ArtGuide 2015
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Кaliningrad — Klaipėda
Lithuania-Poland-Russia ENPI Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2007-2013 is co-financed with funds from the European Union
ArtGuide 2015 CLOSE STRANGER: GDAŃSK — KALININGRAD — KLAIPĖDA This publication has been produced in the framework of international project «Close Stranger: promoting mutual understanding between population of Gdańsk, Kaliningrad and Klaipėda through facilitation of exchange in the field of contemporary arts and culture»
ORGANIZERS Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts // Kaliningrad, Russia // www.ncca.ru/kaliningrad The Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Arts // Gdańsk, Poland // www.laznia.pl Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre // Klaipėda, Lithuania // www.kkkc.lt
CURATORS Russia Elena Tsvetaeva, editor Ilya Dementev Poland Agnieszka Wołodźko, сoordinator Aleksandra Kminikowska Lithuania Ignas Kazakevičius, coordinator Skaistė Kazarauskaitė-Marčienė
This publication has been produced with the financial support of the "Lithuania-Poland-Russia ENPI Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2007-2013". Russian part of the project was realized with the support of Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation, "New Art: Foundation // Moscow, Russia and KROO "Art Mission" // Kaliningrad, Russia PUBLISHING TEAM Concept: Ilya Dementev, Elena Tsvetaeva Image Processing: Evgeny Umansky Graphic design: Irina Shmidt, Alexander Suvorov-Franz Studio of graphical design DEZA, St. Petersburg, www.dezzza.ru Print: LTD "VIA Kaliningrad"
Special thanks for help and assistance with realization of English version of the ArtGuide to: Yulia Bardun, Olga Danilova, Irina Dewar, Stephen Dewar, Andrey Efits, Robin Gill, Aleksandra Musielak, Yulia Petrovich, Irina Pokrant, Marek Zygmunt, translators of the Lithuanian part Aleksandra Fomina and UAB "FOKAJA"
© Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2015 © Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2015 © Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, 2015 © Group of authors: texts, photos, translations, 2015 ISBN 978-5-94620-100-1
Elena Tsvetaeva Kaliningrad, Russia Artist, curator, director of the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts
Towards Each Other: Art-Expedition "Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda" Translated by Olga Danilova
In 2005, the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) and a regional NGO — Cultural Initiatives Support Agency "Transit" published the first artistic guidebook about Kaliningrad called the "Art-Guide. Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad Now". It was written by 86 authors from 12 countries around the world, who had visited the city at different times and participated in various art projects of the NCCA (http://art-guide.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/). In 2013, being guided by the book which had become a bibliographic rarity, and having extended its geographical coverage, contemporary artists and arts professionals from Lithuania, Poland and Russia went on an art expedition along the South-Eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. It lasted from June 29 through to July 11, and included visits to historical and cultural sites important for the regional identity. The trip was mainly aimed at searching for and discussing specific territorial markers, scanning cultural and social landscapes, collecting images, accumulating basic materials and generating ideas for the next stage of the project — the joint development of a unique artistic guidebook about the three cities "Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda" and five tourist routes. Participants of the project from three different countries visited 11 institutions and sites in Poland (in Gdańsk, Gdynia, Tczew, Malbork, Elbląg and Frombork), 16 institutions and sites in the Kaliningrad region (in Kaliningrad, Yantarny, Marino, Gvardeisk, Znamensk, Druzhba, Pravdinsk, Domnovo, Bagrationovsk
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and on the Curonian Spit) and 17 institutions and sites in Lithuania (in Klaipėda, Nida, Juodkrantė and Palanga). Those were museums, contemporary art centres, galleries, historical sites, barracks, Teutonic knights’ castles, cathedrals, Russian Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran churches, unique natural landscapes, submarines, historic burial sites, cemeteries, war memorials, ports and shipyards, natural anomalies and bird colonies, studios of artists, photographers and designers, homes and displays of private collectors, independent art spaces, former military bases, architectural ensembles, book and antique shops, slow-food counters, bars and cafes.
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As a result of the trip, artists, curators, writers, journalists, social researchers and art critics prepared a unique art-guide "Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda", which presents different views on what unites the three cities in one region. The art-guide is devised as a book for reading with stories of common and individual plots. Project partners from Kaliningrad, Gdańsk and Klaipėda sought to investigate and express themselves about natural and artificially created contradictions, stereotypes and prejudices existing among the neighbours, as well as that very commonality, which makes us really close and interesting to each other, bound by friendship and fondness. Being sort of a resource for all of us, our alliance enabled us to discuss the most difficult issues freely and become rather old friends than close strangers
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Ilya Dementev Kaliningrad, Russia PhD in History, Associated Professor at the History chair, Institute for Humanities, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University
Introduction Translated by Irina Dewar
The ancient lands on the south-east coast of the Baltic Sea are destined to bring out old memories. For some Germans they evoked Atlantis — a realization of Plato’s myth set in harsh northern climes. The best Greek myths are painted in amber colors. The historian Peter Wörster, in the preface to a collection of municipal plans from former East Prussia, compared her to Gaul, in the words of Caesar, est omnis divisa in partes tres. Today one part is inhabited by Lithuanians, another by Poles and the third by Russians. Koenigsberg, like the Eternal City, was erected on seven hills, but these hills are hardly visible today in the landscape of post-Soviet Kaliningrad. From Gdańsk to Klaipėda traces of the past give us food for thought about the perishable nature of earthly things. All of us, around strangers, are a bit withdrawn. We also recognize the eloquent nature of a ruin that is so characteristic of olden times. A ruin is a frequent cause of sadness, but a man in times past was not able for long to be introspective. The ancient mind, as was well known in the classics, was the mind of a traveller. Over the centuries the Baltic coast gave shelter to many wanderers, from Wolfstan and Ibrahim ibn Jakub to the curious tourists of our own days — thousands and thousands of travellers wearing out their shoe leather on these roads, taking shelter in the shade of trees on the banks of rivers, and being entranced by the landscape and the architectural masterpieces. It is more difficult for us today than for the discoverers of this region, because we are obliged to travel in four dimensions — in space, like our forebears, but also in time, because every corner of this land that is divided into three parts has some history to tell. This divided land is reunited through shared myths,
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legends, stories and narratives, and strangers travelling in various directions unexpectedly can find that they are considerably closer to each other than thought. A travelogue, a record of a journey, is the most suitable genre in order to overcome the contradiction between space and time, between near and far, between oneself and others. This book was planned as a guide-book for those who are interested in the past and present of this large region, with the ancient cities of Gdańsk and Klaipėda positioned on the edges and Kaliningrad, for a few centuries in the past the capital of this land, in the center. The contributors to this guide-book show the readers that although our region is divided into three parts, like Caesar’s Gaul, there will always be that which unites those of us who live here above and beyond borders. We share the same landscape, a common cultural heritage, and mutual respect. Neighbours do not go through life without problems from time to time, but the resolution of such problems cannot be done without the participation of neighbours. Looking at one’s neighbour — whether critically or ironically or benevolently is a form of sightseeing that also deserves attention. We invite you on a journey through one of the most remarkable regions of Europe. Bon Voyage!
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Akimov Danil
Akimov Danil Kaliningrad, Russia Sound artist, curator of the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts
"My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days", or a Brief Guide to "Powerless Places" of Kaliningrad, Gdańsk and Klaipėda Translated by Jeffrey Gorovits
For most travellers, a city opens up and is remembered by its key pieces of architecture, urban structure and general atmosphere of the streets, arising as a consequence of the life of residents and visitors. That’s all you can see and feel in the daytime. But there are plenty of researchers who familiarize themselves with the places they visit primarily in the evening and at night, when the city and its inhabitants officially take a rest. And closer to the night, especially on weekends, the small clubs, cafes and bars, which could be closed or just not visible during the day, come alive with flashing advertisements, noisy music, slamming doors and scurrying visitors. If you stumble upon an actively chatting group of people lining up at or encircling an entrance to somewhere, you can be certain that this is a lively place where you have the chance to experience the local life without a demonstrative camouflage and functional limitations. In these "rumochnayas" (pubs), bars or cafes, as a rule, there are no waiters, and you immediately have to join in the game, evaluate models of "artillery shells" on the bar shelves, fix the count on the scoreboard (menu, scrawled in chalk on a blackboard) and shout your bet to the bartender while leaning over the counter. It is better to visit such places in a "surf mode" and in a small company: take one wave, plunge into another, catch the third one and don't dive too deeply or for long. Then next morning you will definitely be occupied by the puzzle compiled of funny experiences, new acquaintances and fun accidents. The "Old Town" of Gdańsk has ideal conditions for such a marathon — a few "pijalnias" (in Polish "pijalnia" means "a pump room") are located in the city centre. In order to accelerate the process of assimilation, the menu is simplified to two price points — a portion of booze (a simple set of beer, wine or vodka) for
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1 euro and a portion of snack (soup, sandwich, herring and some "avantyurka" or "surprise") for 2 euros. The hall is equipped accordingly with "risers" or poseur tables, amusing items and photos of Soviet life, banners, caricatured portraits of party leaders, and wallpaper with prefabricated blocks of flats and, of course, the music of the bygone era!
Night bar in Klaipėda. Photo by D. Akimov, 2013
After pijalnias, you're ready to go down into the underground. As in any old town, it is spacious, and you can pick from a variety of clubs, pubs, restaurants — cult classic, new or updated ones — Museum of Polish rock, cabaret or Flisak '76. Opened in 1976 and still run by the same family, for the moment it is a very cute refuge for hipsters and other lovers of scaled modern culture — there is an inventive drink menu, radically fashionable music and intelligent design with clear elements of an authentic interior. But if you are still on your way to the "old town" coming from the market side, then immediately turn towards the river on Lavender Street (Lawendowa) — over here, thanks to a tiny cafe "Lamus", a new drinking and recreational cluster is emerging. "Lamus" itself, a quiet and holy abode for beer lovers with the atmosphere of a "home" cafe for meetings and deep discussions, is stuffed with an amazing assortment of exquisite varieties of intoxicating and foamy stuff, road bikes on the walls and an ideologically preoccupied public. You’ve come to Klaipėda and in the evening you want to feel the city, so keep walking along the left embankment of the Danga River. Having visited, as a warm-up, a couple of standard noisy and flickering cafe-clubs for idle inhabitants of the first line, you will feel like a sailor on shore leave — the rocking of the waves has not yet left you, but you are full of strength and determination for port adventures. Then there are a few options: venturing into the "Old Town", you are sure to dive into "Leica" to charge your flash memory, but the
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Акимов Данил
Pijalnia, Gdańsk. Photo by D. Akimov, 2013
respectful logo will only whet your thirst for art, and you will be pulled into the food court at the Culture Communication Centre at 4 Bažnyčių Street, and if on that day there is an exhibition, you will no longer be a "white crow" this evening 1. If you’re already a "weathered sailor" and you are bored with these vain places, spontaneous fun and casual acquaintances, then move along the river and after the bridge on Tiltu Street turn right to see the winking eye of a light box with the puzzling title of "Herkus Kantas" on one of the old small houses. It is ideal for a leisurely critique of pure reason or for the local stories of heroic epics — ascetic food, rare types of beer and intelligent music are there to help you. A suitable place for finalising the festive evening is the "Kashtonas" 2 — an assembly auditorium of an industrial plant that was converted to a club: a spacious hall with a high ceiling and a long bar, as well as imperceptible homemade / hand-fixed repair work, is the best place for down-to-earth concerts and unobtrusive parties without dominating the dancefloor. It is a rare example of a large space to achieve proportional personal pleasure. For the very final stop of the trip, the rooftop bar "Klaipėda" is an ideal point, from which the view of the city by night and the working port will serve as a visual lullaby.
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1 Balta Varna 18 Sukilėlių St. https://www.facebook. com/varnabalta
Kastonas 6-1 Danės St. https://www.facebook. com/Kastonas
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А-1 Having found yourself in Kaliningrad, forget about rules and indications — in this reserve of paradoxes and oddities life is strangely arranged and unpredictable. An expensive interior does not guarantee good quality food and service, and a large accumulation of youths seemingly laughing doesn't promise a friendly celebration. But do not sit there in a hotel, though, if this is the hotel "Moskva", then on the first floor you can charge yourself with stout exotic coffee in the "Kafema" shop or tolerably inexpensive wine and meal in the "Tabasco" or "Moskva — Berlin". However, these places are not equipped with comfortable bar counters where you become a direct participant in the bar’s action. The lowest and therefore most open to direct contact bar is nearby, at 13 Koloskov Street, where its residents having replaced the balcony with stairs and having moved the inside walls around, turned their "Flat" into a club. You really should come here in the first place, not only because the "Flat" closes at 23:00, but also because there is always a motley but friendly company, representing the electorate of Kaliningrad in miniature. On Fridays, starting from here, you can end up anywhere, but most often in the "Artichoke" which is a small cinema hall of "Zarya" that turns into a crazy dance hall at midnight. Selecting the opposite direction while walking towards the Victory Square, after the monument to Peter I, turn right and onto 5 Gendel Street, and go down to the pub "Dreadnought". In Soviet times, a "sobering station" was located here, while now it is a place for drinking up. Order for two of you the "Dreadnought Discharge" (set of five homemade infusions) or a cocktail "Train to Bratislava", and you will feel like a regular. But if basements and low ceilings put you off, go to the club "Reporter", which is settled in what was once a factory building on Lieutenant-General Ozerov Street. With high ceilings, austere design, a terrace overlooking the industrial area, musicians and local beer plus a varied audience, it will bring you subliminally to the feeling of home comfort in this strange, but already intimate town
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
Cafe Lamus in Gdańsk. Photos by D. Akimov, 2013
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Bakhtin Anatoly
Bakhtin Anatoly Kaliningrad, Russia Chief archivist of State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region
Lenin in Prussia Translated by Stephen Dewar
Photo 1 Bust of Lenin, Bakery № 1, 1958. State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region
"Lenin in Prussia — From 1956 to the Present Day" is a journey around the city and region of Kaliningrad depicted through photographs of various monuments to Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, the revolutionary and founder of the USSR, widely recognised as the leader of the world proletariat of that time. The first monument to commemorate a Soviet leader in Kaliningrad (formerly Koenigsberg, the capital of East Prussia) was, unsurprisingly, a statue of Stalin (sculptor E.V. Vuchetich, architects V.S. Atakov and D.K. Navalikhin) erected in Victory Square on April 29, 1953. Shortly after, a few small busts of Lenin were quickly put up in the city, including one at Bakery № 1 in 1958 (Photo 1). After the denunciation of Stalin in 1956 his statue was replaced by one of Lenin (sculptor V.B. Tapuridze) in 1958 (Photo 2) and was relocated to a small square in Teatralnaya Street on a new pedestal, from which it was removed in early 1962. In 1974, Stalin’s granite pedestal was used as the base for the statue of Mother-Russia (sculptor B.V. Yedunov). After 1958 several other monuments to Lenin were put up around the city (Photo 3). However, more recently it was decided to move the main monument to Lenin from Victory Square to Central Square, where a new pedestal was made for it (Photo 4). In 2005, when reconstructing Victory Square for the 750th anniversary of Koenigsberg-Kaliningrad, the monument to the leader was taken away overnight — temporarily for restoration as it was then reported but, after the work was finished, it never came back. This was partly because there was no place left for it between the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and the WWII Triumphal Column. Eventually, it was placed in a square in front of the "House of Art" concert hall originally built as "October" cinema (Photo 5), where it stands to the present day.
