Rumia (; Kashubian: Rëmiô; German until 1945: Rahmel) is a town in northern Poland, in the Wejherowo County in Pomeranian Voivodeship, with some 45,000 inhabitants. It is a part of the Kashubian Tricity (Rumia, Reda, Wejherowo) and a suburb part of the metropolitan area of the Tricity. It is situated in Kashubia in the historic region of Pomerania. It is connected by well-developed railway and highway connections to the Tricity, an urban agglomeration of almost 1 million inhabitants on the coast of Gdańsk Bay.
History
Slavic Lechitic settlements existed in present-day Rumia in the Early Middle Ages. The region formed part of Poland since the establishment of the state in the 10th century. The village of Rumia (then Rumina) was first mentioned in 1224 when it was awarded by Swietopelk II, later duke of Eastern Pomerania to the Cistercian convent in Oliwa (today part of Gdańsk). The name of Rumia was applied also to the neighbourhoods of Janowo and Biała Rzeka. In 1285 Mestwin II, duke of Pomerania stopped here to issue official documents. It was part of Poland until 1309, when it was annexed by the State of the Teutonic Order. Poland tried to regain the region through diplomacy as it did not recognize its annexation by the Teutonic Knights, and from 1325 the local Cistercians secretly resumed collections of the Peter's Pence tax on behalf of Poland for the Catholic Church. From 1320 to 1342 a Cistercian–Teutonic conflict took place, which ended with a privilege in which the Teutonic Knights confirmed the Cisterian possessions in the region, including Rumia.
In 1454 King Casimir IV Jagiellon re-incorporated the region to the Kingdom of Poland, and after the subsequent Thirteen Years' War the Teutonic Knights renounced their claims to the region in 1466. Afterwards Rumia was administratively located in the Puck County in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of the Kingdom of Poland until the Partitions of Poland. It remained a church village of the Cistercians from Oliwa, while the present-day district of Zagórze was a royal village of the Polish Crown, and also new craft settlements (also present-day districts) Szmelta and Stara Piła emerged.
In 1772 it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in the First Partition of Poland, and from 1773 it belonged to the newly established province of West Prussia until 1871 when it also became part of the unified German Empire. In 1905 Rumia (then officially Rahmel) had 760 inhabitants. 579 of them were Germans and 180 were Kashubian or Polish, while the present-day districts of Zagórze and Janowo had 754 and 161 inhabitants respectively, and remained predominantly Polish-Kashubian. Rumia was a German language island in a predominantly Slavic speaking region.
Germany's defeat in World War I gave Poles hope for the restoration of independent Poland. The Poles established a local Polish library, and on December 29, 1918 the first Polish pro-independence rally took place in Rumia. Germany responded with repressions and discrimination of Poles, and carried out arrests of Polish activists and searches of Polish homes, etc., however in 1920 Rumia was successfully restored to the newly re-established Polish state. Administratively it was part of the new Pomeranian Voivodeship.
In the late 1920s, the nearby village of Gdynia was developed into a city and one of the biggest seaports in the region – especially due to its strategic location on the Polish coastal region, to which Rumia also belonged. The rapid growth of the city of Gdynia prompted the price of land to increase. Labour migrants from other parts of Poland began to settle in the region including the village of Rumia and its vicinity. Zagórze, Kazimierz and Łężyce, which are today parts of Rumia, were originally separate villages, and were joined with Rumia in 1934 to form the Rumia Rural Commune. By 1934, Rumia had become a suburb of Gdynia (population of 12,000 in 1939), located approximately from the city centre and well-connected with it through a railway link. A small military airfield, home of two squadrons of the Coast Defence Escadrille (based in Puck) was opened to civilian planes on 1 May 1936. The airport serviced international route Gdynia-Copenhagen and domestic route Gdynia-Warszawa and by 1 January 1939, the number of passengers using it rose to over 3000 a year. The airfield was also the main base of the Gdynia-based glider club.