military battery there.

German soldiers and marines quickly stormed the city despite fierce Polish resistance, particularly at the city's Polish Post Office.

Many members of the city's Slavic minority of Poles and Kashubians were forcibly arrested and executed afterward.

During the war, the German concentration camp of Stutthof, located 34 km (21 mi) east of Danzig in the present town of Sztutowo, served as the killing ground of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people, many of whom were Jews and ethnic Poles.

By the war's conclusion in 1945, Danzig was largely in ruins and occupied by the Soviet Red Army.

Approved during the Yalta Conference, Danzig (now under its Polish name Gdańsk again) was annexed by Poland.

The city's ethnic German majority was forcefully expelled, leaving the city open to Polish resettlement.

Under communism, Gdańsk became a major shipbuilding center and port for the Eastern Bloc.

Dissatisfaction with the regime was particularly strong in the city and elsewhere in Pomerania, manifesting itself visibly with popular protests against severe price hikes in 1970.

In Gdańsk, shipyard workers were gunned down by police and army units. Despite this clampdown, mass protests against more price spikes resurfaced in 1976.

In 1980, responding to the Lenin Shipyard's firing of worker Anna Walentynowicz for participating in a non-governmental worker's union, Solidarity (*Solidarność*) was organized to protest the regime.

Led by electrician Lech Wałęsa, the Catholic-inspired labor union quickly spread across the country, forcing the Polish government to enact martial law in 1981.

Despite efforts to contain the movement through police and military means, Solidarity grew only more emboldened by the draconian response, forcing the government into negotiations by 1989, eventually leading to the peaceful downfall of the communist regime later that year.

Following the end of communism, Gdańsk opened its doors to the world and has in recent decades become a growing tourist attraction.

While remaining one of the Baltic's most important port cities, Gdańsk has highly benefited from its charming historic old town streets, many museums, and its excellent access to the popular Baltic coastline.

#### Sopot

Sopot is a seaside spa resort city in Poland. Sopot and two nearby cities, Gdańsk and Gdynia, are often referred as Tricity (Trójmiasto).

It is a smallest of the three and the most affluent on average, attracting the rich and famous from the local area (who tend to settle there), and from Poland, Europe and elsewhere, who come over for vacations or maintain a pied-a-terre there.

Sopot has an impressive history, but remains small and committed to its original mission of leisure.

Being locked between the larger Gdynia and Gdańsk and being able to take advantage of their big-city infrastructure, it retains its small-town charm and remains a very popular seaside destination in Poland.

The first written record of Sopot date back to the 13th century, and has been popular as a summer residence of the local elite for centuries.

It has been a property of the Order of Cistercians of Oliwa since 1283 until 1772, when it was annexed by Prussia.

It was not until 19th century, however, that Sopot took its present form. In 1808, a French physician named Jean Georg Haffner came to Sopot with Napoleon's retreating army and decided to settle there, and marry a local woman.

He immediately recognized the resort potential in the local area, and started to organize appropriate facilities first in Gdańsk and later in the centre of modern-day Sopot, constructing the first pier and the Resort House, and creating the park that surrounds today's pierhead.

Haffner is recognized as the father of modern-day Sopot and celebrated throughout the city.

Sopot quickly became a fashionable spa on a European scale, accessible by the seaport of Gdańsk and the railway line to Warsaw and Koszalin, built in 1870.

It was granted city rights in 1901 by the German Emperor, and was at the forefront of adopting modern leisure facilities: spas and a horseracing track, tennis courts and a casino.

When the Grand Hotel was completed in 1927, along with the final pier extension, Sopot gained its complete form it was to retain until the new millennium, in the meantime becoming a part of Poland again.

In the 2000s, much effort was put into restoring Sopot's heritage, including the reconstruction of the Resort House, conservation of the pier and a major restoration effort at the Grand Hotel.

### Venue

The Ergo Arena (formerly Hala Gdańsk-Sopot) is a multi-purpose indoor arena, that was opened on 18th August 2010. The boundary between two cities, Sopot and Gdańsk, runs through the very middle of the hall. It costed 251 million złoty or €60 million to build.

The arena has a capacity of 11,409 people for sports events and up to 15,000, with standing places, for concerts.

The first major event in the hall took place on November 26, 2010, when Lady Gaga performed during The Monster Ball Tour, with Semi Precious Weapons as her opening act, to more than 12,000 people.

Sport events, including the 2013 Men's European Volleyball Championship, 2014 IAAF World Indoor Championships and the 2014 FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship, as well as a part of the 2016 European Men's Handball Championship were held at the arena.

Other notable artists that have performed here include Ozzy Osbourne, Rammstein, Sting, Enrique Iglesias, José Carreras, Michael Bublé, Iron Maiden, the Backstreet Boys, 30 Seconds to Mars, the Pet Shop Boys, Lenny Kravitz, André Rieu, Hans Zimmer, Andrea Bocelli and Il Divo.

## Participating countries

### Semi-final 1

China, Poland and Switzerland will vote in this semi-final. Qualifiers are marked in blue.

### Semi-final 2

Italy, the Faroe Islands and San Marino will vote in this semi-final. Qualifiers are marked in blue.