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Photo 2 Monument to Lenin. Sculptor V.B. Tapuridze, 1958. State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region
Povarovka (former Kirpehnen). Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2011
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Various small monuments to Lenin in Polessk (former Labiau), Neman (former Ragnit). Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2007, 2013
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1. Alekseevka (f. Auschlacken) 2. Bagrationovsk (f. Preussisch-Eylau) 3. Baltiysk (f. Pillau) 4. Bolshakovo (f. Groß Skaisgirren) 5. Gvardeisk (f. Tapiau) 6. Gusev (f. Gumbinnen) 7. Domnovo (f. Domnau) 8. Zheleznodorozhny (f. Gerdauen) 9. Zelenogradsk (f. Kranz) 10. Kaliningrad (f. Koenigsberg) 11. Krasnoznamensk (f. Lasdehnen) 12. Mamonovo (f. Heiligenbeil) 13. Neman (f. Ragnit) 14. Novostroevo (f. Trempen) 15. Ozyorsk (f. Darkehmen) 16. Otradnoe (f. Georgenswalde) 17. Pionersky (f. Neukuhren) 18. Povarovka (f. Kirpehnen) 19. Polessk (f. Labiau) 20. Poltawskoje (f. Groß Rudschen) 21. Pravdinsk (f. Friedland) 22. Svetlij (f. Zimmerbude) 23. Sevskoe (f. Böttchersdorf) 24. Slavsk (f. Heinrichswalde) 25. Sovetsk (f. Tilsit) 26. Ushakowo (f. Brandenburg) 27. Chernyakhovsk (f. Insterburg)
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Photo 4 A new pedestal for monument to Lenin. Central Square, Kaliningrad. Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2006
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Photo 5 House of Art, Kaliningrad (former Koenigsberg). Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2013
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Slavsk (former Heinrichswalde). Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2013
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Ozyorsk (former Darkehmen). Photo by A. Bakhtin, 2007
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Towns across the Kaliningrad region also acquired their own monuments, which were more modest, with the exception of Svetly (the former Prussian village of Payziev), where they erected the biggest statue of Lenin in the region. Not to be outdone by Svetly, Chernyakhovsk (the former town of Insterburg) previously having nothing but a bust of Lenin, ordered an even bigger statue in 1985, but it was only completed and erected after the collapse of the Soviet system. Villages that were administrative centres of collective farms or rural authorities acquired humble gypsum busts of Lenin, which were mass produced and popularly known as "Easter cakes"
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Chechot Ivan
Chechot Ivan St. Petersburg, Russia Critic, curator, PhD in Art History, Associate Professor at the Department of Philology of the St. Petersburg State University
To Genius Loci Кaliningrad and Кoenigsberg Translated by Anna Matveeva
When the jubilee celebration is over and the wind tosses up trash, ordinary life will go on, and the grim reality of a provincial life will be back. This is the provincial town called Kaliningrad: a mass of problems, bad roads, unemployment, terrific pollution, the desperate struggle of the old order against the new. Talks about the prospect of the Russian enclave's capital, separated from the mainland, will renew: nervous or desperate talk about the future and when the future is going to begin. Questions will arise again: Along which path should culture go? What amount of the global and the local should it contain? What amount of the Russian and the European? This is what everybody is thinking if not arguing about — not only the inhabitants but all who love this town and even those who are just curious about it, guests visiting the town. In summer they will come again for a seaside vacation: solitary tourists or groups, mostly German. My first visit in Kaliningrad, which took place in the late 1970s, was exactly that of a tourist. Since that time, I have frequently visited Kaliningrad, where I have good friends and am inevitably overwhelmed by thoughts about my homeland, about Europe, and about Germany (to which I am connected both professionally and spiritually). As an art historian, a specialist in German culture, a keen lover of classic music and literature, and a reader of philosophy books, I could not but crave visits to Kaliningrad. I believe that a Russian intellectual in general, especially a Western-oriented one (as I was at that time), cannot help but be interested in the town via which Peter the Great and Karamzin discovered Europe, the town at whose borders Gumilev and other notorious persons fought. Such a person cannot feel bored in Kaliningrad. Though, not just any person, because almost nothing is left of the former town. It lacks notable works of art and architecture, the immediate appeal of German Middle Ages and the coziness of other Baltic towns, like Riga or Tallinn. And the German remnants seem improper: they are special, deformed, barbarously reconstructed without any Romanticism. One may say that there is nothing for a tourist to do. But for a pathfinder, for an explorer…
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С-3 Photo project "Solingen" by Yury Vassiliev, 2010
Who can be interested in Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg in its present time and state? Not a tourist. By definition, tourists hurry in pursuit of all that is bright, big, pretty and special. In contrast, Kaliningrad, just to be seen, requires much time and the skill of gazing thoroughly, a micro-vision, an interest in details. Without that micro-vision, without a sense of the whole which follows from a consideration of the main theme or question of one's visit, without the larger context of history and present times, nothing will be clear or interesting in Kaliningrad. This requires vast and diverse knowledge, imagination, a capacity of feeling the presence of the absent and love or desire for thinking. For those who possess all this, Kaliningrad is a very interesting town that launches one's memory and intuition towards both the future and the past. The main question that bothers an observer in Kaliningrad is whether Koenigsberg remains. What embodies it and why? What saved it from total disappearance? These questions give rise to conjecture about what Koenigsberg has to say to Kaliningrad and the world in general, what direction it points at. There is also the question about how Kaliningrad and Koenigsberg are united at the same place and in present time, and a question of the town's future which rises from its history as a whole. Not only the external observer but also the native feels it difficult to combine the town, Kaliningrad / Koenigsberg, into a single whole. Nowadays, it splits into fragments or parts lacking any obvious visible connection. Here a lonely old tooth-house, there a small block seemingly untouched by time, with pieces from a past Soviet-era life protruding all around, living houses already a little dusted with time; scarce remains of the Stalin era town, once bright with fountains, columns, statues, neighboring upon newer investment in real estate, hastily constructed centers of contemporary civilization — and dumps, garbage-heaps, garages, barns, flea-pits, tumbledown and desolate military settlements all around, to the horizon. The town center is empty. A boring long bridge crosses the place where the old town was once located and leads to the place where the Royal Castle once stood (it was demolished in the late 1970s). On this ancient hill, another ghost castle Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
has been erected: the huge cubic Dom Sovetov — an expressive monument to prolonged construction, neither a ruin nor a Futurist project but an object of meditation, mysterious in its opacity. First, a Kaliningrad visitor wonders and steps aside in terror. There is no town, old or new, there is only a draft, the rage of the steely winds of history, the mocking faces of destruction and the useless, doomed, poor, miserable, self-assertion of another life, the impudent glitter and ringing of cell phones, and the already familiar gush of waterfalls of beer flowing from advertising billboards. But here, evening falls upon the town. You are in long alleyways, you hear the special rustle of tires — as if in a forgotten movie — along the glossy cubic pavement, you see wandering car headlights on an ornamental brick wall, you notice a tracery sash in a yellow window and inhale the wet air under the trees. The huge silhouette of a tall roof suddenly looms in the sunset sky; you are invited to visit a local home and you walk up a squeaky wooden staircase with copper-padded stairs, here is a brass door-handle and a doorbell, both old. German objects still remain in many apartments: a piano, a cupboard in the bathroom, a coffee grinder — they feel at home here. A conversation starts: When did you come here? And you? Were you born in Kaliningrad or not? Have the previous residents come here to visit you or not? Where are they now? Et cetera. But it is not necessary to witness this old-time sentimental picture in order to feel that you are not exactly in Russia. You can relax in a new billiard club or reserve a table under colored lights in a Biergarten, you may converse with young people who have never been to Moscow and who are not at all dying to visit Petersburg, but who go to Poland and Germany every year. You understand that you, a mainland Russian, live somewhere deep in the rear; it is here that something is happening, waiting, starting. However, in a territorial sense it is going in a quite different direction from the mainland. Curious, you enter the "German" movie theatre from the 1920s, thoroughly renovated and carefully preserving a few pre-war details but now equipped with the latest technology. You then go to a cafe and club inventively decorated by their designers in the spirit of the postmodern stylization of bourgeois luxury, with tense Art Deco lines that make you feel your own stylistic inferiority. You talk to the energetic, sometimes rather ecstatic people. You see that they are full of hope, they are robust, pragmatic, they speak Russian, they are absolutely Russian, but… And here your inner voice whispers that something separates you from them, something totally specific and almost ineffable: a direct living connection to the genius loci, to Koenigsberg-Kaliningrad, which you may contemplate only from aside, from far away. Western writers like to depict Soviet Kaliningrad only as a prison, a concentration camp. However, already in the 1960s this town had another reputation in the Soviet Union. My aunt, a doctor, used to travel abroad from Kaliningrad on gigantic ocean liners, like "Alexander Pushkin" or "Mikhail Lermontov" (the latter had a tragic bitter end). The town was a restricted-access port. It had a special regime, financial bonds, an exclusive Beryozka shop with imported goods, the pretty wives of sailors and navy officers, delicious smoked fish, clean and very green streets, the nearby seaside, cozy German houses, children in summer camps and military units with apple trees painted white. All this was 24
С-3 crowned by the Baltic Fleet, Sailors' Day and Navy Day. The town was closed to both foreigners and natives; it lived its own inner life that was hardly known in other parts of the USSR. It seemed to be exactly like life everywhere, and yet it was slightly different. For example, they say that after the war there was no criminal prosecution in Kaliningrad; one could come here and get lost. Patriotic propaganda was extreme, and there was nothing German. History was reduced to Russian military victories in the 13th, 18th, and 20th centuries; the only exception was that the victors over Napoleon were respected — Russian commanders and, unwillingly, their Prussian allies. The Soviet experience was not lost on the town. The very location at which the town lies had been transformed: hills effaced, dozens of streets disappeared forever. In its center, 99 % of the ruined and damaged yet still standing old buildings were demolished. Koenigsberg lost almost all its memorials and monuments, but this has let in the air and light of riverside meadows, transforming it into a complete and utter park, both spacious and sunny. At that time, when everything was being demolished this measure was understandable, ideologically grounded, and unambiguous. Meanwhile, things which were not symbols lived on; they remained and continued their silent work. They were not tended to, they were not repressed, they were simply put to use. Thus, the run-down and rank but intact, true bourgeois German Koenigsberg survived up into the 1990s, with all its villas, quiet streets and gardens, and beautiful green suburbs. It was not officially valued, but it was loved. People lived in it and by it, even suffering from humidity and lack of free space. As a result of the mostly post-war destruction, the surviving objects have acquired a strange character. Fortifications and enormous mid-19th century casernes have become the town's main sights and symbols. The island with the ruined Cathedral has gained special meaning and has become a romantic landscape. Spacious red brick hospitals, orphanages, schools, and some other official buildings are preserved. Key buildings of the Third Reich still stand, shocking in their austere monumentalism, as do fortress-like bunkers; the Soviet Army used the Reich's new barracks and officers' houses without much ideological hesitation. As for church buildings, it is not the old structures of the 17th and 18th century that have survived but more recent ones, right up to the Kreuzkirche, which was built in 1933 and whose forms provide expressive evidence about the epoch and taste of the so-called "German Christians" under Hitler. Many splendid industrial buildings have survived too, such as the castle-like brewery and examples of 1920s Constructivism. Recent years have given rise to a wave of destruction of a totally different nature. It is impossible to resist. This destruction is the other side of reconstruction, repair and overbuilding; all the repainting and new roofing are essential improvements. The cityscape is changing rapidly, villas and mansions are being built on all vacant lots, and the town acquires a new lively image. Small details disappear, iron tracings are gone, and façades change. Windows suffer the most, bidding farewell to old frames and small glass tiles. Houses gape with empty eye-sockets and strange bare-looking white plastic window frames.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
Once Koenigsberg gave way to Kaliningrad; now Kaliningrad is retreating, hiding, under the pressure of the 21st century city, the city of supermarkets, villas, garages and bowling clubs. The green zone downtown will soon be built up; there are already seminars and competitions aimed at that. Some propose to build a castle and an old town there, to remake everything anew and even better; others, calling the former reactionaries stuck in the mud, suggest a showroom for contemporary urban architecture in place of the "cemetery" Kaliningrad: they want a real noisy city. But what about genius loci? Is it alive? Is it visible? How can one hear or see it? Is it possible to not mistake the sentimental fantasies of a professed Germanophile for the real? What or who is the genius loci? Let us delve into the scholarly literature. "Genius is what the ancestors called the natural god of every place or object, or person," the Latin writer Servius wrote. The genii of a home-the Lares-and the genius loci were given offerings of wine and milk, fruits and flowers. For the Roman genius, the Greeks had daimon (demon). The very word genius refers to "genus", the origin or kin, i.e. the forebears. The Romans regarded genius primarily as the god of the inner forces and capacities of a free male citizen. Neither women nor dependent people had a genius. In a genius, one can see
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Photo project "Solingen" by Yury Vassiliev, 2010
С-3 the impersonation of an individual's inner qualities, of their nature. Thus, after death, your genius wanders somewhere around the places where you lived, and can unite with other gods. Soon, the idea of genius was extended to inanimate objects and places. According to Servius, there is no place without a genius of its own. The most famous ancient genius loci is certainly the genius of Rome. On Capitol Hill, there was a shield dedicated to the genius and the inscription: "To either man or woman." These words were conditioned by the idea that neither the name nor the sex of the genius could be known. The unknown name of the genius was never pronounced, so that enemies could not entice it. One could sense the mood of the genius, one could feel its presence, and one could be in the power of the genius, but naming that mood or giving it a definition was considered impossible or even dangerous. In ancient images, the genius was a snake that suddenly appeared in a certain place, the symbol of the fertility of the place and a sign that bore male, phallic meaning. But more often the genius was portrayed as a young boy with a horn of plenty (a snake-like source of benefits) and a cup in his hands. There are no snakes in Kaliningrad, but we do have large black snail-slugs without shells. They freak out newcomers to Prussia, who encounter them for the first time. Some locals give special meaning not to the slugs but to the souls of Kaliningrad, the dogs and cats who are thought to have survived the destruction of the old town. Demon is a fatal force that both shows itself and disappears suddenly. Hermann Userner, the eminent German scholar of ancient religions, called demons "the god of the given moment". Demon has no face, shape or name but it can send a person trouble or a prophetic dream, an idea or inspiration. It can also show someone the way, but most often it is a perilous way. Demon is connected with notions of fate and history. Fate and history owe their scenarios to Demon, and it defines their type and character. Translating demon into the language of traditional Russian culture, we get bes — the evil spirit, enemy of God and angels, with his special abodes. Bes is scary, and the very word boiazn (dread) is related to the word bes. Evil, unknown forces can settle in human and other beings, becoming the reason for diabolism and for mental disease. Bes, demon, genius and spirit are always masked, they never appear in their true guise, and they do not have any true guise anyway. This detailed story is of importance to the following study for several reasons. First, because genius loci never appears in its true form; it is always masked. Subsequently, a town or place is not exactly what it looks like or has looked like. The genius-demon can appear in a dark or in a light, comforting disguise. Both are not exactly the genius itself. Second, a genius loci may well be an evil demon, a curse burdening a place. Third, genius loci is not the genius of a person or a group of people. But is it not the people who make a town, its classes and groups of inhabitants? This is certainly the case. One city differs from another by its people and their organization, the structure of the population, the social structure, the number and special character of its eminent citizens, their political and spiritual ideals, and the language of their culture. Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
Taking these enlightened modern notions totally seriously, we have nothing to look for in the place where Koenigsberg once stood if we are interested in Koenigsberg. The citizens, language and culture have disappeared. Some stones remain, but they can tell about the people only in a vague and mute way. Preserved in fragments stones can easily mislead. Furthermore, these stones have lived in peace with another people for a long time and seem to have forgotten their previous masters. Yes, the town plan remains in the landscape, canals and streams, the river flows. The sea and major roads have not vanished. It is often said that they tell their stories and the stories of people, but this is nothing but a metaphor. In reality, the landscape is a dumb picture for those who have not read historical books and who are ignorant of names; for them, all the stories (if any) that the landscape can tell are either inarticulate or primitive and recent. It is better to sit in a library, among books and glossaries, than to walk around Kaliningrad, and that is what real historians do. If they get out into the landscape, they cannot but see first and foremost contemporary history and social processes, and only after those do they see signs and traces of the past. Do they have anything to recall? Only what they have read. But let us try to move from reading and pseudo-recalling to seeing: let us try to see what opens itself in this place, to feel it, under the pressure of contemporary external forces, to see through strata, while recognizing the value of all the layers. The natives of Kaliningrad and its newcomers usually feel that they are in a place where there was and remains the presence of a certain whole with which they come into contact. It is not so important what is purportedly objective and subjective here; the main thing is that we have directed our gaze towards this place, that we have recognized it and that we cling to it, forming a living unity with it. Everything that we further learn about this place will be superimposed upon the essential — on the experience of the place, on the experience of our life, imagination, and reflection in this place and about this place (when we are away from it). To meditate, to mentally be in Rome, Moscow or Kaliningrad does not require our presence. Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad is a place, the topos of ideas, a certain theme with its own inner structure. Even speaking about the genius loci of Kaliningrad means to be immediately drawn into the orbit of special questions, such as: Is genius loci permanent? If it is impersonal but spiritual, then how does it manage to exist, this genius? It really is this way — invariable and impersonal! This is the very fact that enables us to establish a personal connection with it; otherwise, we would have to know the people, which is impossible as they are all dead now. Their spirit, though reflected in their manuscripts and ideas, is so various, individual and flexible that it enables the most varied selection and interpretation. The town as a polis, people, social body: they are a totality of local genii, which have no common denominator. The denominator may be invented, explicated by highlighting some things and obscuring others. This is why a town, as a socio-historical phenomenon and, moreover, as a social phenomenon that has disappeared, like the Koenigsberg of the 18th to 20th centuries, does not 28
С-3 have a genius. It can only have various constructions, slogans for the future reconstruction of the town in a certain way. The genius loci, as well as the location itself, was called Twertikos in Old Prussian (according to Lasitsky), existed before the town and will remain after it. This place, marked by nature and the pre-history of pre-history, is not at all empty, and that is why not everything is possible in it. Now, Koenigsberg is the pre-history of Kaliningrad; that is why not everything is possible there, and some things are probably inevitable. This is not entirely mysticism. We are not only speaking about stars and one's place in the world but mostly about the history of a place that can never be totally sterilized (with its past entirely purged) possesses a certain continuity. One can expel a people but not a place. It is easy to ruin houses, to cut down orchards, to level cemeteries, but one cannot alter a place among other places in the world, just as one cannot define a place's essence and content once and for all. A place cannot be extirpated. The genius loci says: "Here, at this spot, the adventure is not finished, the show goes on, not everything is dead." In an old park in Kalthof (Gagarin Street) stands a boulder with an inscription on it: Non omnes moriar (Not everything dies). This is absolutely correct. From the point of view proposed here at least as an opportunity of reflection, the town is not just people but geography, landscape, houses, maps, pavements — more objects than texts. They may well be silent but they look expressive. People (ideas, opinions, interests) are variable and forgetful, humans are variant and yet alike everywhere. Without doubt, it is people who build towns, but not they alone; forces that work on towns are also the greater forces of nature, politics and history, whose development is not entirely, or is entirely not, in people's control. Following from all this, the genius of the place at which Kaliningrad is located cannot be represented by either the image of the German (conqueror, merchant or scholar), the "Prussian" returning from a long journey, or by the contemporary Russian (heroic or beaten). Is Kaliningrad the town of Kant? Both yes and no, to tell the truth. Is it the town of the crazy E.T.A. Hoffmann? — Well, partly so. Is it the town of the arrogant Prussian colonel NN? To a great extent yes, but also just partly so. Whatever kind of people you take, they are just people, just individual cases, but not the place or the town with its special capacity to unite difference. Sometimes I think that the genius of this place is calm, even drowsy. Here, everything seems to say: leave me alone, let me be as I am. That's the genius of surprising weekdays, light air, and quiet rain. At other times, this genius appears nervous, like the excited, unpredictable, disheveled and unclean character of the famous dramatic Romantic writer Zacharias Werner. The stones say that the local genius is stern, authoritative and dry, but my own personal contact with this place says, rather, that its genius is gentle, airy, and young. This place never seems to be old or ancient. It does not wear a beard. You never sense it as something completed, geologically firm; it is not a crystal. It provides a certain detachment from reality, an opening onto the hidden.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
Let us look at the town from afar, from above. Any town has its major and minor places in the world. The minor place is a medium one, as well as a unity of parts. The major geographical place for Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg is East Europe, its Baltic shore, so-called East Prussia. Being there, one has to think about their fate. The area of the Samland Peninsula and Natangen Land, at whose border the town was founded in 1255, is a bit smaller. If you take a flight from the Urals to the Pyrenees or from the Norwegian fjords to the Balkans, the point marking Kaliningrad is geometrically at the very center of today's map of Europe. However, this place is essentially extra-territorial. In a cultural and historical sense, it used to be the outskirts of Europe, it was not the North of Europe but neither was it the European East, which was located further into Russia and more to the South, in Poland. Previously, Koenigsberg was a faraway province of Germany, the German Siberia. For today's Russia it is a territory removed to the West, either an outpost or a drifting ice-floe detached from the mainland, or even a lifeboat into which survivors struggle. Kaliningrad's medium scale equals the distance between the ancient Prussian lands called Samland and Natangia, the mouth of the Pregel River and its long delta. The middle of Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg is Kneiphof Island and the Royal Hill. But today, as well as at the start of the 20th century, the town has two centers: one purely symbolic and empty, the other alive; they are Ploshchad Pobedy (Victory Square) and the Old Hufen (Prospect Mira). Now, as in the past, the town consists of many different places and has many parts, isolated and hardly coordinated with each other. Before the War, like today, there were two towns. One town is depicted in the famous photographs of the historical center, now sold at any newsstand. This was a very narrow, motley, ugly town on the banks of the narrow Pregel; the Cathedral is hardly visible behind the abundance of small shabby huts with walls almost descending to the water; loaded barges traverse the river, everything is stuffed with ships, bridges stretch out their iron wings. This is not Venice or Amsterdam or Saint Petersburg, but some mob in sleepy oily water. The Castle rose above this town. Its main tower was built in the 19th century: a dry silhouette, austere vertical lines, no expression at all — a rational symbol of the Middle Ages. The Castle itself is quite ugly with its pot-bellied towers, attachments, and rough buttresses. But there was also another town. It started behind the town gate, and in the 20th century it quickly turned into a garden town, decorated with austere modern buildings. This town was designed for living, for walking, and for bicycles. It was filled with sounds of nature that accentuated the latest sports and cultural issues. The two towns were opposed like taste and tastelessness, like the old and the new, like the cultivated individual and the street crowd (markets, squares, stores). The two parts plus zero equals an empty middle. The value, the beauty of a void in the center is hardly recognized in today's town and will soon be destroyed as something symbolically harmful. The town must not be absent but it has 30
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Photo project "Solingen" by Yury Vassiliev, 2010
no right to disturb, either. This disturbance, or rather a conjunction of coziness and anxiety, the gap and the transition, is peculiar to all large territories: along the circle of the old military ring road stand numerous former villages and old districts, which officially became part of the town in the 19th and 20th centuries, but which still retain their special atmosphere. Living on Pavlik Morozov Street (behind the railway station, in Ponart) greatly differs from living on Orudiynaya or Rothenstein. All towns are defined not by their center alone but by their suburbs and outskirts as well. Vorstadt is a notion essential for Koenigsberg, as this was the place where the unity and unwilling proximity of the urban and the rural were revealed. Certainly, the main distinguishing feature of Kaliningrad's landscape is the river entering the town via two sleeves coming from a vast jungle of reeds and marsh verdure and leaving the town northwards, towards the low banks of the gulf and the Sea Channel. For a long time, the town had no walls or fortifications at all, but it had many canals. What Koenigsberg does not have is the sea: you cannot see it. The Baltic is even less present than in Petersburg, as the Pregel does not at all resemble a seaward river and maintains its rural character up to the seashore. Old Koenigsberg had almost no marine imagery in its architecture or decoration.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
After the erection of the Elevated Bridge in 1972, the image of the town center changed dramatically; the balcony of the bridge appeared, offering a view of the port and its cranes behind the empty middle of the absent town. From this balcony, it is not the town that is seen but rather a park with intersecting paths (Where did it come from, this Prussian diamond pattern?) and the blue or yellowish-brown river. This may also be seen from the windows of the surrounding houses and from the windows of Hotel Kaliningrad. From the middle of the bridge, great prospects open up almost to the horizon. When the weather is good, these views provide you with a nice light mood, arousing a desire to fly away from the town and into the fields or seaside. However, the town does not provide a real languor of faraway lands, a strictly down-stream orientation to the West, as in Saint Petersburg. I believe that the town rests in itself, transforming smoothly into nature. It is mostly oriented upwards, into the sky, and downwards, into the ground. In the center of Koenigsberg, the river makes a loop that creates a circle. Two rivers enter the town and only one river flows out, but it does not grow wider and even narrows behind the railway bridge (the former Hollenderbaum Station), makes a turn and seems to disappear. From this place, the town returns to itself. The river flows sleepily, it swells under the influence of western winds and goes backwards. The rectangular island rests passively in the water, without any hardness of stone. Ground, people and houses are piled upon it. The old university, standing on old piles, almost flowed with the current. Koenigsberg is a peaceful haven, "the pumpkin arbor" of the 17th century poets, the cozy Simon Dach and Robert Robertin. Kaliningrad has neither a basic cityscape nor a main outlook. Its plan is more important than its profile. It was not always like that, but this tendency also existed before the war. Koenigsberg has been spread across the surface. Shadowed by the foliage, it hardly ever rose above the surface. This will certainly disappear soon. The people of today love penthouses and the manicured evergreens in tubs. The bushes, thickets and wastelands will disappear. Before the war, there was the prison cell of the downtown and the garden city uptown. Nowadays, many old trees remain; the numerous wind-fallen trees in gardens and parks are striking. Tangled planning, twisting streets and small rivers are peculiar to Kaliningrad. It is a billowy hunters' land, a breeding ground for wild boar. The complicated town plan is suddenly intersected by avenues. From the squares small lanes go in every direction. The squares have awkward polyhedral shapes. Even those who know the town well sometimes get lost, trying to find the shortest way. The intersecting streets push and force you to take wrong turns. In Kaliningrad, the role of a separate house or mansion is essential. All of the time a prismatic volume, an isolated building with a tall roof, appears in front of you. Furthermore, a linear building-up strategy prevails in some districts; Long three and four-storied façades frame the famous "island inner courts". They once had blooming gardens.
