Bus route 'Highway to Hel' number 666 revived by FlixBus in Poland

A controversial route number 666 bus service to the seaside resort of Hel in Poland is to be revived by its operator this summer.

The so-called ‘Highway to Hel’ was run by local company PKS Gdynia, but was changed to 669 in 2023 following protests from some religious groups.

One organisation had accused the bus company of "spreading satanism", due to the play on words, with the popular seaside resort’s name sounding like the English word ‘hell’, and the number 666 widely associated with the biblical number of the beast.

The route number had attracted a lot of attention, with tourists taking photos of the buses, posting the pictures on social media and calling the service ‘the bus to hell’.

But coach company FlixBus has announced it will revive the service with new 13-hour route linking Kraków with Hel, running via the capital Warsaw and the most popular resorts on the Hel Peninsula.

The new route is to run daily during the summer season, departing from Kraków at 6am, arriving in Warsaw at around 10.30am and in 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."

‘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,’ said Michał Leman, managing director of FlixBus in Eastern Europe, at a press conference, as quoted by the Trójmiasto.pl website.

Hel is a key holiday destination, attracting tens of thousands of visitors daily in the summer months. It is located on the tip of the 22-mile (35km) Hel Peninsula on Poland’s Baltic coast, and has approximately 3,000 residents.

In June 2023, a PKS Gdynia spokesperson had told media that 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."

Poland is a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, and the church still remains influential.

In Old Norse, ‘hel’ means ‘hidden place’ or ‘underworld’, but the name is likely derived from Old Germanic languages, in which the word ‘hel’ meant a ‘dune’ or coastal hill.