Poland's FlixBus has announced the revival of a controversial bus route numbered 666, which travels to the seaside resort of Hel. The so-called 'Highway to Hel' service was originally operated by local company PKS Gdynia but was changed to 669 in 2023 following protests from religious groups who accused the company of 'spreading satanism' due to the number's association with the biblical number of the beast and the resort's name sounding like the English word 'hell'.
New Route Details
The revived service will be a 13-hour route linking Krakow with Hel, passing through the capital Warsaw and popular resorts on the Hel Peninsula. It will run daily during the summer season, departing from Krakow at 6am, arriving in Warsaw at around 10:30am, and reaching Hel before 8pm.
FlixBus spokesperson Aleksander Kalenik told Polish news service TVN24: 'The number 666 was deliberately chosen as a marketing communication element, intended to increase the visibility of the connection on the popular holiday route to Hel.'
Michał Leman, managing director of FlixBus in Eastern Europe, said at a press conference: 'It's better when a route explains by itself where it's going. In this case, there's really nothing more to say. Everyone will understand.'
Background
The original route number had attracted significant attention, with tourists taking photos of the buses and sharing them on social media, calling it 'the bus to hell'. In June 2023, a PKS Gdynia spokesperson said the management board had 'buckled under the weight of letters and requests that were sent to us, maybe not in large numbers, but periodically for many years with a request to change the line number.'
Hel is a key holiday destination on Poland's Baltic coast, located on the tip of the 22-mile (35km) Hel Peninsula. It attracts tens of thousands of visitors daily in summer and has approximately 3,000 residents. Poland is predominantly Roman Catholic, and the church remains influential.
In Old Norse, 'hel' means 'hidden place' or 'underworld', but the name likely derives from Old Germanic languages, where 'hel' meant a 'dune' or coastal hill.