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С-3 The special role played by earth is characteristic of this town. Buildings grow from the earth, they are not separated from it, they do not float above. The earth is the beginning. The sky is the crowning element. Often a dark violet sunset suddenly glows behind the growing houses. You cannot see the horizon; the lines lie in a heavy horizontal. The trees crackle and make a lot of noise. This is how Koenigsberg lets us know of itself. The underground. You can feel it everywhere. I do not mean the underground town, which of course does not exist, but the tunnels (a train running under the main square, almost a subway), numerous mysterious waterways, a very small aqueduct, bunkers, sewers, houses sunk into the ground, garbage-filled basements, tram rails, and cobblestones showing from under the asphalt. Old houses sit beneath new ones. Everywhere is archaeology, a science that was advanced in Koenigsberg and that still develops: 1945, the Germans, the Prussians, the mainland. Sky, rain, wind, fog. Kaliningrad would not be Kaliningrad without them. The sky and weather are in permanent motion. Kant traced the weather throughout his life. It is a pity that nothing but garbage remains around the stone in the place where Bessel built his Sternwarte (Observatory). Kaliningrad is a town of picturesque sunsets, and it is also the town of a sunset, a decline, which cannot be forgotten. Two countries have already declined: Prussia (along with the German Reich) and the Soviet Union. But the tender, crystal-clear sunrises are piercing here too. It is a town with a play of light on shadowy streets, dramatic evening and night performances. Light is variant and constantly changing here. It is the town of an enormous yellow moon and bright autumn stars. A painter should render Kaliningrad in a high-contrast manner, with dark shadows and stressed accents, with glowing reds, deep-blue water and bright or brown but not pale buildings. Two centers, two cathedrals, two names, two "K"s (Kant and Kalinin, Kant and Koch, Kleist the writer and Kleist the general), two railway stations, two lakes, two towers (Dohna and Wrangel), two rivers, two meanings. The two meanings are essential: a bad meaning and a good meaning, an aggressive and a liberal one, past and future (two faces looking East and West). A double-edged axe. Deuce is the prototype of Koenigsberg. It is not a town for compromise, for the removal of contradiction via synthesis; it is not a place for peaceful negotiation. Here, Kant thought of antinomies, here Herder (or Hamann) opposed him, here the democrat Jacobi argued against the liberal monarchist Simson, here the evangelical authority of Andreas Osiander subverted the evangelical authority of Melanchthon, and so on. Ceaseless pairs, ceaseless arguments. Ambivalence was already distinctive in the mythology of the Balts and the Prussians: coupled horse heads, doubled wheat ears, etc. This was probably due to the importance of the twin myth for the nations forming this group. Couples were also peculiar to the Prussian pantheon: an old deity and a young deity (Potrimps, the god of river, and Autrimps, the god of sea; the gods Pekols and Pokols, and others. In Koenigsberg, everything has two sides, like Queen Louise: on the one hand, an idealized sentimental icon (a puppet theatre in a former church named after her) and, on the other hand, the highly intelligent Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Photo project "Solingen" by Yury Vassiliev, 2010
historical person; like the defeat and victory of Tannenberg, and the balance of the Soviet and the Prussian, ranging from an obvious mutual negation to a tacit interchange of stern styles. Naturally, Koenigsberg had some original Christian patrons. The Cathedral on Kneiphof was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. Adalbert, the baptizer of the Prussians. In the Catholic epoch, the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist were the heavenly patrons of the town (both were closely connected to the symbolic system of the German Order). Other patrons were Saints Barbara, Adalbert, Elisabeth, Nicolaus and, of course, the Holy Spirit. This set of saints is far from unique. After the Reformation, the saints were forgotten, and in the 19th and 20th centuries only historians could tell to whom the churches were originally dedicated. Angels have disappeared from the town, but the local demons and Prussian gods have disappeared as well. Historical personalities have become the town's patrons. Koenigsberg is a town of great people. They crowded the genius loci, fought battles against, but they also listened to it. The people. The so-called simple people have always been present. They change a little bit from one epoch to another, and they also change depending on their nationality, but generally, their cares and desires remain the same. Yes, today's people cannot organize themselves, while the previous ones possessed a significant corporative, solidarizing power. Who are the main people in this town? Certainly not artists or artisans, nor even craftsmen or workers. Art, industry, and production in general have always lagged at this place; they were second-rate, provincial. That is why the local architecture of the olden times was simplified, and good-looking implements were largely imported. Just compare this with Danzig, the town of skilled craftsmen, shipyards and jewellers. Merchants? Yes, doubtlessly the merchants, but could they ever compete with the merchants of Lubeck, Hamburg or even Riga? No, they could not. The genius loci was not addressed to the merchants.
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С-3 The military? Here we approach the core of the problem. The town was founded by knights, ideological and ascetic people. But by the 16th century, nothing was left of their enthusiasm. Later, Koenigsberg was the permanent point of application of the military genius of Germany — i.e. Prussia, as there never existed a Saxon, Bavarian or Schwabian military genius. However, that was an unlucky genius. Its earthly embodiment was Fritz, with his head drooping down to his knees; even he was just a step away from death, and that was the greatest moment in his life. Koenigsberg and Kaliningrad (when it was Kaliningrad) is a military town, an outpost, as they say, facing both East and West. Von Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Wrangel and Hindenburg, Beck and von Richthofen, Admiral Roeder and Cherniakhovsky, the Soviet military from Stalin to Andropov — all these are K/K. And nevertheless, Koenigsberg is not merely a military town. It is something different. Scholars, people of reason, political thinkers (not politicians), analysts, and teachers. They are the main ones, although at the first sight they seem to be pressed back by journalists, writers and activists. The latter brilliantly embody the motif of the opposition (in relation to the Order, the crown, Berlin or, now, Moscow) which has been present in Koenigsberg since time immemorial. However, despite the brightness of these revelations of free thinking and generally liberal inspiration (Braun, Jacobi, Lohmeier, Herder), I doubt that it is they who defined the profile, the spiritual pattern of Koenigsberg. The main people here are the scholars, who asked questions and who were not afraid of the answers they found. The main thing is the idea of fundamental questioning: Kant, Herbart, Fichte, mathematicians, historians, philologists, the biologist Lorenz, the sociologist and philosopher Arendt, but also those writer-artists who, like Kleist, due to some mysterious reason, contrasting the vegetative life of the bureaucracy and in tune with the genius loci, had their striking revelations here (Pentesilea) which cast a special light on human fate in this world. I will return to the artists. They, like no other people, had to hear the voice of the genius loci. Let us begin by listing the main emblematic names. Not music, but the word and theatre. Not painting but graphic art. Not sculpture, but chiaroscuro and cast light. They can be secret and quiet, like Dach, Wichert or Fanny Lewald. They can be mighty and passionate: the painter Willmann (born in Pillau, but he painted in 17th century Silesia), the brilliant actor Wegener, the expressive Korinth, the graphic artist and a sublime poet Miegel, the obsessed writer Borchardt, and Kathe Kollwitz. If they are thinkers, like Herder or Hamann, they are excessive in both ideas and style, almost a natural phenomena. This nature was lacking in Thomas Mann, and maybe that is why he came here. However, I do not think that the local genius addresses artists. An artist is hardly able to concentrate on the genius. Artists appear here, they are born here or pass though a strict ordeal, and then go out into the big world. Artists come here as guests, like the Expressionists, Mann or Borchardt (who came from Italy for just three days) or the art historian Worringer, in order to experience something and to take with them the story of this experience.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Chechot Ivan
The genius of this place says something personal to everyone, that's its peculiarity, but it seems to be saying something very serious, something that can be revealed on the brink, at the moment of disappearance. About something lost… The decay of the Order — I am always sorry for the Order. 1806: all my compassion is on the side of the meek king. 1871: the spiritual and political end of a Prussian project independent of imperial Germany. 1933: the disappearance of intellectual Koenigsberg. 1945: the catastrophe of Germany, the beginning of the end of European culture. Our present day: the end of Kaliningrad, mutation, the town shrinking into its shell, the town going outside itself, turning its face to the problem of identity and, finally, into an object of research. What does the word Koenigsberg mean for me now? What does it primarily mean in a historical sense? A crush, a defeat, a sacrifice, a victim. A posthumous and virtual being. The disappearance of Europe in the ultimate exertion of European thought. The new European question of metaphysics, of God, not just of Enlightenment. This word also means an uncertainty of symmetry in the mutual understanding of East and West. Just as Tannenberg (Grunwald) has two meanings (those of victory and defeat, reaction and pseudo-progress), in the same way Koenigsberg means both the victory and the defeat of the European idea, not just the funeral of the Enlightenment. Watch the sunset of Europe in Kaliningrad. There, the view of this very place is both a memory and a struggle with memory, that is, the meaninglessness and irreversibility of the conquer, the inevitability of defeat. Koenigsberg means a Prussia that no longer exists. Koenigsberg means a virtual Germany. Koenigsberg means a gaping truth: the main word in this town, not the term coined by specialists in epistemology but the question sounding above its planes. Koenigsberg means controversy: between trade and university, between nature and liberty, and, most importantly, between liberty and liberty. Originally, Koenigsberg was a global project of power with a spiritual filling. Later it has an administrative scheme for a heart. Even later it was filled with a domestic civilization and the rights of a private person. Yes, Koenigsberg was the place for innovative processes, for transformation, digestion, and convergence, but it was ultimately a field of defeat. Koenigsberg betrayed the Reich, but not the Third Reich. Kaliningrad betrays Moscow. Koenigsberg means symbolism transformed into a myth. It means empire, honor, political and military art, civics, duty, faithfulness. But it also means self-betrayal (like that of Duke Albrecht) for self-esteem; subsequently, it is a hidden treason as a way of survival. In what form is it destined to appear now? Is it a fact that Kaliningrad will surrender? Or that Koenigsberg will come back? Or that nobody will win, neither Asia nor Europe, because the winner has a different name? It turns out that Kaliningrad is "horizontally" neither a battering ram nor a net for (and against) the East. It has not justified its principal purpose, it has been defeated. Like all of Germany, it is a weak colonizer, a rather impatient one. Koenigsberg is the embodiment of an openly formulated principle of conquering and civilizing. But this principle was originally not founded upon the idea of a normal human community but upon the extraordinariness of supreme service and heroic deeds. This straightforwardedness becomes the cause of defeat not only because it was beyond life, but because it was prone to involution, i.e. a loss of noumenal substantial meaning. 36
С-3 It was not by chance that Nietzsche disliked "the Koenigsberg Chinaman" (which is obviously Kant) and waged war against him on every page; he totally disliked the German North and the Baltic Sea. All this was heavy with Protestant burghers and their "cowardly" ethics. He was attracted to the music of the South. A true epiphany of the will to power. At one place, Nietzsche wrote in his cynical, mocking manner: "For example, Kant says: 'Two things will eternally remain worthy of worship' (the starry sky and the moral law, — I.Ch.). Nowadays, we would rather say: 'Digestion is more respectable'." (Nietzsche, The Will To Power). Nietzsche and Koenigsberg are incompatible. Does that mean that Koenigsberg and today's world are enemies, Nietzsche being the godfather of modern and postmodern thought? On the other hand, Koenigsberg really had a soft burgher core to its depths, deep inside, a warmth of communication. This resulted in its permanent hesitation, oscillation between cruelty and meekness, between humanism as a custom and humanism as a duty imposed upon others. Nevertheless, we remember the proverb: "He who offers you a soft bed, makes it difficult for you to sleep." Koenigsberg is a town of impossible but ideologically necessary things that you will never meet in real life: Kant's "eternal peace" and "human rights", as well as "the categorical imperative"; Johann Jacobi's ideal "German democracy"; the pure totalitarianism invented by Hannah Arendt; the totalitarian but worn-out "Soviet socialist democracy" practiced in Kaliningrad; and, finally, today's dream of establishing a true Russian European town. All impossible things amalgamate in one main Koenigsberg notion: "the thing in itself", objective and transcendent being, which absolute trust is to be placed in despite its unrecognisability. And the town itself, in which this notion came to life and became a heavy burden for its greatest thinker, begins to look like its offspring: it eludes all definitions, it only appears as a number of phenomena and reflexes, is totally disappears, like something which has been given to us as an experience but which continues to exist as a thing in itself at which the free effort of a free mind is aimed. Thus, Koenigsberg is doomed to be an eternal project, an eternal beginning (this being the essence of freedom), an eternal contradiction of different projects, and, at the same time, to leave us wondering about the original idea of its matrix. It is the same with Kant himself: all attempts to authentically understand him seem to be doomed while creative interpretations resemble the annexes of an utterly impossible building. The home town of the abstract became even more abstract after 1945. Nowadays, there is a void at its center, and its outlying blocks blend with wastelands and abstractly perfect comfortable oases of a new life: all those new cultural centers, shopping malls and mansions. It appears flexible, ready for any transformation you like. However, history proves this to be wrong. Out of that peaceful happy town of the 1920s and 1930s, a place for manslaughter developed, a place for the slaughter of culture and heritage. Its ruins did not give rise either to a real Socialist town or a new stronghold. All that remained was long-lasting, protracted building activity; new shoots spring through its slabs, capable of becoming both the truth and a treacherous illusion.
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Chechot Ivan
Koenigsberg is the image of Germany's most striking opposition of squalor (political, esthetic, urban) and the rise of Germany's most supreme nobility. That is what Kaliningrad has not yet become. It has not ever really been threatened. Koenigsberg can be a good lesson for us in its controversy. Narrow-mindedness and bad taste have always been especially hard to bear here. It was here that one could witness the boldest sparks of the sublime: in thought (classical philosophy) and in the poetic arts (Kleist, Hoffmann). The thinker Schiller directed his imagination here, towards Kant; Wagner heard the bursts of the Flying Dutchman's overture here; in this town, amid a circle of proletarians, Kollwitz crowned the 19th century with her drawings full of the deepest sorrow and humanism. Philistinism was versatile, it could sport both new and old disguise, it could be aristocratic or progressive, but it always embodied an imitative and degraded understanding of the purpose of human life. It was opposed by strict, lifeless, anti-biological maxims. Fidelity, Truth, Responsibility, Duty. The brake as a starter. These are the famous Prussian virtues. Nothing can be less similar to them than our Russian talents. These virtues can be embodied in people of any nationality. They have Christian roots but in their metallic sound one can recognize something else: a special pride, a stubborn decision not to follow the path of salvation, a readiness for disaster for the sake of one's vow. These virtues found their places in Koenigsberg. It was not the town but the place that was the source of sacred authority for the Prussian crown, for reactionary Romantics of the 19th and 20th centuries, for nationalists, for fanatics who resisted progress. This place is a kind of a trap. Finding yourself in it, you either have to escape to the individual and the private, or to burst straight out of its top, or, finally, to say goodbye to all that was yours, native but impossible, in order to leave forever. Then, in the place of Koenigsberg there will be a nice Baltic, instead of Prussia there will be Eastern Europe as the threshold to a big and peaceful world, and instead of heroism there will be just life. This very thing, just life, and this is one of the most obviously impossible things. What does the word Kaliningrad mean to me? What does the genius loci say to me? On Aivazovsky Street, there lives Victor, a jeweller and a sportsman — heart, silver, amber. He has a small gym at home and a bathhouse in his backyard. In front of the bathhouse stands a long table, like those used for the dead in morgues. There it is, the starry sky above. Steam belches in all directions on a beautiful spring night. The craftsman's instruments, a grip vice and a gas jet, lie by the window. That was how I melted silver for the first time: in Kaliningrad, with help from the genius loci, which has summoned me here again to feel it — in the whole world or maybe at the interfaces between different worlds
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Lovis Corinth's native home in Gvardeisk (formerly Tapiau). Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
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Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Dambrauskaitė Viktorija
Dambrauskaitė Viktorija Klaipėda, Lithuania Screenwriter
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Dambrauskaitė Viktorija
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Dambrauskaitė Viktorija
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Gugevičiūtė Gitana
Gugevičiūtė Gitana Klaipėda, Lithuania Theatre critic, playwright
Dashed Reflections on Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda Route Line I am not a stable, salaried traveller, and not much of an expert in journeys. Not Much of An Expert has not been travelling a lot, not because he is a settled aboriginal: these are just the current conditions that life dictates to him at the moment, and he is quite resigned to spending most of his time at home, in Klaipėda, in his "Khrushchev-era" apartment, or travelling across the internet virtuality. Not Much of An Expert is sincerely convinced that this is also a way of travelling. For instance, Jules Verne, who described so many exciting journeys over the world, under water, and far-away exotic lands, never travelled around them personally. I mean, he did travel, but only in his mind, overwhelmed by his creative urge, and did it by using apparatus that no one ever heard of in those times. Coming back from the topic of virtual journeys, it is worth noting that this manner of travelling is perhaps not so tangible, tasteable, smellable or suitable for trying on, but on the other hand, it liberates one from packing one‘s luggage, suffering from inconveniences at the airport, and travel companions who transmit different frequences. The latter, if any, can become a true blessing or a true condemnation when one has to share with them a bus seat that is a real kidney-buster, to decide which way to turn, in which hotel to stay for the night, and how to spend one‘s time in general: whether to wrinkle and crinkle in the swimming pool, make assaults upon unoccupied Medieval fortresses, forts, churches, gallery halls, theatres and other cultural heritage marked by quality seal that has been acknowledged by snobbery lodge, or to look for an alternative — something informal. But travel companions, whoever they are, always give one a lesson and can make one a huge favour: reveal the unexpectable parts of one‘s own personality. This summer, Not Much of An Expert was fortunate enough to "go up in the world" and meet some new people, and the people — Polish, Russian and Lithuanian — turned out to be fascinating artists, critics and historians. They have worn out many pairs of shoes in their journeys around the world, they are 46
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T 34, Elbląg. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
colourful personalities, one as intelligent as the other. Not Much of An Expert knows quite well which of them he would grant with "Mr./Ms. Intellectual", but would rather keep his opinions to himself. As Paul Valéry would say, "You can't get drunk or quench your thirst with the labels on bottles" — so would you really, if you are not an extrasensory perception adept, start to read the person like a book just upon hearing his/her name? Moreover, the names of travel companions are not the subject on which Not Much of An Expert has been training his beak to chirp on, but his subject is the journey that he has experienced in an absolutely subjective manner, a journey called cultural expedition: Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, Klaipėda. With a small bagpack on his shoulders, a small travel cushion in his armpit, and a sleep-kit in his mind, Not Much of An Expert was just going wherever the road would take him... *** The three cities, the distance between each of them being as small as 300 km, bear a quite immodest, far-from-servage title of "Baltic pearls". Aces at tourism agencies recommended them as especially appropriate for weekend trips, summer holidays and other kinds of pleasant visits not moth-eaten by exorbitant prices. True, they also mention the fact that a visit to Kaliningrad requires a visa, but for diplomatic purposes Not Much of An Expert calls this detail not an obstacle at all, but a kind of exotic inconvenience that is merely necessary if one wants to enter the womb of "Baltic pearls" and truly enjoy all its wideness and sweetness: big and small museums and galleries, gardens and parks, bookstores and libraries, cafeterias and shops, as a matter of fact, hotels and stations (in case you decide to spend the night or at least get out of the vehicle there), the local flora and fauna. You can, if you desire to do so, communicate with the latter both in official and immediate manner: for that purpose, people usually use Russian, Polish or Lithuanian language. Lithuanian communication happens as an especially rare exception, even though an opportunity to meet a person
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Gugevičiūtė Gitana
Cat, graffiti. Photo by E. Umansky, 2010
of Lithuanian origin will arise more than once. All things depend on your own wish, expectations and goals. *** By the way, how do you prepare yourself for a journey to a foreign or unfamiliar city? Do you read everything you can find in a language that you can speak and then map out a route that you find beautiful? Or do you take an interest only in things that coincide with your own "professional interest area"? Do you hire a guide? Or do you give all of yourself to chance? Not Much of An Expert did not do any homework, even though there was plenty of literature on what is worth seeing and visiting in Gdańsk and Kaliningrad. Not Much of An Expert left home with his beloved Günter Grass and his "Danzig Trilogy" in his lap, with a story that he has heard (or listened to) through a mist: a story about Lech Walęsa, the legend of Gdańsk, also with the name of Immanuel Kant that he will probably never overcome, with a goal to visit the monument to professor Ludwig Rhesa and the Lithuanian square (which he never went to), and with an attitude that it is better to avoid speaking with Russians or Polish on the topic of "our common history": he has had enough of hearing those conversations and seeing their consequences. Upon that occasion, Not Much of An Expert went as far as erasing the stereotypes that someone had installed into his head, that Kaliningrad is ugly and backward-looking city, while each Polish person only cares about occupying Vilnius and the whole Vilnius district. On the same occasion, Not Much of An Expert planted an open heart somewhere on the left side of his chest, which suddenly made him become slightly sentimental, a little bit political, vulnerable and childish (even though he did not refuse some wine and beer). By the way, due to this open heart that he was wearing every day, Not Much of An Expert was not capable of developing any kind of new methodology, look upon this journey triptych with a conceptual eye or interpret it in a wildly original manner. "The history was quite dramatic, — Not Much of An Expert thought. — Today is also quite odd, but still, when the dwellers of Gdańsk, Kaliningrad and 48
G-5 Klaipėda go to visit each other, they probably feel at least a bit like "going home", not to a foreign country, that is what makes them feel safe... " Later, in Kaliningrad, Not Much of An Expert had a twinkle of an idea of a "common denominator": oases of amber art and kitsch, Sea museums, sculpture parks, the German heritage, queen Louise, the still-existing "block-of-flats mentality", and all kinds of sea and herring festivals... "Nevertheless, in one way or another, everyone is a little bit of a cater-cousin", — Not Much of An Expert wrapped himself in a blanket and fell asleep blissfully, dreaming of the sea, the Baltic department of Kaliningrad National contemporary art centre, "Łaznia" contemporary art centre in Gdańsk, artist Gytis Skudžinskas, a just married couple who was hanging a 10 kg heart on a bridge, the Curonian spit, and so on. *** …Meanwhile in Kaliningrad, further away from vibrantly busy streets, in the backyards of old houses, there are a lot of wandering cats. The Kaliningrad-dwelling cats. Neither sweet nor frightful, neither stray nor domestic, neither clean nor dirty — just imcomprehensible. Nearly transparent. Like skinny models who will swallow only as much food as is necessary to let them stay on the catwalk. They are not even cats — they are street spirits, who have nine lives each… We love guests… We are delighted to have guests… Good luck…(Russian)
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In Kaliningrad, in a trolleybus whose number Not Much of An Expert cannot remember, an old woman, working as a ticket inspector, also sells trolleybus tickets. The tickets are printed on small paper rolls, so she is wearing a "necklace" of those rolls hanging on her neck. She carries her handbag with money over her shoulder. She is walking around her own trolleybus: it is her home (I wonder how many years the old woman has been working as a ticket inspector?) and talking in a calm voice, which sounds like honey to my ears: "Мы любим гостей… Гостям мы рады… Cчастливо…" 1 Such a homely, lovely old lady, who has wrapped up her own version of the history of Kaliningrad and Lithuania into one of her ticket rolls... In Kaliningrad, rich with as many as seven ancient gates of the city that had survived to nowadays, one can see the standing-out building of "Soviet Palace" — a dreadful monster who has crashed the impressive Koenigsberg castle that once stood here (well, ok, there were ruins of the castle). This brainless and soulless mockery at architecture was started to erect in 1970. Today, it still remains empty, in spite of the renovation works and even new windows instead of the broken ones, given to it on the occasion of Kaliningrad‘s 750th anniversary. In Kaliningrad, in "Shit" gallery, probably the first generation of contemporary art has been hazardously and trustfully playing the basics of contemporary art. They have been supported and encouraged by all the elite of Kaliningrad contemporary art curators and critics. In Kaliningrad, there is an art cafe called "Apartment" that works, literally, in a private apartment. They screen movies, organize workshops on photography, cinema and other arts, and the objects composing the interior are on sale. The notably snug and genuine atmosphere sticks to the visitors‘ skin like a fine,
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warm home-made sweater: they will want to dive here again and again, on their other visits to Koenigsberg. In Kaliningrad… You know, it would be easier to say what is missing in Kaliningrad… Kaliningrad is an organic, spontaneous, exotic city, rich in contrasts: it is guarding, destroying, spoiling, renovating, wasting, playing, contradicting, corteous, full of oddities, depths and superficiality. Here, ragged façades are flirting with beautiful, well-kept quays and sparkling hotels, contemporary construction style — with fundamental historical buildings, sacrum with profanum, the concept of "toilet is everywhere" with notes indicating "pay-toilets"… Not Much of An Expert enjoyed Kaliningrad very much. And even now the memories of Kaliningrad are sending shivers down his back. *** Czesław Miłosz wrote that Polish literature always inclined to poetry and theatre rather than prose. Not Much of An Expert can still see these features in Gdańsk, the port city of Poland: also poetic and theatrical. A little bit phoney, resembling a huge theatre stage crumbling into a lot of small mise-en-scènes and set design details. Here is the lively artery of Vistula (there are two branches of this river running across the city), decorating the city with beautiful bridges, where one can enjoy standing and just staring at the water or far-away horizons (the locals claim that it is not vigorous at all. At least it should be used more actively and cleverly, but the city authorities are so incompetent…). The expressive dynamics of the roofs, the fragile tracery of church towers. The mass tourist scenes going on in the three main streets: the wide pedestrian steet Długa (the Long street), the narrow (aka golden) Mariacka street, and the long quay of Motlava river, to which the two streets, favoured by tourists, are directing the streams of people. The restaurant lounges, decorated with precious interiors and notable for prices that make one choose a spectator‘s seat outside rather than an actor‘s seat at the table, so that you feel a little sorry for yourself for replying just a thank you to their serdecznie zapraszamy 2 and not giving generous tips. The stalls of affordable little cafes, sometimes ornamented with "sticks and twigs" sort of art. The standing rooms in barrel-houses where the atmosphere is not always friendly. Good beer and delicious food. Semi-official and alternative culture. Even if the Soviet-style five-storied houses and other blocks of flats are misunderstandings that play tricks on one‘s eye, hiding under the make-up of renovation, they actually convince one of being recently constructed contemporary houses. Whatever side you turn to, you will still find something to admire. It is a truly West European city. It is a truly city of freedom, where the shipyard that was once named after Lenin, turned out to be the gravedigger for communism in Europe. *** While the ferry was carrying the bus across the sea to Klaipėda, Not Much of An Expert was thinking about his own limited knowledge of the city where he has been living. Not Much of An Expert has written a lot about the provinciality of Klaipėda, its lack (or absence) of high-grade cultural initiative, its cultural 50
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Pioneers. Bagrationovsk, Kaliningrad region. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
The approaching shoreline and a wall of monoliths, resembling a very thin razor blade, crashed into his sight, leaving no chance to even blink an eye. In order for Memelburg / Memel / Klaipėda to install its past, memory and present. So that the city would receive a respectful look, too, a look with a faint smile — with the eyes of a tourist. So that the places that Not Much Of A Tourist thinks are kitsch, reflecting their own helpless convulsions to veil something, would make him pleasantly excited, or maybe even surprise him: all the petty architecture, scattered over a tiny Old Town that could fit into an armful, and a free of charge exposition of small sculptures along Martynas Mažvydas alley, would push a passer-by slightly and modestly and make him swim across Kristijonas Donelaitis street to the bank of Sculptures park. One should dare to invite friends from Gdańsk and Kaliningrad for them to give a look at something that they also have, but in a different manner: time (the Clock and Watch museum, the "Book of Time" sun clock), news (the central building of Klaipėda Post office), the sea (Lithuanian Sea museum), antiquity (Castle museum), contemporary art centre (Klaipėda Culture Communication centre), theatre (Klaipėda Drama theatre), amber (Amber museum in Palanga), or alternative culture ("Fanierkė" informal parties at former woodworking plant). Just relax when the Old Town streets are empty and the walls of one‘s house are not stressed with tranquility. Relax again, when Klaipėda is abundant in people, movement, hustle and bustle: much more time is spent hanging out and sitting around. It is no secret that this happens in the warm season, when the public events start to rock, starting from the full-bodied Jazz festival and Sea festival, and finishing with cultural initiatives and initiations living on a diet regime, and the Baltic sea opens its free of charge SPA center: sun bathes, marine perfumery, wind massage and everything else — pebbles, stones, pieces of amber, water-worn woodsticks, and an ice-cream in the hand at the moment when one‘s back, impregnated with sunscreen cream, is reflecting UV rays. "What on Earth has happened to me?! — Not Much of An Expert suddenly got frightened. — What kind of slobbering is this?! What kind of Kafka’s "Metamorphosis" is going on?" And then Albert Camus told him: "There is no pleasure in travelling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. If we understand by culture the exercise of our most intimate sense — that of eternity — then we travel for culture. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."
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Karpenko Anna
Karpenko Anna Kaliningrad, Russia Social researcher, coordinator of the "Save the Cobblestones"
Cobblestones: an Uncomfortable Legacy Translated by Jeffry Gorovits
Cobbled roads are the common arteries of the triangle of the former East Prussia now divided between Russia, Poland and Lithuania. The era of universal motorization in the 1990–2000's was a time of X and decided the fate of this strange inheritance. Will the bumpy stone pavements stubbornly standing out through the Soviet asphalt, creating noise, smashing car suspensions and being cursed at intersections — this granite history, stand up before mass desire for comfort "here and now"? The attitude to these stumbling blocks in Kaliningrad, Gdańsk and Klaipėda show different trajectories, not only in perceiving the past, but also in viewing the future of the three cities. In Kaliningrad, the question of cobblestones became the universal theme for the city in 2011. The beginning of the 21st century had improved the financial situation of the citizens, brought massive loans, also borrowed for the purchase of vehicles, along with state funds for road maintenance. Block pavements began to disappear one by one from the urban landscape and became victims of municipality contracts with asphalting companies. And then it turned out that the issue of cobblestones is not just a utilitarian theme about benefits of this or that type of pavement. Cobblestones have become a sign of identity, a link to the pre-war history of the city and a question of values for many citizens of Kaliningrad. In January 2012, several dozen residents banded together in an initiative group to rescue the stone heritage. A group for the discussion of action was formed in the Facebook network called "Save the Cobblestones". They became known under this name in the activities of the virtual community, which has more than 400 members. Various events and campaigns involving up to a hundred citizens have been arranged by them, consisting of a core of about 30 people as the active participants. From the outset emphasis was placed on the fundamental openness of the community, which has changed its composition over the past two years and has made it possible to attract representatives of different age and social groups of citizens. Perhaps now the "Cobblestones" is the only grassroots association where you can see businessmen and artists, local historians and cyclists, writers and lawyers, pensioners and students together.
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K-6 Gold Ring (2 Euro). Public art project by Mikhail Gulin. Kaliningrad, BB NCCA. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2012
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Karpenko Anna
The strategy for defending historical values has changed over time. Initially, the main forces were directed to interact with the city administration, when the mayor initially showed support. Such a "dialogue with the public" has become part of the election campaign and ended in winter 2013. But at the stage of ostentatious constructiveness it already became clear that civil servants’ understanding of historical and cultural values was not soon to be a possibility as one of the main criteria for their decision-making. Elected officials prefer to use value judgments only for short-term political dividends, and their daily bureaucratic routine is regulated by the imperatives of budget funds application and short-term solutions. The group "Save the Cobblestones" studied the experience of neighbouring countries and cities with the same heritage (Riga, Vilnius, Gdańsk, Lubeck and others) and tried to propose adoption by the municipality of regulations for the handling of the cobbled pavement, but the bureaucracy rejected them. Pretty soon it became clear that the game with the bureaucracy on its traditional field, a field of applications, documents, papers, does not lead to any results. In this track, urban activism is a destructive confrontation on paper and is doomed to act only by reaction, losing strength to form its own agenda and influence public opinion. Awareness campaigns and events, allowing citizens to learn the history of the city and become active players in the public space, are more efficient processes than a one-time protest. It was in that vein that the group celebrated its second anniversary in January 2014 — by organizing the educational action "Koenigsberg Professors Day". The pretext for it was another high-rise residential building to be built in a historical place — the cemetery where famous professors of the Koenigsberg University (Albertina) lie, including the astronomer Friedrich Bessel, physicist Franz Neumann and botanist Robert Caspary. On the day of commemoration of the professors, the townspeople, together with representatives of the group, walked through the astronomical hill where Bessel first measured the distance to the star; through the former university campus with a botanical garden, where Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope, and zoologist Karl Baer disclosed the laws of embryonic development. The academic evening was followed by shamanism at the old Sackheim city gate, where poetry was combined with experimental music. Afterwards, that undertaking led to another campaign initiated by one of the group members, poet Boris Bartfeld, who managed to gain support from city councillors in putting up in June 2014 a memorial to scientists of the Albertina University buried in the professor necropolis. 54
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Public art project by Mikhail Gulin. Kaliningrad, BB NCCA. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2012
The question of Kaliningrad’s cobblestones immediately turned into one of broader urban planning and development: infill construction, public transport, cycling, parks and green areas, and preservation of cultural heritage. What are the prospects for the development of the city? Will the past be a serious resource for the future? Is it possible to discuss issues of the common good beyond personal interests? How are similar stories developing with the neighbours? It is not easy to defend the historical and cultural heritage in Gdańsk and Klaipėda. The drive of real estate development and the pursuit of investments, the same as on the Russian side, often eat up significant cultural landmarks. However, familiarity with the history of the paving stone question reveals interesting processes different from Kaliningrad’s trajectory. Cobblestones were not just saved, but carefully restored and recovered, at least in areas declared historically significant. The value of stone paved roads is recognized not only by culturally sensitive citizens, but also politicians. Statements about history’s priority over comfort (cars or spiked heels) are not just election declarations, but reflection of the actual motivation and basis for decisions of city authorities. The reasons, we think, were both the practical awareness for tourist’s attraction of a place’s heritage — a kind of monetization of history, and the, traditionally, more obvious importance of historical continuity in the consciousness of our neighbours. The cobblestones have become not just a symbol of historical flavour and special urban atmosphere. They materialize the past into the subject of not only contemplation, but also bodily sensations. We stumble, slip, and our shoes get caught on the stone surfaces just as our ancestors have done hundreds of years ago. Amidst disposable quickly rejected materials and cheap items, cobblestones have become an inaccessible and inconvenient luxury. How are the paving stones perceived by a citizen used to interact with the world in a comfortable mode of consumption? Is the pleasure of traveling and not just moving from point A to point B still accessible? Cobblestones are a stubborn incarnation of slowness. The cities that were developed for servicing the industry, conglomerates of creatures rapidly circulating along predetermined paths, receded into the past. Stone pavements — the emergency brake, the tumbler switch, which can stop and bring us back to the Aristotelian polis, where townspeople have a place for reflection and conversation
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Kazarauskaitė-Marčienė Skaistė
Kazarauskaitė-Marčienė Skaistė Drawings (ink on paper): Rolandas Marčius Klaipėda, Lithuania Coordinator of the art expedition in Lithuania, curator of contemporary art projects
Leave the Pedestal — Replace the Monument On a Habit to Use the Plinth 1 In 2012, during the final review of students’ works at the National Gallery of Art, Saulius Leonavičius, MA graduate from Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, took an artwork from its pedestal (platform), put it on the ground, and after half a minute, returned it back. The art object was Deimantas Narkevičius’ "Too Long on the Plinth" (1994).
"About a Habit to Use Plinths" Saulius Leonavičius Internet link: http://www.airb. lt/?p=241
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NDG information, Internet link: http://www.ndg.lt/rinkinys/k%C5%ABriniai/deimantas-narkevi%C4%8Dius.aspx
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Too Long on the Plinth 2 Deimantas Narkevičius created his artwork "Too Long on the Plinth" in 1994 — during the period when Lithuanian society was still living in the climate of essential political and social changes of the early nineties. In that period, the rigid ideological framework that ruled the development of Lithuanuan society for almost fifty years, finally lost its moral authority and power and gave its place to a new system. This artwork is a subtly ironic reflection on the legacy of the political and artistic system that leaves its mark in history. The artist’s means of expression — a pair of worn classic-style leather boots, filled with coarse salt — make a reference to the heroes’ monuments as the embodiment of the collapsed system of values in the bygone era: as soon as the the political changes began to take place, society immediately took those monuments down from their pedestals.
A Stranger‘s Past I have encountered with changes in all things, the absence of old ones, or more precisely, the attachment to the past, quite recently — to be more accurate, I bumped straight into my memories. Nine years after my graduation, here I was again, climbing up the stairs to the fourth floor of the university, as the secretary had told me on the phone: "The meeting will be in my office, room No. 404". I was climbing and counting the stairs when, after I reached that floor, I suddenly realized that I came back to the specific corridor of my undergraduate times. For four years, it was here that we would wait for teachers, lectures, performance results, homework, examinations, etc. On the same floor, I had 56
K-7 a safe hide-out. There was the Oriental Studies Centre, where my diploma director worked: a woman who would narrow her lids when she was telling us about India, as if she saw the sunset there just yesterday and met the sunrise at home, in Lithuania. I would spend months leaning over the Sanskrit dictionary in attempts to discover etymological threads of the goddesses’ names, and carefully copying their bases — Heaven forbid that I forget a point or a dot. When I first came around to ask the teacher A. if I could be her student, she invited me to sit on a high couch. I plunged in there with my feet swinging in the air, as if I was sitting on a bridge. The teacher asked me when I was born. She would cast her eye over what was written in the stars for me. I cannot recall what was written there, but she agreed to be my diploma director. Here I stand in front of the room No. 404, looking for information on teacher A.’s working hours, but I cannot see them. Without knocking, I open the door… There Oriental Studies Centre is no longer there: there are no couches, no Ganesh image glued to the cabinet, no Shiva statues, no tables lined up in an angle, loaded with books. True, there are desks and books, but it’s not the same anymore. Everything has changed. Similarly, once a small group of people was running about our dorm rooms. They said they had studied at Lund University ten years ago, and had lived in that "corridor". We, the new inhabitants of the room, showed them around the rooms (that used to be theirs) indifferently, but they kept saying how things had changed, and recalled many funny stories. Then I did not perceive the state of changes in life, so I did not understand what it meant to "have changed". On the fourth floor, the atmosphere has changed. It is as if everything is the same, but feels different. I want to run and call my groupmates, shouting: "Can you imagine, everything has changed at the Uni!". It feels as if I was standing inside the movie "Goodbye, Lenin": its character wakes up after a long coma, but over that period, the political regime in Germany has changed — the Berlin Wall has collapsed, and the Iron Curtain has fallen. The woman's son, fearing that the news would harm his mother‘s fragile health, is hiding the changes from her. A break of Past-Present-The moment. The moment when the continuation of the process breaks down, but the story goes on. The sign of the times are changing, the experiences that keep us together are fading — as if someone would contour with a marker an ink stain on the blotting-paper that has been left in the sun.
Oblivion. Leave the Pedestal — Change the Monument The silhouettes of Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, and Klaipėda (see the pictures: Rolandas Marčius, ink on paper, 2014) with no reference to their environment. Monuments. Sights. The heroes of the period. Close and distant. The ones that we keep away from and the ones that become our meeting points. The destruction of a monument is like getting rid of or destroying the old political system — like liberation from the shackles of history. Or vice versa — building a monument marks a new political order. Deimantas Narkevičius’ work, a pair of boots full Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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of coarse salt, dates back to the collapse of the Soviet conjuncture, when new monuments to heroes replaced the previous ones, but the old pedestals remained. After eighteen years, an artist of the new generation took away Narkevičius‘ boots and then put them back — he did not dare to set up another object on the pedestal. By using symbolic forms, such as monuments and commemorative events, society is trying to restore its past in accordance with its present needs. When professor Leonidas Donskis asked professor Zygmunt Bauman about the relationship between memory and oblivion, for today the memory that is stored in computers, servers, and databases, is not necessary to remember, professor Bauman shared his insight: "Forgetfulness is due to much more serious reasons. <…> The first reason is the desire of modernity to submerge our collective memory, as well as our shared past, in oblivion. The fact is that the architects of modernism deeply believed in and trusted in the idea that the human potential to change the world is almost endless. So it is not surprising that modernity faced a goal to change the world and get rid of the influence of the past on the present by making it invalid. The ambition was to just sweep away the past, to remove it, so that it would not get in the way of those who planned to re-make people by transforming their natural environment and the very order of the society where they operated. The goal was to adapt both the nature and society to human requirements, needs, desires, and so on. Overall, this audacious, incredibly brave and ambitious program of modernity was to liberate the people from the effects of external circumstances, so that they could follow their own vision of the future rather than the circumstances determined by the past." 3 The participants in cultural expedition that took place as part of the "Close Stranger" project on June 28 — July 11, 2013, would encounter the monuments in the above-mentioned cities consistently, then incoherently and sometimes by pure chance, and then would take long rides in the loops of memory and oblivion, as if they were roller coasters. True, they have not submitted the photos, but maybe no one really needed ones. I have to admit that in writing this text, I also had to despicably employ online databases, as I never had a chance to meet the living storytellers. Does anyone really remember how the city left the pedestal, but replaced the monument with a new one?
Monuments route: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda Route A Follow the route. Route Z Nearly everyone wishes to change, break, deviate from, re-group, re-shape or re-design every plan, rule, order, injunction, or anything that is supposed to be followed. A perfect route means — no route. The monuments that have been hit upon, are described and illustrated below. Anything that you will find on the way, please write down in the routes B–Z.
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Fragment of the discussion "Moral Sensibility in the Age of Uncertainty: Dialogues Between Professor Zygmunt Bauman and professor Leonidas Donskis" that took place on October 30, 2013 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Internet link with text in Lithuanian: http://www. bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/2013-11-20-z-baumanas-ir-l-donskis-apie-moralini-jautrumanetikrumo-amziuje/110273)
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Location: Wały Jagiellońskie Street Maria Konopnicka park Authors: professor, sculptor Franciszek Duszenko Built: 1977
Monument to Maria Konopnicka Maria Stanisława Wasiłowska-Konopnicka (1842–1910) was Polish poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
Location: Solidarności Street Authors: Bogdan Pietruszka, Wieslaw Szyslak, Wojciech Mokwiński, Jacek Krenz Built: 1980
Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers In 1970 the gate No. 2 of the Gdańsk shipyard witnessed a bitter strike against the communist regime. The strike killed 45 people. Three crosses with anchors, 42 metres high and weighing nearly 140 tons, have been built in the spot where the first victims of the strike died.
Location: Szeroka Street Authors: Wawrzyniec Samp Built: 2010
Świętopełk II Monument Świętopełk the Great (1190/1200l– 1266) was the Duke of Pomerelia. During his life, he constantly fought with his brothers, who were making alliances with Great Poland and the Teutonic Knights Order. Their alliances led Świętopełk to choose pagan Prussian tribes as his allies, so that in in 1242, an internal war in Pomerelia shifted to Prussia and has been referred to as the First Prussian uprising ever since. As the uprising was crushed, Świętopełk suffered defeat and was forced to apologize to his brothers and other Christians.
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Location: Polska Polish Post Obrońców Square Authors: sculptor Wincent Kućma Built: 1979
Location: Korzenna Street Authors: sculptor Jan Szczypka Built: 2006
Monument to the Defenders of the Polish Post
Monument to Johannes Hevelius
On September 1st, 1939, the German army invaded Poland, attacking the Gdańsk Post office. 57 postal workers withstood the attack for 15 hours, but could not resist any longer. The monument depicts a dying Polish postal employee, who passes the rifle to Nike, goddess of victory.
Jan Heweliusz (spelt Johannes Hevelius in Latin) (1611–1687) was astronomer, brewer, and mayor of Gdańsk. The monument was built in 2006 to commemorate the 395th anniversary of the mayor‘s birthday. Jan Heweliusz discovered four comets and Sobiescianum Scutum (Sobieski's Shield, now called Scutum) that he named in the honour of Polish and Lithuanian Grand Duke John III Sobieski’s victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna.
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Location: Drzewne Square (Targ Drzewne) Authors: unknown Built: 1897
Location: Market Square (Długi Targ) Authors: unknown Built: 1549
Monument to John III Sobieski
Neptune fountain
Jan (John) III Sobieski was Polish nobleman and military commander, King of Poland John III and Lithuanian Grand Duke Jonas Sobieskis (1674–1696). The sculpture was built in 1897 to memorialize the King of Poland, who defeated the Turks at Vienna, thereby preventing further penetration of the Ottoman Order in Europe. Firstly, the monument was built in Lviv (now located in Ukraine), then moved to Warsaw in 1950, and finally to Gdańsk in 1965. In the period of changes, the sculpture became a gathering place for demonstrations and marches.
A bronze statue of the god of freshwater and the sea was built in 1549. In 1633, it was turned into a fountain. During World War II, the fountain was hidden. Neptune came back to the Market Square in 1954. Since 2011–2012, the restored Neptune Fountain in Gdańsk has served as the symbol of connection to the sea and a centerpiece of the Market Square. The legend tells that Neptune got angry at the people throwing coins into the fountain, struck his trident hook in the water and turned it into gold. Small pieces of gold are still glowing in the bottom of the fountain. That was how Neptune contributed to the birth of the famous Gdańsk infusion "Goldvasser" ("Golden Water" in German).
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
Location: Sucharskiego Street Authors: sculptor Franciszek Duszenko, architect Adam Haupt Built: 1966
Monument to the Coast Defenders Westerplatte is a peninsula in Gdańsk, located on the Baltic Sea coast. The peninsula is famous for the battle that became the first clash of the German and Polish armies in 1939, at the Ger man invasion of Poland, and thus the first battle of the Second World War in the European war theatre. A 25 meters high monument, composed of 236 blocks of granite, is designed to commemorate the Polish crew.
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Kaliningrad
Location: 2 Universitetskaya Street Authors: sculptors Harald Haack and Stanislav Rauch Built: Rebuilt in 1992 in accordance to the replica from 1864 by Stanislav Rauch
Location: 4 Prospekt Mira Avenue Authors: sculptor Stanislav Cauer Built: 1910
Monument to Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Schiller Monument
Sculptor Stanislav Rauch created the bronze statue of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1857 in Berlin. Unfortunately, due to financial difficulties, the monument was not immediately built in Koenigsberg: the population failed to collect the sufficient funds. But luckily, Karl Rosenkranz, who received royalties for his book "Koenigsberg and Modern Urbanism" ("Koenigsberg und der Moderne Stadtbau"), donated the missing amount to his city. The monument was unveiled in 1864 in Prinzessinnenstraße street, and in 1884, it moved to Paradeplatz square next to Koenigsberg University. During the Second World War, when the Russian army was approaching, the monument was hidden. True, the pedestal was used for a certain period of time to host the monument to Ernst Thälmann, the German Communist Party leader. The monument to Immanuel Kant remained undiscovered. In 1992, Prussian-born countess Marion Dönhoff initiated the restoration of the monument replica.
The bronze monument to the famous German playwright, poet, philosopher, and historian Friedrich Schiller was cast and built in 1910. Why sculptor Stanislav Cauer decided to erect this monument in this city, still remains a puzzle, because Friedrich Schiller never lived in Koenigsberg. The monument was erected on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Koenigsberg Opera. On the occasion of the opening (in 1810), the Opera staged Schiller’s "Wilhelm Tell". During the war, the monument suffered, so it was restored in the 1950s.
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Location: Generala Sommera Street Authors: architect S.P. Miroshnychenko, sculptor V. I. Jakutina Built: 1980
Monument to the Battle Tank T-34 The most famous tank of Kaliningrad stormed Koenigsberg in 1945, and also stood the fire of battles in China. The tank rolled to Generala Sommera street in Kaliningrad on its own, and then was immortalized by setting it up on a pedestal. In 2007, the monument was granted the cultural heritage status to commemorate the tankmen as war heroes.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
Location: Gvardeisky Prospekt Avenue Authors: sculptor Juozas Mikėnas Built: 1946
Location: Prospekt Mira Avenue Authors: sculptor B.V. Yedunov Built: 1980
The Victory composition
Monument to the Compatriot Cosmonauts
"The Victory" composition is a part of the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen. Lithuanian sculptor Juozas Mikėnas was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947. The Monument to the 1200 Guardsmen became the first monument in Koenigsberg (shortly before the city was renamed Kaliningrad) built to commemorate the Soviet soldiers who died at the assault on the city during World War II.
The monument commemorates the cosmonauts who spent their young years in Kaliningrad and became the first to make cosmic flights: Alexey Leonov, Viktor Patsayev, Yury Romanenko and Alexander Viktorenko. The initial title of the memorial was "To the Conquerors of the Universe". The locals call the monument "Homeboys Cosmonauts" and "Survivors from the Nine". In 2007, the monument gained the status of an object of protected cultural heritage.
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Location: Kant Island, near the Cathedral Authors: sculptor A. Tshernitsky Built: 1983
Location: Pobedy Square Authors: historian Sergey Trifonov, sculptor Alexander Rukavishnikov Built: 2005
The New Renaissance Arch
Triumphal Column
The sculpture consists of two figures: a male one and a female one, who symbolize the source of inspiration and creativity. Above them, there are portraits of Leonardo Da Vinci, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Lomonosov, Viktor Vasnetsov, Sergey Konenkov and other famous people. The writing on one side of the monument says "Renaissance", and on the other — "New Renaissance". The man and woman sculptures are bearing "the challenges of centuries". The masculine and feminine principles are supposed to be a source of inspiration. The people of Kaliningrad have called these figures Atlas and Caryatide. To pass under the arch of the monument is said to be a goodluck sign.
The Triumphal Column was built in 2005 to mark the 750th anniversary of the city and commemorate the German-Russian struggles. The pillar, symbolizing peace around the world, is a part of the general urban composition "Two Hundred Years of Glory to Russian Weapons". The column has four bronze bas-reliefs depicting the four most famous Russian wars: the Seven Year War, the First and Second World wars and the Cossack war against Napoleon. According to the historian Sergey Trifonov, the author of the idea, "the Triumph column is dedicated to peace. It is meant to remind the four great victories of the Russian nation. As the four sides of the column are occupied by images, there is no more space for war, so we must live in peace and brotherhood". In 2013, the top of the column was equipped with a three-meter-high Victory Order, whose imagery is reminiscent of its prototype — the highest Soviet military award.
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Location: Kant Island, near the Cathedral Authors: Johann Friedrich Reusch Built: 1891, rebuilt in 2005
Duke Albrecht Memorial The memorial is dedicated to Duke Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1568), who was the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights Order and the first Duke of Prussia. The Duke’s grave is located in the Cathedral of Koenigsberg. Through Albrecht of Brandenburg’s efforts, the economy, politics and culture of Prussia began to flourish. In 1542 in Koenigsberg, he founded Collegium Albertinum that served as the basis to establish the University of Koenigsberg (Albertus-Universität) in 1544. Johann Friedrich Reusch built the bronze scuplture in 1891 in one of the Koenigsberg Castle towers. In 1935, the monument was moved to another castle tower. During the war, it survived the bombing and the assault on the city, but after a while, it disappeared. Kaliningradians initiated the return of the monument: in 2005, a copy of the sculpture was built next to the cathedral of Koenigsberg. The works were completed by F. Morozov and A. Shevtsov.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Kazarauskaitė-Marčienė Skaistė
Klaipėda
Location: between the Kulių Gates and Taikos Avenue Authors: sculptor D. Matulaitė, architect R. Buivydas Built: 1983
Location: Sculpture Park, among K. Donelaitis Street, Liepų Street, Trilapio Street and S. Daukanto Street Authors: architect P. Sadauskas Built: 1975
Neringa
The Monument to Soldiers Who Died During the World War II
The sculpture depicts a woman carrying two ships on her shoulders. The expression of the idea that she is a giant lies the maximum exertion and the concentrated energy of the sculptural forms rather than in the large scales of the composition. Ascending upwards, the figuratuve and emotional intensity accumulates at the top of the sculpture: the head of giant Neringa with her individualized features crowns the image of the sailing ship, the wings and the central axis of the composition. Neringa’s austere face type resembles the harsh seaside nature. The monumental composition with its winding gradual paths and the stair steps around the sculpture evokes the rippling sea or the dunes that the wind has drifted. 66
The monument marks the burial place of Russian soldiers (about 700 Russian soldiers) who died in in 1945. Here, the eternal flame is burning. The nine-meter sculpture has the shape of a hanging sword.
Location: Liepų Street, near the Faculty of Arts of Klaipėda University Authors: sculptor Petras Deltuva Built: 1974
Monument to Kristijonas Donelaitis Kristijonas Donelaitis was the pioneer of Lithuanian literature. There is no extant image of the classic, so the sculpture was created on the basis of only anthropological data. The initial idea was to use the sculpture to decorate the Donelaitis school lobby, but since the statue was too massive, it has stood in the square that bears the classic’s name.
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Location: Theatre Square Authors: unknown Built: 1912
Location: in front of the Town Hall, Danės Street Authors: sculptor K. Kisielius, architect P. Šadauskas Built: 1971
Sculpture "Ann of Tharau" and the Monument to Simon Dach
Fisherman
The fountain built in 1912 at the Theatre Square commemorates Simon Dach, the poet who was born in Klaipėda and worked as professor at the Koenigsberg University. The sculpture depicts a charmingly young barefoot girl — one of the characters of his poems. The people of Klaipėda raised funds to build the Simon Dach fountain. Lithuanian people from Klaipėda region also made substantial contributions to set up the monument. It was the first memorial of humanitarian content in this region. Its lyricism, romantic aura and democratic character made it strikingly different from other official monuments in the city. The love song "Little Ann of Tharau" is still sung in Germany, as well as in Switzerland and Austria. It has been among the German folk songs, and people say that the bells at Munich Town hall still ring out the melody of this song.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
K. Kisielius’ sculpture "Fisherman" was set up in front of the former Town Hall in 1971, during the Sea Festival. Previously, the location used to host the Borussia memorial that was erected there in 1907 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the victory over Napoleon. The Borussia monument was also referred to as the National monument, for Klaipėda was the only city in Prussia that Napoleon’s troops did not occupy. After 1923, the participants in the Lithuanian uprising took down the monument, and brought it to the City Hall courtyard. In the late 1930s, the growing nationalist moods of the native Germans in the region contributed to the restoration of the monument. During the Second World War, the monument was gone, and the Soviet times replaced it with the "Fisherman" sculpture. Around the statue, there is a fountain that functions in the summer.
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Kazarauskaitė-Marčienė Skaistė
Location: end of Tiltų Street, beginning of H. Manto Street Authors: sculptor Arūnas Sakalauskas Built: 2003
Location: H. Manto Street, next to the building at 38 H. Manto St. Authors: sculptor Vytautas Mačiuika, architect Gytis Tiškus Built: 1983
The Arch — Monument to the United Lithuania
Monument to Herkus Mantas
The Arch Monument was built in Klaipėda to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Tilsit Act and the 80th anniversary of the return of the Klaipėda Region to Lithuania. The monument weighs 150 tons and is 8.5 meters high. The smaller column from red granite symbolizes Lithuania Minor and its cultural heritage, while the gray column is the symbol of the Great Lithuania. The top part of the monument that looks like a chipped-off piece, depicts Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad), now a part of Russia. The phrase carved on the monument is a saying by Lithuanian writer Ieva Simonaitytė: "We are one nation, one land, one Lithuania".
The 4 meters high monument to the battlemaster, depicting the great Prussian commander, was a work in progress for as long as twelve years. In 1971, the city executive committee chairman Alfonsas Žalys gave his blessing to the sculptor Vytautas Mačiuika’s idea. However, the sculpture building process was stopped in fear of reaction from the Moscow authorities. The permission to build the monument was issued only in 1982, when the general secretary Leonid Brezhnev died. Officially, the sculpture was titled "The Guard". It was only during its unveiling ceremony that a mention was made that the sculpture was an image of Herkus Mantas, a Prussian commander who revolted against the occupation by the Crusaders. Later, the high authorities in Moscow would receive letters informing them that "Klaipėda erected a monument to some kind of German-Pruss".
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Location: Sculpture Park, among K. Donelaitis Street, Liepų Street, Trilapio Street and S. Daukanto Street Authors: sculptor Adomas Brakas Built: 1925
Monument to the Klaipėda Revolt of 1923
Location: Authors: Built:
Title (please fill in) The Pedestal Left for Your Sculpture. Please create and write down the story of the monument
The Klaipėda Sculpture Park hosts the monument to the participants in the 1923 uprising, as well as the graves of the rebels who died in the battle for reunification of Klaipėda and Lithuania. The monument-obelisk is an authentic demarcation (frontier) post that once divided Lithuania Minor from the Great Lithuania
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Kolesnik Vasily
Kolesnik Vasily Photos by Alexander Lyubin Kaliningrad, Russia Journalist, editor. Media projects curator and producer
Maritime News Translated by Irina Dewar
Energheticheskaya, Lyamina, Gooskova, Blochny — these are the names of streets and side streets, which one will never find on a city map. These are places where even a taxi driver would have difficulty in finding an address let alone parking a car — unless one is a lorry driver delivering construction materials. The most popular hat here is a helmet.
This publication was released in "Baltic Broadway", the Kaliningrad entertainment magazine, at the end of 2012. Originally, the authors of this publication, Vasily Kolesnik, journalist, and Alexander Lyubin, photographer, saw it as part of a series dedicated to closed and semi-closed city areas, in particular, the Yantar shipyard.
The Yantar shipyard is a city within a city: eighty hectares of land, nearly four thousand workers, huge German hangar-workshops and gigantic cranes. There is a constant mechanical drone — either rhythmical or monotonous. Curious or mocking glances from the helmets focus on a stranger. And ships, of course, are everywhere — already assembled, on slipways; on photos, oil canvases, drawings. Most ships are military. This is the reason why the entrance checkpoint is so strict and why the shipyard has such an inappropriate name — Yantar (Amber). Originally, in 1945, it was called the 820th and was renamed in 1966. Around that time, it became fashionable to include Yantar in the names of companies (Yantarnye stranitsy — Amber Pages), competitions (Yantarnoe ozherelye — Amber Necklace), music groups (Yantarnye gitary — Amber Guitars), sports grounds (Yantar Sports Palace) and anything else that had nothing to do to with the extraction and processing of the mineral of that name.
(Later the publication became part of an exhibition project "The Story of the Baltic" (Baltic Branch of the State Centre of Modern Art, Kaliningrad Regional Non-Governmental Organization "ArtMission", Nida Art Colony and the Academy of Science of Vilnius, 2013)
The history of the shipyard began in the 1930s when Schichau, the big jointstock company, bought the Koenigsberg Union Gisserei (Union of Foundry) and started to build military ships. Then, from 1948, the Soviet Government placed orders to build and repair military ships. The collapse of the USSR resulted in a crisis that ended only in the middle of the first decade of the millennium — around the time when India ordered three military frigates. Nowadays, the Yantar slipways are booked several years in advance. The Ministry of Defence is usually the principal customer. There are nine workshops at the Yantar shipyard. The main ones are slipways, assembly and welding, pipe-assembly and assembly-delivery. There are two slipways — "Yantar" and "Boorevestnik" (Storm Petrel). A slipway is a huge space in the open air, where the body of the ship is assembled from ready70
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made components delivered from workshops. The working hours are from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The workers follow the same routine every day except at lunchtime. Lunchtime is from 12 p.m. until 1 p.m.; the jetty is full of anglers, the assembly and delivery workshop is a popular place for playing chess, billiards, table tennis, backgammon and cards. Everybody plays quickly and noisily, as there is not enough time for everything. When the noise in the workshop is like that at a sports stadium and the clatter of the big wooden chessmen on the board (also big) is more distinct, we meet Yury Mashinin. Master Mashinin, trying to get rid of curious persons, is a master among workers and managers who feels he is caught between two rocks. He tells us that thirty years ago he used to be the Deputy Chairman of a trade union and a secretary of the Komsomol organization. Within two weeks, he carved the chessmen for the young people to play at lunchtime, and an Uncle Kolya Rakhmanov made the table. The billiards were obtained later. For those who do not bring their lunches from home and do not eat them in haste before the ping-pong game starts, there are three canteens at their disposal. The prices are reasonable (first and second course, dessert and a drink come at a price of 80 roubles). The menu is traditional, but the names are not: e.g. salads such as Prichudlivy (Odd), Serdechny (Hearty) and Krasnaya Roza (Red Rose). Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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There is a popular theory why the shipyard remained intact during the Second World War; firstly, somebody in Great Britain held a significant stock of Schichau shares, so the British airforce could not bomb it. Then, the Germans who were fleeing decided to destroy the shipyard before the Russians came to the city, so they ordered an engineer, German by nationality but Russian by origin, to set off the explosives. The engineer, Zaytsev, not only did not set off the explosives but also went on to help the Russians defuse them and restarted the production process. Later on, after the War, he was killed — probably by Germans who stayed on in Koenigsberg. Alexander Finkov, a non-combatant second rank captain, and now the director of the shipyard museum, recounted that theory. In the museum, a metal drawing board and samples of wooden blocks represent the German era. A number of certificates of one of the first directors reflects the Soviet period. To get in to the museum is very easy — make a call to the administration of the shipyard, agree on the date, number of people and the details of passports. There is a library on the same floor as the museum: two halls, two courteous librarians, one cat and 150 thousand books. The first hall keeps the specialized literature (there is the Baltic Shipbuilding College within the shipyard itself); the second hall has an impressive collection of Russian and foreign classical books. For example, the full range of "World Literature Library" and rare antiquarian books, e.g. "Talks About Сinematography" by Mikhail Romm. One can hardly find such a book elsewhere in Kaliningrad. We leave the quiet library with its pleasing smell of yellow pages and covers and head for a painting workshop through a slipway. After that, we look at the panoramic view of the shipyard from the top of the floating dock. We look around in the Baltic Shipyard College. We leave. One hour before the end of the working hours. We spent the whole day here but Yantar still remains impossible to comprehend in full. Here, among the side streets with German houses, people come to build ships for the Ministry of Defence of Russia; and when lunchtime comes people start to play chess at the table or eat Prichudlivy salad at the other table covered with an oilcloth decorated with giraffes, lions and rhinoceroses
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Kozłowski Wojciech
Kozłowski Wojciech Zielona Góra, Poland Director of BWA, curator
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the Course of Exploring Various Countries by Bus (or the Impossibility Which Governs You Even As You Travel) The uncertainty principle (or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle / intederminacy) — a principle, according to which there are such pairs of variables which cannot be simultaneously measured with unlimited precision. 1
If all of us present here, apart from rare exceptions, were to see the mathematical formula of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, there would be sighs galore and recollections of the torture of Maths classes intertwined with nostalgic jokes. And yet I cannot stop myself from adding quasi-scientific overtones to the perceptive actions I undertook during my holiday, when I was not yet aware of the pain caused by one’s own — and not other people’s — omission and stupidity.
1
As cited in Wikipedia.
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This text makes for the best read accompanied by the songs of Billie Holiday, especially those recorded after 1950. It could seem that this music has nothing to do with the route of our trip and I would bet that the artist had no idea whatsoever about the Hanseatic League, Teutonic Knights or the location of Gdańsk, not to mention Immanuel Kant. Still, the nostalgia and memory of loss which constitute the essence of this music are something that accompanies the former and current inhabitants of this area on a daily basis. It fits perfectly. We should also note that Heisenberg is not just the pseudonym of the main protagonist of "Breaking Bad". This was my last personal interjection, although I am now lying through my teeth, for it is impossible to go sightseeing and tell stories about it in an impersonal manner. You can also watch the images on your computer screen, using the well-known Google Maps. This was where I again glanced at the gate of the Kaliningrad shipyard, which was nice, despite the menacing entrance — where I had to show my passport and attentively look into the eyes of the stern guard. Not everyone is allowed to enter, so if any tourists are reading this, don’t even go there. Choose another shipyard, the Gdańsk one, where you can walk to your heart’s content only to later ask why it had to end like this. Stupid question — you haven’t tried to make it any different. Own up — have you even lifted any of your fingers?
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Nothing is what it seems if you are watching it with another person. In actual fact, to a certain degree you are seeing things through his eyes, filtered through his consciousness, preferences or bias. His knowledge or ignorance, willingness or reluctance. Even if you don’t want to. Even if you think that you can go it alone, for your eyes only, since you are smart, you have all the answers, you know languages, you can describe the style and you can distinguish between a groin vault and a stellar one. Through his photos or the decision not to take them, or the decision to enter or not enter a place. Everything conspires so that things are not what you’d want them to be or what they seem. So that you don’t know what’s yours, what’s mine and what’s theirs. So that it’s like in the guidebook or after a couple of beers combined with vodka. And so that you can’t even distinguish between either of them, for nothing is for real. It is always from someone, through someone, to someone and for someone. Your eyes are merely glasses whose lenses represent a glance through Someone. I will not tell you about the journey, for my memory of it the day after was the same as after a month: snatches of conversations, someone’s perfume, a bird next to the road, a cloud, the colour of grass and bees in the crown of a linden tree. We went past beautiful and unbeautiful streets, past buildings, squares and churches both ruined and renovated, old and new, past bars and restaurants, young and old people, museums and galleries. Something important could have probably lurked everywhere. I took over a thousand photographs along the way. I have to pick ten — I have to, for maybe they contain an objective record of the unique connection between the eye, the lens of the mobile phone camera and the time of recording. The decisive moment, however ridiculous it might seem in the context of a digital set of pixels.
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
The selection is random: I quickly flip through the small icons, blindly, and pick some by chance. If I pick an obviously poor photo, I take the next one. Even I am curious. 75
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№95 A glass brick wall. At the back of a modernist residential building in Gdynia. A shelter in the basement and a small museum of the People’s Republic of Poland, this is how I remembered it, but maybe it was more about the city and its history. The wall was on the surface, at the back, near a strange, small construction, which turned out to be a ventilator of an underground garage — also open to visitors. Although glass bricks are slightly passé, they are having a comeback, like all modernist inventions. Seemingly transparent, but the image doesn’t show. Contrary to appearances, it is a perfect material for a wall — which, in this particular case, enclosed a single-family home, slightly odd in the context of the collective nature of the adjoining block of flats. Like two attitudes to life, two concepts of being towards one’s neighbour. Perhaps, I am thinking now, it is even more interesting than the cellar and its museum. Here everything happens without words or images, it is clear at first sight — like the glass bricks and the sun they reflected.
№129 A sculpture from Malbork. Completely out of context. I probably took this photo because I was missing Zdziś, whom I left behind — under good care, but still left behind. A child with a dog on a leash, a part of a larger sculpture, as a fragment of an adult leg can be seen in the picture. Had it been in natural proportions, the child would have been very small, not to mention the animal. This would have been the room with numerous mediaeval sculptures. The child (a girl?) has an adult face and the dog is bulldog-like. His "face" reminded me of the numerous representations of the devil found in Malbork. I probably took this photo out of longing, out of fear too, that something is lost, gone and surely cannot be undone. Apart from that, I recalled the numerous contemporary sculptures scattered across the entire, enormous space of the castle. Such mixing of the order of things is rather commonplace nowadays and I usually have nothing against it. Here, however, I took no pleasure in looking at it. I didn’t know who was supposed to be important or more important and whether this was a clash or co-existence. What should contemporary sculptures communicate here? What is their story? I had the impression that the Teutonic commanders were mocking them to their face, crunching their bones in their hidden tombs.
№174 A view of the main gate to the Zoological Garden in the vicinity of the entrance to Kaliningrad’s Hotel Moscow. I really wanted to go there and was afraid at the same time. I don’t like such places, and yet I sometimes venture inside, because animals are fascinating, different and interesting. I always have the impression that they are suffering (I was once almost reduced to tears in the monkey house at Warsaw Zoo — which was actually very neat and tidy — they are so like us), but it’s different. In the end I didn‘t go, because there was always something more important, we were walking or going somewhere, always together, and I didn’t want to break ranks. Sometimes the sin of omission is the worst of all sins. If I were to offer you advice, go there, no matter what, absolutely. 76
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№272 The visit to Exit and Shit galleries. Still Kaliningrad. Young people who believe in art, in its social and creative potential. I was deeply touched by all that, because, frankly speaking, I remembered myself at their age, my faith and conviction that what I was doing was deeply meaningful and important not just for me. In a small room, we watched the documentation, while in an even smaller room, practically a corridor, there was an exhibition — photos from the army taken by one of the artists. A documentation of people, days, activities. I could be seeing the exact same exhibition in some Polish gallery, but I probably never will, Polish artists don’t go to the army anymore. Perhaps a different mode should be used to talk about something, which in Poland, paradoxically now more than ever, has become an off-limits area to "civilians"? I was convinced by the honesty and sound idea behind this project. I felt as if I had entered a time machine, which transported me to a time when the world might have been more difficult, but the choices were obvious. The photo is out of focus, like any time-machine photo would be.
№327 This could be confidential — we could take photos there, but only facing straight, and this one is taken slightly at an angle. The Amber Shipyard. A lot of names in the Kaliningrad Oblast refer to this fossil, since this is where it is most abundant. The gentleman who was our guide in the shipyard museum was passionate about his job. We found out so much that — as is usually the case in such circumstances — I have forgotten most of it. Which, of course, is not the result of the narrative itself, but of my poor perception. I remembered the wooden paving and the Indian warship. But the shipyard is roaring, working and operating, which is also an odd flashback of my youth, when the entire class would visit various operating facilities in order to see the hard toil of the workers and consider a potential future job. It was always roaring, always smelt of grease and the people's faces were always very weary. It seemed more joyful here, but maybe it was just my impression… Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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№444 A war cemetery somewhere along the route to Bagrationovsk or in the vicinity of Yantarny. My inept attempts at finding the location using the longitude and latitude in Google Maps yielded no results. Thanks to the aid provided by a German foundation dealing with cemeteries it was beautiful like a dreamy meadow. This was where I heard bees in the crown of an enormous linden tree. It was hot and we walked in silence, reading the surnames of mostly young soldiers from the gravestones. The whole evil of war seemed to disappear in this lazy afternoon, although the crowd of eighteen- or twenty-yearolds lying under our feet probably did not want to disappear. The dissonance of the neat surroundings and its meaning. I would recommend this place to everyone who doesn’t want to make some sense of this "enclave", but to feel it. №543 A white cat in the grass. It could have been anywhere. Wherever I am, I take photos of THEM. For they are a rather widespread species, if I may use that expression. The more one moves to the south, the more stray ones there are. In different states, conditions and ages (although the remarkable cat scientist, Zuzanna Stromenger — forgive my cheap sentimentalism, but may the cat purr over her soul — assessed that the average age of a stray cat is a maximum of ca. three years), always slightly withdrawn, always taking over the neighbourhood, even if they are invisible. Treated in different ways, they are an important element of the landscape. Even if they are absent, this means something. I have entire sets of cat photos from different areas, I took some fifteen pictures of them during this trip. Not a lot, these were nonfeline lands that we were traversing.
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№668 A ferry to the beach in Klaipėda — I don’t remember whether this was the one we took. It reminded me of the incessant presence of the Baltic Sea throughout this journey. It was always near, hidden from view or in full sight, such as on the Curonian Spit or in Gdynia. Visible from the house of Thomas Mann in Nida, in Palanga, in Yantarny. In all of the places I have remembered or forgotten. A few of us went to the beach; it was some informal time. There could have been more sun, but it was windy and very sea-like. I was looking for amber, not sure what for — I haven't done it for thirty odd years; I immediately found several small pieces, as I would in this area, but I don’t think it was purely by chance. We also ate a very tasty meal prepared from tasty home-grown ingredients. The atmosphere was friendly, as if not on an official trip, but on a journey with friends to their places of residence. For those several dozen minutes, the time stopped between the sea and the beach and I felt that the true taste lies in the relationship with people — the place is of secondary importance, just as long as it’s friendly enough, but it is not the most important. Navigare necesse est, but only in good company.
№770 An art gallery pavilion in Palanga. This trip was instructive, pleasant, but terrifying at the same time. It was about time, passing away, big money and base impulses. It could have occurred in any place where people and architecture combine to create the serpent of greed. Which, however, may be understandable. The conservator’s stories about the struggle with individuals building horrible shacks against the backdrop of beautiful, traditional architecture are, I guess, familiar all across Central Europe, whatever this term means, we understand it anyway. It is bound to stay that way for a long time, I guess we just have to really settle here and realise that this is truly ours, or, in any case, realise that
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there are others who also have eyes, who also have a brain and who would like to be in the same space. Well, but were we to reach a global understanding on that, there would be no wars, hunger or poverty, perhaps even no humanity; black scenarios in the beautiful Palanga, which was a true gem of a spa and is slightly changing towards becoming a typical seaside resort, but if guarded like that, maybe things will not be so bad in the end. The hotels of the big fish who has the city under his thumb are not at all ugly.
№1006 A park and former cemetery in Klaipėda. This particular photo is not a random choice. I selected it on purpose, remembering all the former cemeteries we encountered all the time, whether nameless or marked, preserved or amended. We use them to underline or obliterate something. They are never simply resting places. Nowadays, their park or cemetery function is always political and historical. The Klaipėda one is somewhat different, its past is not obscured. The remnants of tombstones are fighting to remain on the surface, but the second part has hosted a sculpture park since 1977. The destruction of the cemetery, which happened not so long ago, is typical of our common neighbourhood in its barbarity. Still, let’s look at it in a different light: although painful, it is often inevitable. In my city, which until 1945 had been German, the cemetery was "transformed" into a park in 1966. There is a bridge in Klaipėda which had been made in the factory of Georg Beuchelt in the city I live in now — today called Zielona Góra, then Grünberg. But I only found out about this after I returned.
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I still remember the smell of roadside dust somewhere outside the city where we had a brief stopover, but this is really difficult to describe. You have to try it yourselves, as always, and even if you don’t feel like it, at least you have such a possibility
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Krasny Marcin
Krasny Marcin Warsaw, Poland Art critic, curator of the Centre for Contemporary Art "Ujazdowski Castle"
Screens Made of Concrete. Decorations of High-Rise Panel Buildings Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
A. Basista, Betonowe dziedzictwo. Architektura w Polsce czasów komunizmu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2001, p. 85.
1
S. Kisielewski, Dzienniki, Warsaw: "Iskry", 1996, p. 815
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The experience of residential high-rise estates made of prefabricated concrete slabs is common to all citizens of post-Communist countries. The coarse structures are the home of one half of city dwellers (and often even more) in the former Soviet bloc. Erected predominantly in late 1960s as well as in the 1970s and 80s, concrete tower blocks have become so rooted in the landscape that it is difficult to imagine this part of the world without them. "They were to be a panacea for everything: both for the general shortage of flats and the disastrously low quality of construction. Neither in the former nor in the latter case, however, did these hopes materialise", writes Andrzej Basista in the monograph "Concrete Heritage. Architecture in Communist Poland" 1. The modernist myth born in Le Corbusier's French studio eventually turned into a caricature of itself, while the "machine for living" in practice proved to be riddled with errors. In the 1980s, when concrete homes had become commonplace, one of the Eastern bloc countries launched a specific toy: plastic blocks which resembled prefab elements of apartments — windowless white walls, window or balcony modules, ceilings with protruding joints and brown connectors with holes for the protrusions, even small green plants to be hung from windowsills. This was a fantastic gift for any child born under communist rule — or rather it could have been, had it not been for one detail — the blocks did not match. The protrusions did not match the holes, the walls did not touch each other and the connectors were either too long or too short. Everything was wrong. The toy was a perfect metaphor of the macro-scale reality, for the residential tower blocks were often botched jobs one somehow had to deal with later. "I am terrified by the new buildings: graceless, lacking any style and destroying the landscape in an unparalleled manner. How dreadfully terrible will such a Poland look years later", columnist Stefan Kisielewski once wrote in his "Journals" 2. However, beauty is relative and there can be no disputes in matters of taste. Is it possible to notice anything of interest in the landscape of high-rise estates nowadays? Have they matured like vintage wine, in line with the wishes
K-10 Courtyard in a block of flats in Kaliningrad. Photo by E. Umansky, 2010
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of decision-makers of the time, or rather fermented like pickled cucumbers? Nobody could have foreseen what fate would await them forty years later… Therefore, the residents took matters into their own hands. Since state authorities rarely proposed any coherent maintenance and redevelopment policies, changes occurred on the level of individual estates or even free-standing buildings. The blocks would often serve as a backdrop for the creative expression of their inhabitants, a screen depicting the aesthetic sympathies, social transformations and individual affections of a vast group of people. Travelling between Gdańsk, Kaliningrad and Klaipėda, one may discover a whole array of domesticating and aestheticising strategies employed by individual residents or communities living in prefabricated tower blocks.
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Mural, Zaspa district in Gdańsk. Photo by E. Umansky, 2015
Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
Gdańsk In Gdańsk, as in the whole of Poland, residential communities and housing cooperatives regularly put money aside for repair funds in order to pack entire buildings, from the ground floor up to the roof, in Styrofoam. No wonder, since it is the cheapest — although, lamentably, not the best — method of thermal insulation of flats, which had already been built with numerous cock-ups, ranging from damaged slab edges to seriously miscalculated dimensions. Once the joints have been patched with tarry insulation and the building covered with Styrofoam, it may finally be somewhat domesticated, individualised, and become more pleasant for the residents. To this end, Styrofoam is usually covered with coloured plaster, applied in geometricised colour patches either corresponding to the window lines or completely ignoring them. The effect
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resembles the work of a folk artist, who suddenly opted for geometrical painting in its simplest yet monumental form. Using pastel colours (although not exclusively, for he sometimes resorts to lush greens or fiery oranges or pinks), he covers building façades with decorations composed of squares, rectangles, sometimes even triangles. The most interesting representations of the genre may be found in the Zaspa housing estate in Gdańsk, where one may encounter such unique specimens as paintings resembling soaring towers with flags at the top — everything painted using the simplest geometrical forms. This estate also features one of the rare examples of employing the circular shape, usually used with reluctance owing to the technical difficulty of forming it on building walls. On the large scale, it is easier to achieve a straight line. Tourists longing for exceptionally powerful impressions may look for the Falowiec — the longest Polish residential building located in Przymorze estate at Obrońców Wybrzeża Street in Gdańsk. It is eight-hundred and fifty metres long, has sixteen staircases and around six thousand inhabitants; three bus stops are placed along the side. Polish artist Julita Wójcik made an eight-metre yarn model of this building, resembling the sweaters crocheted by grandmas for young girls back in communist times. The baby-pink colour of the yarn is a faithful copy of the colour of plaster applied to Falowiec in contemporary times. Painting work on building façades may be treated as geometrical kitsch, but associations with folk art are also justified. At the Alternativa 2013 exhibition at the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk, Estonian urban theorist Maros Krivy illustrated the "promise of happiness" offered by façades of buildings covered with "fanciful patches of yellow, orange, pink, purple and green". The description of the project asked: "But is today’s utopia nothing more than the dismantling of the modernist post-war utopia, with colours substituting greyness and individualist ideas supplanting communitarian ones?" 86
Roof in a block of flats in Kaliningrad. Photo by E. Umansky, 2013
K-10 Kaliningrad In Kaliningrad, similar actions aimed at saving the aesthetics of prefabricated buildings are extremely rare. Russian citizens are clearly releasing communist tensions, when individualism was persecuted and uniformity — elevated. Furthermore, one should remember that Soviet authorities outlawed the creation of small housing cooperatives; estates were managed by bureaucratic monsters, which may be the source of today’s lack of cooperation between residents. This is why Russian blocks, despite the very interesting forms and details one may encounter, are predominantly not properly maintained or consistently decorated. The abovementioned details include concrete openwork staircase covers cast in various, sometimes very fanciful shapes, or loggias made of metal sheets, now regrettably very corroded. Owing to the fact that Russian tower blocks are generally not insulated with Styrofoam and plastered rather rarely, the tourist has a unique opportunity to witness what prefabricated buildings originally looked like in the 1970s and 1980s. However, what seems most interesting are the individual methods of adapting balconies or even the external walls of single apartments. Residents of the blocks, sometimes even the closest neighbours, often have different social and material status, which translates to a different level of adaptation. One may sometimes encounter isolated patches of plaster and brand new windows right next to raw concrete slabs with rusty joints. Even though, as a result, the entire block is in danger of collapsing, the residents clearly follow the "my home is my castle" principle. Balconies are often completely walled off, giving residents additional usable space. Sometimes, on account of such methods, different for each apartment, the entire block resembles a giant favela patched together from what happened to be at hand. Consequently, the need to personalise one's living space takes on fantastic forms, which may be observed without the need to enter the building itself. The way of organising the balcony, the objects kept there or the decorations and ornaments — all this awaits the alternative tourist who wants to get to know not only the country, but also its inhabitants, yet is too shy to approach somebody directly or knock on the door of a stranger’s flat. Swiss artist Seline Baumgartner did a project in Poland (and presented it at Alternativa 2013) which focused on such petty interventions as walling-off balconies, decorations in the form of potted plants or repainting, which were to individualise the repetitive space of high-rise estates. It could be expanded onto other Eastern bloc countries. "Great high-rise estates are a mosaic of such individualist manifestations, which remain in conflict with the aesthetic concept of normalisation of large architectural objects; they represent a rebellion against the standardisation ideas", wrote the curators.
Klaipėda In comparison to Gdańsk and Kaliningrad, Klaipėda seems the most coherent and aesthetic, although also the most monotonous. Here, prefabricated concrete was often combined with bricks. As a result, the estates took on a homogenous character, typical of this region, which may intuitively be construed as more related to Scandinavia than Eastern Europe. Even if a building did not have brick walls or they had been covered with thermal insulation, they are still painted Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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in a colour close to the original: orange-reddish. Like in Russia, balconies are sometimes walled off, which serves first and foremost as protection against the harsh winters, but the scale of such practices is decidedly smaller. Some Lithuanian prefabricated buildings could even compete with modern, more comfortable housing, but even here does one see curious examples of renovation work or surprising ways of managing façades. Generally speaking, in most districts around the centre we may encounter apartments hidden behind labyrinths of orange-reddish walls. For fans of alternative tourism, visiting a new country is also tantamount to discovering what functions beyond tourist city centres. The first step in that direction may be to observe high-rise housing estates, whose façades can often say more about their residents that they themselves would be willing to tell. The renaissance of folk art in monumental forms, the strive for individualisation and personalisation of one’s own space even at the expense of the interest 88
Residential area in Kaliningrad. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2014
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Gabi, Wielka płyta (‘Concrete High-Rise’), prod. by Studio Hammer (http://www.tekstowo.pl/piosenka,gabi,wielka_plyta.html)
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of the community, the adaptations and decorations — all this may be treated as a reaction to the era of obligatory standardisation and normalisation, a personal objection to imposed order or a simple need to manifest one’s social status and taste — whatever they might be. In the People’s Republic of Poland, concrete high-rise estates were assumed to last some fifty to seventy years. This deadline is approaching quickly and mercilessly. According to experts, with proper renovation and maintenance, prefabricated buildings may last up to one hundred and twenty or one hundred and fifty years from the time of their erection. What next? Around twelve million people live in such estates in Poland itself. Concrete high-rise has become a permanent element of culture, which gave rise to an entire generation of rappers and football fans, sometimes referred to as "blokersi" ("blockers"). One of the representatives of this generation, a certain Gabi, used to sing: "This is my place in this concrete jungle / This is where my heart is as well as my home / Concrete High-Rise, remember, it’s where I belong" 3
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Mikhailov Sergey
Mikhailov Sergey Kaliningrad, Russia Writer, translator, member of the Union of Russian Writers. Compiler of anthologies of modern Kaliningrad literature
Discoveries and Losses Translated by Irina Dewar
Travelling and death have something in common in terms of a mystery behind them. All sorts of guides fail to unravel the enigma of gaining and losing in both, only your own experience can be the key. The difference between them is a possibility of return. One more thing is that the itinerary is known. At a young age, when I became a homebody after the riotous life at the backyard of my childhood, I was fascinated by death. I stared at it and devoted my poor poetry to it as if trying to penetrate into it or perhaps call it while staying indeed at a safe distance. However, once I found myself presumably quite close to it and thus not in the mood for any poetry. My high school love went to study in another city and soon left me for somebody else. It became clear that I could not live without her, or I do not want, it made no difference in terms of a way out. I decided to kill myself. Death was suddenly unravelled as a deliverance from so much meaninglessness of life that death seemed quite a relief. However, the method of suicide, which I chose, for various reasons, required a short waiting period. During those three months of cheerless existence but meaningful due to the oncoming end, life still took revenge. An unfamiliar person declared love for me, and I could not reciprocate being actually dead. However, as a result I came to life, the confession made a wonderful shift in my soul by dropping off the unbearable burden that I wanted to get rid of through death. Now again looking a little wan but full of several years of my own experience I see the reason in just revival of self-conceit. The frozen scale pan was outweighed by a sign that I could still be loved. Perhaps it was for this promise and born-again I rushed into my first more or less serious travelling, Kaliningrad (to get higher education, according to the official version). I was travelling, only now it is important, from my small Moldova of childhood into the big world, to the very border with the unknown but already half-opened Europe, 1988. I knew Kaliningrad at a glimpse from the back of a truck which was riding in August five years ago from the Southern Railway Station, the blank grey wall of a cinema in incredible sparks, a high bridge, a river, trees, wasteland, and that was all.
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Street art, Gdańsk. Photo by E. Umansky, 2013
Now, where did I come? First of all, the city showed me the personal freedom not experienced until then. First, my independent ‘adult’ life began by entering the university there. Secondly, the life itself and its location were yet to open. Thirdly, the city, even at first glance, produced the impression of something free, at least, from the thick of my Moldovan prejudices. Fourthly, all previous life was left far in the past. Life was here and now. I was in it a beginner, a scholar and a whippersnapper. While walking around the city I soon found the bridge and river and the "Oktyabr" (October) movie theatre (now the House of Art); stumbled upon the giant skull of the House of Soviets miraculously not seen from the body of the truck, which formed a rhyme — not dissonance — with the otherworldly wreck of the then Cathedral; went through the rough Brandenburg gate leading from here to here again; discovered the enemy’s fortifications amicably mucked up but without having lost their hostile nobility. I was watching paving blocks going under the asphalt and reappearing in its holes… I learnt about palimpsest later at university lectures. But the city spoke in the same manner, in its two languages. The top Soviet official bureaucratese was clear to me like my mother tongue, it lied. The German language muffled by it still remains confused, what kind of life does the dead speak about? Definitely not about mine but perhaps about mine too? Is our communication possible at all? The Koenigsberg myth, which by clawing its way had provided the basis for Kaliningrad and now sounding out of its pit of hell right from under its feet
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Mikhailov Sergey
not recognized by strange, not created by it, consciousness. Its code is not available to us. But this indistinct mumbling, which overtakes you anywhere in a modern city, raises obvious concern. Such reminders of nothingness, or otherness, which are scattered everywhere like Tom Thumb’s pebbles, are perhaps its key landmark. Here, borderlands are everywhere as far as the eye can see. Exclavity I mean last. Say if it was about the epic Murom surrounded by alien land, then the perception of the city would be one-piece, i.e. a citadel, closed-end, its own flesh and blood, a part of Russia. But Kaliningrad itself encompasses the border. And the inner boundary is still locked down. The Soviet urban life seen in the late 1980s seemed to me a barbarian who had destroyed something beautiful and harmonious, the culture of a higher profile but alien and thus frightening those who had won that worthless trophy. Those who could not comprehend and transform it, those who could not reborn, settle in it and failed to quickly forgive its carriers. Koenigsberg found itself in the heat of the moment and received in full. That was fancily named restoration of Kaliningrad. I thought we simply insulted over this city but I knew that destroyers considered it as the embodiment of an even more terrible barbarism, and they had a right to retaliation through suffering. They also wanted to get rid of the disastrous past for a new life — albeit not perfect — but that of their own. However, I felt comfortable here. That is the kind of comfort like at the old cemetery where only strangers lie. I mean walking. The conditions there were favourable for existential sadness, thoughts about the impermanence of life and the comforting throes of creation. Soon I began to write poetry again, and it was not for nothing, ‘Where does this city come from? How to start a line of poetry to finish with such a blot?’ As I remember, a blot meant not so much the Kaliningrad exterior but the outlines of the city on the map, and the outlines have changed since then. The initial bewilderment remained. Where did it really come from? Where does it go? What historical logic can be assumed in its life, from that time until the present? In the parlance of our time, narrative disintegrates. But the history of the city remains elusive; and if the German thesis and Soviet antithesis have already been entered into it, it is easy to conclude that it will be continued in the synthesis. However, something else should die for that sake. In person. A human is a changeable and fickle creature. Essentially, actual me was born by Kaliningrad, this is my second home loved by me not less than the first one 1. Before me it became the one for post-war migrants many of whom might also have first seen the city from the back of a truck. Gaining a second homeland is perhaps the most important topic for Kaliningrad; the new century has brought new settlers here. Everyone, like an uprooted tree, makes haste to find new roots in the soil; and in order to get acclimated, he/she will be ready to sacrifice something that was relevant in a past life. So they will become closer to each other, as he understands. But is he/she aware of his/her foreignness on the earth, namely the root foreignness? If so, then he/she has uprooted at least one stereotype of the recent past in himself/herself.
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The first one, Moldova moved into a gloomy memory area adjacent to nothingness. On my underworld map it is now located next door to Koenigsberg, and hence for me it is at a stone’s throw.
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House of Soviets, Kaliningrad. Photo by D. Vyshemirskii
I do not think that today it makes sense to be a Kaliningrader without being an outsider at home, to be a citizen without suspecting a defector in yourself, i.e. through that internal boundary. The issue is not about the right to this land (a person living on it is certainly right) but about respect to those who are in it, who are now the land itself, to it as such. A kind of a boundary is in any of us, between you familiar or inveterate and you unknown, changing. It is this personal boundary to which, I think, everybody is lead walking around contemporary Kaliningrad with its contradictory unity of past and present, internal and external, its own and strange. Where else to open borders if not here? This is a territory of an endless journey, going beyond the edge, which is possible if those who go are ready to open for a dialogue with the other one unfamiliar, to give up part of yourself that has definitely come true and opposes new. In this personal effort, I see pledge of rebirth and the mentioned synthesis, the point at which past losses become a discovery
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Milukas Ricardas
Milukas Ričardas Kaunas, Lithuania Artist
T-Shirts
These drawings/symbols came upon my mind when I absolutely refused any preconceived opinions, clichés or stereotypes, and was meditating purely on the essence of the three cities, including the thin red line that would connect them with each other… My hand started to draw a line on its own, driven by my subconscious impulses. Gdańsk is memorable for its spirit of ancient castles and urban landscapes that have remained and have been brought back to life by renovators. Kaliningrad and the mindset of its people, as I see them, are characteristic of strong technical and constructive principles. Klaipėda and its surroundings revealed to me through the beauty of its somewhat exotic nature and its unconditional influence that made me think about the temporariness and evanescence of human living. Life is short like a tourist season in a small resort town, while our environment and the things that we attach ourselves to, are nothing but pieces of stage set and theatre props.
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The fort — the rocket base — the port and souvenirs Their situation illustrates the inevitable change of times. When some things cease to function and lose their primary purpose, in the course of time they gain new functions. We often add a shade of irony to their exterior form that often has some mystical features. The very idea of universality is quite attractive and praiseworthy, as it makes a step toward sociability and communication. The picture shows the importance of coming back to primary values and to nature nowadays: the ways in which the former fort can turn into educational space for children, a living book on history, while the T-shirt as a souvenir would take the shape of a small bag or a peace flag.
Sketches. Souvenir T-shirts-small bags
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Milukas Ricardas
"Unity idea" T-shirt The three nations are wearing clothes displayng the symbols of peace and friendship. Each of the nations has its own specific colours in its symbolism, but red is the common colour that unites us: red symbolizes brotherhood, fire, and blood. Red is also present in the flags of all the three nations.
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"Save me and protect me" T-shirt This loose, warm T-shirt made of rough fabric, just like the legendary big and friendly heart and soul of a Russian person, is simple and cozy. The design of this T-shirt also shows sincerity and endless confidence: when we celebrate — we do go wild, if we pray — we do it from the heart!
"Kaliningrad" T-shirt is a reminder of famous Russian czar Peter the Great and his idea about the sea and the window that he opened to Europe for Russia. However, at the same time, its design raises a question: if you want to go out to new space, shouldn‘t you start from opening your own mind?
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T-shirt with a chicken The design of this T-shirt is full of dualism. In this model, the topic of religion interweaves with the symbolism of the two opposites, while the symbol of waves makes a direct allusion to Gdańsk as a port city.
"Gdańsk" T-shirt is meant to commemorate the times of ancient knights and crusaders. In this model, I have used the symbol of two crosses: it is the former coat of arms of the Gdańsk city, bearing the memories of the prosperity times in the glorious kingdom of Poland.
T-shirt model with cherries This T-shirt model with cherries has been created on the border zone between Poland and Russia. Both countries belong to the Slavic family of languages, but also have quite a lot of things in common with each other. In this particular work, I am trying to speak about it by using drawing and the specific features of the fabric.
We the Lithuanians have a saying: The wolf is not so terrible as he is painted. I think that there are a lot of ways to paint and draw: for example, the drawn version of Russia‘s flag looks much cozier and warmer than the one we see in official TV broadcasts. When I draw its blue part, I imagine water and blue sky, in the red part, I see strawberry fields or affection, while white is the color of peace, light, and tranquility.
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Milukas Ricardas
T-shirt with crowns On July 3, 2013, I was visiting Marienburg castle. There, I saw a tourist wearing a T-shirt that showed a lot of crown silhouettes against golden background, and I had an idea of creating T-shirts that would be characteristic of each country. I was thinking about fashion and styles, and I caught myself thinking: who are the kings nowadays? If they exist at all — what do they look like? And who is really ruling the world today?
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T-shirt dedicated to the sea The subject of the sea unites and connects all the three countries that we have visited, so this T-shirt is fit for any of them: Gdańsk, Kaliningrad or Klaipėda.
T-shirt with humming bees The idea of this T-shirt is related to the fact that a young and beautiful body is especially attractive and seductive, in spite of the many dangers around it, while the person who is wearing this T-shirt is beaming with youthful courage and self-confidence. This model is a reflection of the aesthetical perception charachertistic of the contemporary young generation.
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"Titties show" T-shirt There is no single or complete interpretation of this model, as it depends on the relation between the person who is wearing it and the one who is looking at it, i.e. the assessing observer. The reaction of the latter person is likely to be critical, because very thin and transparent material is a symbol of the liberating Western world, while the fact that something that used to be considered very private and reserved, will inevitably provoke a conflict. If one looks at the T-shirt from the typical Soviet perspective, this model could have been named "a manifestation of rotten capitalism". But if a young girl from East Europe puts on this T-shirt, one can insensibly make a more contemporary interpretation: her body is her main subject of sale.
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Moreno Eriz
Moreno Eriz Bilbao, Spain Artist, photographer
The Berlin Route Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
The Berlin route (Polish: "Berlinka") is the contemporary name of the motorway constructed by the Third Reich between 1933 and the outbreak of the World War II. Its official name is "Reichsautobahn" (The Global Motorway). It was supposed to connect Berlin with Koenigsberg which was located on the eastern border of the country. In 1938, it became the pretext to wage war when the Germans demanded that Poland provide an exterritorial corridor allowing them to construct the Berlin route across its territory. The construction was never finished. In the years 2011–2012 Spanish artist Eriz Moreno organized a photography campaign entitled "Concrete Project" which was devoted to this exceptional undertaking and its current condition. On 233 slides, he recorded the last remains of the road and its engineering infrastructure as well as the surrounding environment, photographing the route every 500 metres. Below are fragments of the series
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"Concrete Project" by E. Moreno, 2012
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Nowosielska Agata
Nowosielska Agata Gdańsk, Poland Artist, curator
Spying on the City Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
"The sun is where we are" read the sign on the bus filled with art curators, critics and artists who participated in the "Close Stranger" project in July 2013. This thirty-odd group of theorists from Russia, Lithuania and Poland were on a mission to mingle as well as to produce a joint publication that would be an art guide pertaining to the particular features of each location. In my text, I decided to focus on the cultural realms of areas in three different countries that had suffered war trauma, were locked inside the communist cage, and are only now opening up to each other, although geographically they are very close.
Klaipėda Accommodation: Litinterp Hotel, 17 Puodžių St. Cafe Vero at half past 10 in the morning. I am people-watching through the elegant window; there are few people to watch. I later stroll through the Old Town streets and end up at a square that hosts a vegetable market. I am lured inside by Humana — a local second-hand store. I feel at ease here, as everyone understands English. I get as far as the bedroom-district of this dormant city. Another Humana franchise and a vintage boutique. These small pleasures of smelling elaborately knitted sweaters or stroking used-shoe-wonders are eclipsed by the melancholy of almost-empty streets as well as the great distance between the cosmic Akropolis shopping mall and the ghostlike Old Town. A recent ban supposedly prohibits private cars from parking in the historic area of the city, which further amplifies the void that is only contrasted by the sparse heat glowing from hidden cafes with Švyturys beer umbrellas. Viktorija Dambrauskaitė, Klaipėda-born graphic and comic book artist, claims that neo-Nazis are growing in power here. She has clashed with them over her zines, experiencing verbal aggression; it is a war of sorts waged by this affable brunette with white power dressed in bovver boots and leather. Little My with great strength. I look at postcards from Memel (Klaipėda’s pre-war name): old clocks, an all-girls’ school, the Prussian building I pass on my way to the hotel. Memel died, leaving behind a strange mixture of Nordic architectural coolness and the surgical precision of fibres and roof tiles; a new design in dark colours.
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Jacek Hugo-Bader, writer, reference to the book W rajskiej dolinie wśród zielska (‘Among the Weeds In the Vale of Paradise’), Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2010.
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E. Loe, Naive. Super, Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005.
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Kaliningrad Accommodation: Hotel Moscow, 19 Prospekt Mira Social? The word runs across his lips ironically. You probably don’t want to know what social means. Social, here you go — Yuri Vassiliev (Kaliningrad artist whose video series Russian Red were exhibited at Łaźnia CCA in September 2013) hands me an album by Russian artistic duo Blue Noses. Here are the thoughts running through my head: TVN24, a Polish news TV channel runs a piece about two kittens that stop subway traffic in New York City. The doors close, no one waits for the student that runs onto the station’s platform like in our cosy town of Warsaw. The doors close, because terrorism is a real threat. Chechen TNT explosives. The doors close in the Russian Federation and no one waits for the student. Terra incognita with Jacek Hugo-Bader’s weeds 1, where the wild hogweed (a fennel-like weed widespread in Kaliningrad Oblast) grows up to three metres in height. The raw beauty of the USSR cadaver spans over a dissonance-filled reality. An elementary school in southern Kaliningrad providing a text-messaging system that informs parents of the moment their offspring enter the building. Russian designer and illustrator Katia Cherevko’s apartment is located in the northern part of a neighbourhood, the name of which I cannot pronounce, as I do not read the Cyrillic alphabet. The flat is overlooking a swamp, where frogs give concerts in the summer. Beautiful sunrises. The whole estate of post-Soviet panel buildings and sheet metal grocery and clothes booths is soaking in the drizzle. It all seems familiar, yet foreign at the same time. Built from simple sentences, like Erlend Loe’s novel Naïve. Super 2, an ironic account full of intelligent humour of a life devoid of meaning. "Poland is just the right size. Not too big and not too small", says Russian art curator and translator Julia Bardun. "Russia, on the other hand, is too huge — the residents of Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg inhabit two different galaxies. A lot has changed in Poland", she acquiesces. Football stadiums for juniors and motorways, that for sure. We get into a Lada (during our visual residency with Polish performance artist Angelika Fojtuch, we were picked up from the train station by art curator Dmitry Bulatov). The backseat is full of dog hair. The air — heavy from cigarette smoke. I did not see a single woman in Kaliningrad smoking slim cigarettes, which would be read as a sign of Western European proclivities. I saw both men and women smoking Marlboros, just like in Poland in early 1990s. There is a place in this city on Leninskiy Prospekt called Anti-Café, where upon entry you pay for the time you spend inside. An original idea for a bar — that’s what counts. There is another place somewhere around Karl Marx Street called RamRam, where time does not fly. It took me and Angelika Fojtuch a long time to find the yellow tenement-house with white columns. RamRam attracts young people who come here to do yoga, brew green tea and consume vegetarian soups. Russian artist Xenia Uranova, a frequent visitor to Poland, describes the locals to me. Men? They leave or they don’t leave. They drink. The women are the drivers of change, she tells me in the course of our short visit.
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Gdynia City Museum, Poland. Photo by J. Bardun, 2013
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We somehow manage to understand each other. I did not learn Russian in school, I was born in 1982. My father was born in the first half of the 20th century and studied Russian for eight years with terrible, pitiful results. It’s a family thing perhaps.
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N-14 Russia is a brand. Rolex in the lounges, Patek Philippe on the wrist and on the bazaar. My distant aunt’s memories of a whole arsenal of watches on the hands of Soviet soldiers (who stole watches and bicycles). Right after the war ended, aunt Alica was on vacation, not at home. This is the first version of my mother’s memories about her. The second version: aunt Alica was hiding in the cellar. All of my grandfather’s sisters were hidden in the nooks and crannies of their house (in the summer of 1946, Red Army soldiers still posed a real threat to civilians inhabiting the lands of East Prussia. Women were raped on a regular basis, irrespective of their age). "Look", I say, "I am fascinated by that. There is no kitsch of neatly mowed lawns and garden gnomes". This is what I sometimes say to Julia Bardun, as we walk by relics of Soviet tankers hidden in people’s yards. Silly YouTube films that I watch before the trip — kids walking on skyscraper roofs, daring each other, who will hold on longer and not fall. Or jumping on a makeshift rope stretched between panel high-rise estates. The punishing hand of the European Union with all its regulations does not reach this far, I think to myself. V. Pelevin, Omon Ra, translated from the Russian by Yuri Machkasov, Tekst Publishing House, 1992.
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The desperate existence described by Victor Pelevin: "Yes, it really was like that — the holes in which we spent our lives were indeed dark and soiled, and we ourselves were, probably, a good match for the holes, but in the deep blue sky overhead, between sparsely sown feeble stars, a special kind of bright points existed, artificial, crawling slowly through the constellations (…) And every one of us, even the blue-faced drunk cowering toad-like in the snowdrift whom we passed on our way here, even Mityok's brother and, naturally, Mityok and I — we all had in that cold clear blue ether our own small embassy" 3.
Gdańsk Home. We Eat at Mon Balzac, 36/39 Piwna St. The shipyard was an alternative to university. I rented a room in the former telephone exchange, Michał Szlaga had his photo studio next door, while Cynada Theatre was located at the end of the corridor. Before the construction work on Nowa Wałowa Street commenced, raccoon dogs and wild hares roamed the shipyard area. Wild salad rocket would grow there. In the summer, we would spend our time outside; throngs of people would go in and out of these post-Prussian buildings. London — Gdańsk — London was a typical route for the artists. Today, the shipyard has turned into a mud-filled construction site full of sewer smells, backhoes, road rollers and trucks. D. Masłowska, Dwa dramaty zebrane, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Lampa i Iskra Boża, 2010.
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"Everything’s fine between us" wrote Dorota Masłowska 4, although the vibrant artist community in the shipyard no longer exists. Everything’s fine between us, although everyone is caving into themselves, their condition as well as that of their country they are unjustly ashamed of. To some, being here, in the Tricity area of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot is a waste of time. A friend from university told me once that I will grow old here. But I don’t mind. I would rather grow old at home doing things I like 111
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Piórkowska Barbara
Piórkowska Barbara Gdańsk, Poland Writer
Lands Without Texts Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
1. A Religious Conversation in Bagrationovsk (Until 1946 Known as Iława Pruska) There are a few points of interest in this small town located on the PolishRussian border, but the feeling of lifelessness is unlikely to abandon the visitors. You are welcomed by the statue of the town’s patron Piotr Ivanovitch Bagration sporting a Russian sailors’ striped shirt known as telnyashka or mayka (the name changes depending on whether the garment has sleeves or not. Looking up I could not make out the sleeves, just the white and navy blue knot of stripes that was either protecting or strangling the statue’s neck). It is a custom — putting garments on statues to pay respect to people. In Poland I have seen football team scarves, knitted installations of famous artists, warm sweaters tenderly knitted on cold bodies of Copernicuses, Children Insurgents of Warsaw, and even on the monumental body of the Polish writer Maria Konopnicka. Bagration was "an ardent supporter of the war effort involvement of the wide masses of the Russian society", says the popular website: http://pl.wikipedia. org/wiki/Piotr_Bagration. Our guide Ivan Czeczot gave us an interesting account of the brave infantry general from the Napoleonic era, but failed to mention another commander, Konrad von Wallenrode, the Grand Master of Teutonic Knights, who lived here and is far more familiar to Poles. Mickiewicz in his epic poem allegedly fabricated all of Wallenrode’s treasons. As the main character of the epic poem von Wallenrode was truly repulsive: he envied other brothers’ successes, his raids on Lithuania were equal parts stubborn and unsuccessful, and the lack of victory finally gave him a stroke. Remains of the castle can still be seen in Bagrationovsk: the stable, the granary and fragments of the castle’s walls; in Alpuhara’s towers a band with the brave Almanzor still keep their stand. Or maybe Ivan Czeczot did mention Konrad von Wallenrode after all, but I would not have known, because just within fifteen minutes into the trip I was lagging behind the group nearly alone (in the army they call these people marauders), dragging my staminaless legs, tempted by the opportunity to take a few poetic photographs and to indulge in the deep blue sky (the sky in these parts has a magnificent hue). Ivan Czeczot did not wait for the stragglers, moving from
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P-15 Monument to P.I. Bagration. Bagrationovsk, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by B. Piórkowska
place to place, telling amusing stories about architecture, and running on to give as much information as possible. On our way we also encountered a brand new orthodox church (with shining domes, overlooking the town and preaching about sin to all trespassers: "Remember! Being on the terrain of a House of Worship with unworthy behaviour is a great sin"), a run-down shed with a billboard RITUALNYJE USŁUGI (RITUAL SERVICES), monuments to a boy and a girl scout — the only expression of gender equality in the area, a very friendly goat — a nice, exotic feature for us, children of the Agglomeration, and boarded up windows with a military sign. And were it not for this intense offensive, I would not have experienced the strangest religious conversation in my life. As I loitered I was accosted by a young woman with a pram who smiled at her much older companion and asked me in Polish, although with an accent: "In your opinion, if you assume that there is only one God in the world bearing different names, does it make sense to argue which religion is the best?" I was really a little surprised by this question in a place whose only semblance with my home city of Gdańsk is that the names of both places originate from wet and unpleasant words (from Prussian: Yle, Eylaw, Prussche Ylow — Iława Pruska — is a place among bogs; the root gd- in Gdańsk means a wetland). "Why do you assume the Supreme Being to be a God, rather than a Goddess?" I was surprised at how easily I got over the boggy subject matter of this conversation that started to digress into multiple levels, parallel universes and Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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galaxies, and was probably intended as an ordinary conversion attempt. "Besides, you know, on the metaphysical plain I support Buddhism that assumes that everything around here does not exist and that it’s just an illusion. If we look at something long enough we finally start to feel that it doesn’t exist, and apparently that’s enlightenment." "Do you mean, life does not exist either?" she asked looking me straight in the eye. "Well, it seems so," I replied averting my eyes. "I can’t help you. Goodbye," I said and went towards the closest ruins, i.e. not very far away.
2. One more thing. We, Poles, will remember Bagrationovsk for the world’s worst cuisine (including — yes, you’ve guessed it — the vegetarian option). Even though we experienced our fair share of culinary fails in Lithuania, for who serves frozen vegetables in high season (my nutritional awareness is slowly but surely becoming extremely cruel for symptoms of recklessness), at least the beer was tasty. Meanwhile, the Bagrationovsk restaurant did much more to unite Vegetarians of the World than any other during this trip. As part of our package deal, we — the non-meat eaters — were seated at a separate table, much like a ghetto, and served cold chips with ketchup. Even average-educated people know that chips are not a proper meal, they are fast food, you do not eat them for lunch, you normally do not eat them at all outside of fun situations like at the beach/in a holiday resort in high season/at a party at 2 a.m. We sat there marked by karma, excluded from the community of normal people, hungry — because you had to order a second helping to stuff your stomach, two Lithuanians did even not touch their supposedly non-animal-fat-soaked meal — separated from the rest of the world. They ran short of soup for one of the women — the only one left had a sausage in it, so it was polluted, irradiated. We were therefore regarded as freaks kicking up rows about food (let us not forget, though, that it was the lack of food that was the cause of all revolutions in these parts). It is customary that if the host serves a modest meal — if it was prepared with love, the traveller ought to eat it. But there, in the border town that was struggling to make ends meet even when it had been benefitting from the crossborder traffic with the EU, the heart was missing even from the dishes that used to be alive (and that were served to the rest of the party). Somebody took this vital organ away from this place a long time ago. It was now laying twenty kilometres from Poland dead like a cutlet on a plate and it seemed to have a hard time digesting us as well. One thing is: is Russia possible without meat, and the whole world without industrial production of slaughter animals, and quite another: why did I imagine that when I would come to Russia it would be all blini, saffron milk caps and deep-fried aubergines. And kvass. And let the meat eaters have it — pelmeni. Instead, what we got was the contemporary poor man’s fodder of all continents — junk food with chemically preserved ketchup on the side. Perversely — Europe, America.
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Curonian Spit. Photo by B. Piórkowska
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3. Storks Each small town in the Kaliningrad Oblast featured a ruined church. Belfries and rooftops of forgotten houses of worship (or only partly reconstructed by the German association for the preservation of historical buildings) were occupied by masses of storks — sometimes you could see a dozen nests at a time. Roofs were white with bird shit, overgrown with moss and grass, towering over the area as the product of human effort actively overtaken by nature. I could not tear my eyes away from this view which, on the one hand, felt familiar and reminded me of my fatherland, folk-style decorated coasters and souvenir mugs with stork motifs, as well as TV reports from this or that European Stork Village or Polish Bird Village occupied by nesting black and white guests. The locals even erected a viewing tower to facilitate animal watching for the numerous tourists visiting the area. On the other hand, however, the picture was disturbing. The rub was that in Russia storks occupied the space without any media or money-generating competition, without people building stork-friendly nesting platforms. Just like that, on the tallest structures in the area, paying no heed to anything they trod onto the sacred, soiled the gothic masonry and the Ersatz of Western civilisation and fed their young with frogs from spacious, empty wetlands. Ostentatiously left to themselves, the storks had simply found their quiet place up there and in the summer of 2013 were looking down onto cross-border tourists with professional bird indifference.
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4. In Pravdinsk (Pol. Frydland or Frydląd, niem. Friedland in Ostpreußen, lit. Romuva), in a Catholic gothic church (built 1360−80) that was later converted into a protestant church (1525−1945), then into an abandoned one (after 1945), and later still into an orthodox church (now) I invested in local religion and spent one hundred roubles (the equivalent of a beer in a restaurant) on a copy of an icon with the Angel Hranitel' (Guardian Angel). In spite of multiple removals of religions the spirituality was still there. Outside, on a renovated low relief St. George was killing (as usual in the Middle Ages) a dragon, a hot, but pure, dullness was roaming the empty square in front of the church. Inside, over a golden-white and very fresh iconoclast, among equally white walls, the darkness of history hung motionless in the form of a gothic rib vault. In 1905, there were thirty seven Jews living in Friedland. After I came back home I found a letter online from a court case concerning the property of Holocaust victims residing in East Prussia (today Pravdinsk, Russia) and in Berlin. Sigfrid Jacob’s and Artur Schwersenz’s claim from the Swiss Bank was refused. Their kinship with the people who made the deposit was not confirmed. It was established that the owner lived in another city in Germany, over five hundred kilometres away from the place mentioned in the claim. But as I was lighting a thin candle for the dead (living light is necessary in places like these) I was not thinking about the synagogue. The Angel Hranitel’ was too fresh a visitor to recall it. The saleswoman gave me change. "Come back sometime", she said sadly and tucked in her head scarf. 116
Russkoe village, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by B. Piórkowska, 2013
P-15 5. There is no doubt that none of the regional capitals participating in this partnership project (Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, Klaipėda) has a Teutonic Knights’ castle. Neither are they to be found in Kaliningrad Oblast villages. There are some picturesque ruins scattered throughout the former Monastic State. Castles had to be built within view of each other, so they formed a dense network and were located in elevated places. The spirit of the Teutonic Knights as — let us call them — organisers of space in the former East Prussia crosses (what else could it do) this beautiful pagan land; were it left in paganism, it would have had a chance for a more peaceful existence in the world. In my opinion, of course. Subjective and naive. But I am a fan of primordial cultures, especially those that existed to the east of us, and that were swept from the face of the earth in the first planned Holocaust in history.
Gdańsk There is no castle. The one that had been built after 1340 was dismantled in 1454 by the city’s people who had been hostile towards the Teutonic Knights since the raid on the city, the 1308 massacre and long-standing occupation. OK, so they destroyed it. Sections of the defensive walls are still there; they were even included in one of the tenements. There is the training ground for a historical re-enactment community (for a long time, among uncovered foundations there lay a rusted Fiat 126 p). When the local people were getting rid of the hated buildings (beginning of the Thirty Years’ War), they had been Christian for a long time, but it seems that after the Knights had murdered a few members of the local authorities, the citizens were angry with everything German. I like walks along the Motława River. I sit on the bank and knowing that there is some old masonry behind me I naively pretend to be a perfect Slav. Behind me, there is also Rycerska (Knight’s) street (a fitting memento, I should think). I am looking at the passing barges and German tourists, it is the second decade of the 21st century, nearby there is Paris London New York — after all, there is the Hilton Hotel — and I’m thinking that Gdańsk deserves a separate series of essays.
Kaliningrad / Koenigsberg / Królewiec In the times of the Old Prussians, this was the site of the Tuwangste castle (the name originated from the Prussian word wangut that meant the cutting of an oak tree; oak was the symbol of the god Perkun). The Teutonic Knights conquered the region and in 1255 the castle was named "Regiomontium" (King’s Mountain) to commemorate king Ottokar II of Bohemia, a participant in the crusades. The castle had been fine until the Second World War when — as a part of the strategic defence system — it was carpet-bombed by the British in 1944 (it is worthwhile paying heed to this Anglo-Saxon gesture of destruction; it was extraordinary in this region, a completely tactless interference, although I am thinking with hope about Polish airmen in the allied squadrons). The castle burned to the ground, and the Red Army dealt smoothly with its remains one year later. The Soviets also raped local German women and girls. After the Potsdam conference Koenigsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, and the remains of the ruins became a popular destination for Sunday walks by the Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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local Russians. In spite of the protests of Russian intellectuals and people of culture, Leonid Brezhnev ordered the remains of the castle to be blown up in 1968 as a "symbol of Prussian militarism". The castle was replaced by the House of Soviets — a nightmarish block that was never finished. This nightmare of a building is also known as the "Prussians’ Revenge". You can see it clearly as you enter the city, because it overlooks the place that used to be occupied by Kaliningrad’s centre. It is hollow inside, they say it is about to collapse; windows were only installed in 2005 when the city was visited by President Putin. The building is ugly. The area is fenced off; our bus circles the streets around it like a fly around meat. I am looking for words to convey the atmosphere of the place. Souls of the dead inhabited the abandoned building and float about the floors all together. Murdered Old Prussians, because after all it is their homeland; Teutonic Knights; Prussian officials and their tightly corseted wives; escaping pregnant German women with children; underage multiple rape victims; disoriented slant-eyed Soviet soldiers unaware of local customs brought here from within the continent caught in the cross fire of retreating Wehrmacht soldiers who did their share of raping in Russia. And to finish it off, a few allied airmen whose planes were shot down over Królewiec and fell to pieces, to flakes of English tea. There are also the victims of communism, and those who got into too much trouble with the underworld. All of them are trying to get to the other side (of the Baltic Sea).
Klaipėda / Memel Memelburg was first built of timber (in 1252 by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword), which was quickly replaced by bricks. The river at whose mouth the city lay had a number of names, depending on the language it crossed: in Belarusian — Nioman; in Lithuanian — Nemunas; in German — Memel; in Polish, sort of, Niemen. The old-Baltic people’s notion of "nemus" meant a forest or a grove in a wet river valley, but it may also simply mean "our river". The site intended for the castle turned out to be a wetland that could be drained (I am starting to be enchanted by humanity’s mental fondness for bogs), therefore the brick part — after it had been transferred to the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary — was built on the right bank of the nearby Dange river. The progress was supervised in 1407 by the Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and architect Nikolaus Fellenstein. The castle was destroyed several times by different armies, including the Swedish one. It kept re-emerging, but its quality was deteriorating. And finally, the practically-minded Prussians pulled it down in 1860 and used the bricks to build a few new buildings in the area. And thus, only fragments of the foundations have survived until today. In 2002 in the underground part of one of the remaining bastions the Castle Museum was opened. It exhibits some archaeological artefacts and preserved handicraft objects. A smiling guide took us around the display. The nearby marina was nice, too. The water smelled of salt and wetness. The newly built hotel suited the atmosphere of the place with architectural tact. Maybe the Lithuanian historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis, director of the Lithuanian Historical Museum, is right saying: "Unlike inhabitants of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Lithuanians living in the former Klaipėda Region took care of the cultural heritage of Eastern Prussia already in the Soviet era."1 118
U. Rada, Niemen. Historia kulturowa pewnej europejskiej rzeki, Biblioteka Borussi, Olsztyn 2013, p. 293.
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P-15 I don’t know. The Greek name for Niemen is said to be Chronus / Chronos ("Geographike Hyphegesis" by Claudius Ptolemy of 150 AD). In the Greek mythology this archaic god was the personification of Time, who sees, reveals and evens everything out. Maybe the Lithuanians of Klaipėda knew that he was watching. Note no. 1: Malbork (Marienburg) Castle. This was reconstructed at the beginning of the 20th century by Conrad Steinbrecht, 50-60 per cent destroyed during the Second World War, from 1945 until today it has been being gradually renovated. The seat of the Order has never been captured (it was sold to the Polish king Casimir IV Jagiellon by Bohemian mercenaries). Nowadays, in high season it gives employment to four hundred guides, usually local people. Note no. 2: less regional, more auxiliary. A strip of abandoned, depopulated land of the Yotvingians for a long time separated the property of the Teutonic Knights from Lithuania. Later on, it was settled by the Teutonic Knights, Poles and Lithuanians.
S. Aleksijewicz, Wojna nie ma w sobie nic z kobiety, przeł. J. Czech, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2010, p. 9−10. (http://czarne.com.pl/ katalog/ksiazki/wojna-nie-ma-wsobie-nic-z-kobiety)
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6. The memorial in Germau (Rus. Русское, Pol. Girmo, Lit. Girmava) is a tribute to fallen Soviet soldiers. It is an impressive monument consisting of a semicircle with a bas-relief of two male heroes, as we learn from the name. It is surprising that these memorials never feature female soldiers, just as if they never fought, died or suffered. It is enough to read "War’s Unwomanly Face" by Svetlana Alexievich to abandon this myth. The book was published less than two years ago, but had been circulating between different publishers since 1983. I learned from the website of Wydawnictwo Czarne that published the book in Poland that the author was accused of "pacifism, naturalism and undermining of the heroic image of the Soviet woman". She says: "When women speak, the thing we usually read or hear about is missing, or nearly missing: how people were heroically killing others and winning. Or losing. What equipment they used, what generals they had. [...]The 'women’s' war has its own colour, smell, lighting and space for feelings. [...] There is no place for heroes or extraordinary feats, there are just people.[...] And apart from them suffering is inflicted on the land, birds and trees. Everything that lives with us in this world. They suffer without words, and that is even more terrifying..." 2 And that is what the view right beside me is all about. A German military cemetery. I failed to see any female names on the tombstones either, but at least I noted the proud presence of names demonstrating historical complexities: Willi Chmielewski, Heinz Duschkowski and Wilhelm Dziobak. The ruins of the church from the first half of the 14th century are swarming with playing and screaming kids from the nearby village. The ruins of the church from the first half of the 14th century feature a cross hanging in what probably used to be the stained-glass window of the presbytery. Its two arms are nailed to the remains of the Teutonic brick wall, and the upper one projects into the sky in abandonment and desolation. The ruins of the church from the first half of the 14th century are also scattered with a hundred, a hundred and fifty year old epitaphs proclaiming Martin Luther’s truth; all the edges of the epitaphs are chipped by a crowbar or falling from a height. You enter the church only in
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your imagination, as the remains of the foundations protruding from the ground are sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and yet sometimes you will not see them under the grass; what you will see, though, is that it is ashes to ashes, dust to dust, vanity of vanities and that the time of living and the time of dying right here, at the northern outskirts of Zelenogradsky District, is becoming visible like the Pole Star on the sea, however, this time it is sort of Red, unpleasant and sad. But that is not all. From ruins you go towards graves — there are not too many of them, it is primarily a matter of tombstones. The churchyard is separated from the cemetery by a linden lane. The dead travel along this lane with superlight speed to regions where battles are professional: open and bloody, over and over again. There is some buzzing and humming coming from a huge tree. Leaves are shaking from this monotonous sound that is hard to hear, if you are passing by with a party of noisy academics. The linden tree issues a voice. It is sort of sepulchral, yet clear, if you focus. You do not feel confident and run quickly to the open space of the nearby field. Thousands of bees collect honey.
Russkoe village, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by B. Piórkowska, 2013
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We stop. There is water leaking. Ivan Czeczot says that on the hill behind trees there is probably an old, leaking reservoir. Mother Earth is bewailing, but not her sons. She is bewailing the living who do not hear sounds.
P-15 7. And the Church of St. Catherine in Arnau (Rus. Марьино, Pol. Ornowo, Lit. Arnava), a medieval pilgrimage temple, is now equipped with a sofa in one of the niches. The orthodox church is collecting donations for renovation. Frescoes are said to have been there (I even saw a German wartime album documenting them). Alas, they are gone.
8. Nida Nida, on the other hand, is a poetic phenomenon that must be described in a completely different language. Nida has hills that afford a view of the Curonian Lagoon and of the Russian shore. Nida was moved many a times from place to place. People were moving between shifting sands, the sea was abundant in fish and other migrant animals, in grey and blue shoals, in shoals’ gleams and soft shadows. The land was independent in its relationship with water and was running away like a bride from the groom, sometimes shy, often demonstrating the power of a woman with an opinion of her own. Huts were erected and abandoned in the eternal circle of things that pass away according to the rhythm of nature, rather than the human world. Somebody listened to the whispering grasses and roaring waves, somebody minded fair strands of sand, somebody was cooking and cleaning with rain and sun. Golden-blue Nida, pagan Nida. Nida cemetery is empty, over-prayed and bright. You want to lie down and rest a while side by side with those who left life to go to heaven together with the shifting sands of Nida. Those who left allowed those who were willing to continue living and conquering the Earth. Nida the blessed, pregnant with warmth, soft relaxation for the body and song for the soul. Nida contrary to everything that we had seen so far. Nida with even pavements, with a house full of light, a house of delighted Thomas Mann, Nida writing joy, Nida the written. Beautiful and simple as time that in Nida paces with the tranquillity of a miracle. With a sundial that is fast only once in a while, that holds the hair of Jūratė and the wrath of Perun in its round dial and displays the hours of harmony. Nida that you float into as if into a legend — lusciously, deeply, immediately. You take a rest after a struggle of many centuries underneath a sculpture or on a wooden bench. You deserve it, tired wanderer. There is a seagull over your head to keep you company, and now you do not have to do anything.
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Note no. 3: NIDA — currently a tourist and formerly a fishing district of Neringa in Lithuania on the Curonian Spit (other districts of Neringa are: Juodkrantė Preili and Pervalki; all of them were merged in 1961). Circa 1900 Nida — then within the territory of Germany — was a fashionable resort attracting painters and poets, in particular from Królewiec. From 1929 Thomas Mann (one of the most eminent German writers of the first half of the 20th century) had a summer house in Nida.
9. Klaipėda. Three Small Pictures In the municipal park, among works of art — sculptures by contemporary artists, graffiti and children’s pavement paintings — there are a few German graves. A sign with text. Children climb one of the installations. Adults rest on benches. The living and the dead spend their free time in one place joined in a natural companionship. In the Museum of Clocks time is simultaneously moving and standing still. The floor is creaking and we are going out to the terrace and spend an hour in peace. Nobody is throwing us out. The sun is showing the minutes. The bus is coming back from the goodbye party. Poles are singing cavalry songs, Russians are hitting such notes that we are full of deepest respect, Lithuanians are murmuring their folk songs at the back. There is a bit of competition who can sing louder and better, but others do not interrupt. We move across the Klaipėda suburbs. The space has meaning and it contains time for everybody.
10. Nativity on the Border. A Play in Five Acts Act of Hope After the twelve-day trip we are coming back to our homeland. We crossed three borders: between Poland and Russia (my body reacted to the mere thought of Russia with menstruation, exactly as we were crossing; the feminist symbolism of this scene moves me even now); between Russia and Lithuania (that we crossed with relief and enjoyed straight trees and pavements on the European Union side); and between Lithuania and Russia (as we were coming back from Klaipėda we enjoyed the duty-free shop at the crossing). I also remember my six visits I had to pay to the Russian Federation’s consulate to get the visa; the visa expires today, the trip is completed, it is now 2 p.m. And we are driving down a straight road without billboards, houses and inns, without all that aggressive junk marking roads in Poland; it is the last chance to look at emptiness. Even the storks are nearly gone; there is only Sosnowsky’s hogweed in quantities that could feed herds of cattle, if only the cattle were able to digest this poison. I say to Wojtek: "let’s have coffee at the gas station", "they serve good coffee at Orlen", he replies, and I take a picture of the road. We are stopped by traffic inspectors — they let us go; Kamila is lazily changing the music on her iPad, we arrive at the Mamonovo inspection post, on the other side we can vaguely see houses in Grzechotki, good coffee is getting closer, we smile — we will be in Gdańsk by 5 p.m. at the latest. We exit the bus and go through the passport check. We need to pee; border crossings always make you pee like 122
Nida. Curonian Spit and Curonian Lagoon. Photo by B. Piórkowska
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no other place, just as if you had to take a leak on all the stupid procedures; with passports in our hands we run into the toilet that features Polish water and soap from the Biedronka chain; Russians queuing behind the window go shopping onto our side. Wiktor wants to go outside, but the officer does not let him, he tells us to stay in; so we wait. Act of Surprise Our driver is coming back from the check; he says no pasaran, he is missing some document for the bus, we have to go to the Bagrationovsk/Bezledy crossing, we have to go back to Russia; there are the superiors who are properly empowered to issue a permit, there are the authorities of a higher level, the authorities in Mamonovo are on a low and inappropriate level. Stamps in our passports are cancelled; it is a car crossing, so we go back to get the paper that Russians always need (and something tells us that we should have stayed). We go back to the bus, we are about forty kilometres away from the other crossing, the coffee is moving away from us like an anti-aircraft missile travelling into heaven; after a few minutes we are caught by the same traffic inspectors and because we do not have a permit that we might get at our current destination, they arrest the bus with us, Poles from cultural institutions with complete higher education, but incomplete knowledge about how institutions in the neighbouring country work, as hostages. Inspectors in brightly coloured vests fold their inspection road signs, put them in the car; they’ve caught their easy prey, we follow their vehicle for a few more kilometres. We are stuck on a flat square in the middle of nothing, it is equally far away from Mamonovo and Bagrationovsk; they show us the toilet and we are left alone amongst concrete slabs and soft leftovers of asphalt with scarce food supplies. My visa expires in about eight hours. Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Act of Fun The paper is serious: we entered Russia with a party of thirty four, and we leave with ten. We dropped off our Lithuanian project partners in their country, we dropped off the Russians where they live, i.e. Kaliningrad, there are only ten of us left, the difference in the documents is inadmissible. A kolomyjka (a folk dance popular in the south) is starting. It is just between two nations — Lithuanians have left the business. The driver calls his company: go back, pick up the Lithuanians and the Russians and cross the border together — says the voice in the receiver; I’m sure the Lithuanians and the Russians would be more than happy to join us in this spot between nothing and nothing. Agnieszka calls the Russian project partners, they give us numbers to the consulate, ministry and Slavic gods and goddesses that take care of travellers; the Polish consulate takes action, but it is not the right kind of action, so we are still stuck here; there is another bus coming from Gdańsk to pick us up, but we need to wait for it. So we wait, we are not instigating an uprising just yet, the situation unfolds. Katarzyna and Jakub say that eight years ago it was the same and nothing has changed. They said it a couple of times before, their fear turned into something completely real. They remove from their luggage a bottle of scotch that they bought in a duty-free shop one border ago and they pass it around. We take out other beverages that we bought as presents and souvenirs; with sentiment and anger we pull together our roubles and buy beer in the only sad shop that can be seen around. We drink everything at one go, what can you do; spirits go dramatically high, and we soon start waving at passing trucks, we make friends with a guy who has a car with disco music and huge speakers (unfortunately he has to go, so it is a really short friendship); after the third visit in the loo we no longer mind the rusty water and dirty tiles; we tell jokes and dreams, we sing patriotic songs, we have serious conversations on relationships and Buddhism, we quote poems; we arrived at Bethlehem and we are going back, it is a reason to be happy. This summer will never come back — say I, but no one is heeding, because the air was pierced by barking; everybody started joking that they set the dogs on us, but the dogs fawn over food; there is also a cat, we take pictures with them, somebody updated their Facebook status. In the distance we can see flashes of lightning and hear the clang of iron. The driver and inspector draft a report, the penalty is five hundred thousand roubles; they go down, I don’t know how, to fifty. Agnieszka calls the consulate, the consulate explains, the bus is coming to pick us up, it is said to be stuck on the border as well, it is nine, ten p.m. and we slowly start to put on our overcoats. We call home to say that we are stuck (eight zlotys per minute). My stay here will be illegal in two hours. Act of Desperation And the inevitable happens: we recollect generations of our dear forefathers who fought for freedom; we recollect national uprisings that were always instigated at a wrong time; but now it is summer, not January or November, so we will be able to survive, we will collect some nettles and make soup from 124
P-15 Nida Ethnographic Cemetery XIX-XX centuries. Photo by B. Piórkowska, 2013
A. Mickiewicz, Dziady cz. III, [in:] Ibid., Dzieła. T. 3: Utwory dramatyczne, oprac. S. Pigoń. Wydawnictwo Czytelnik, Warsaw 1982, p. 141.
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roots, we will catch and kill a stork to feast on its meat; it is non-vegetarian, but probably everybody will have a go at it. All of a sudden we start to recollect Siberia, lagers and Mickiewicz: "They brought out Janczewski. He was disfigured, he had grown haggard, / He had grown thin, but somehow strangely ennobled. / He who, a year ago, had been a mischievous, pretty little boy, / to-day gazed out from his prison cart, as that emperor gazed from his desert rock" 3. "They’ll take us to Siberia" — says Wojtek, "Oh, would you shut the fuck up!" I ask him, so he stops; but all of a sudden in the dawn, in the seat next to Wojtek, there appeared Bolesław Piórkowski, my great-uncle, director of the Vodka Factory in Brest, taken in 1941; he sits there looking at me indifferently; we share the same initials and at the moment we feel the same pain; fortunately, a moment later the horn sounds beep beep — the forefather disappears, and a truck with the text ROMAN INTERNATIONAL TRANSPORT Koszalin POLAND enters the parking lot. Are they going to interrogate him? While we wonder, the remains of the sun are setting. We take all our luggage out. To speed up loading onto the other bus. The one with which we came is locked and officially sealed forever; it will remain here as some sort of pamiatnik stariny; when somebody rediscovers this place in the 22nd century, Russians will still be using the bus, just as they are still using their wartime trucks today. Act of Gratefulness I cross the border a few seconds before the deadline. I still have strength to call my mother and tell her about it. I fall asleep on the front seat of the rescue bus; I don’t mind the bus’s violent shaking, nor the driver’s ruthless handling of the road. I wake up at the key place, behind the window I can see the lights of the Refinery, the lighthouse guiding men and women of Gdańsk who return home from their journeys. After the trip I sleep for ten or nine hours a day for a week. I dream of the personification of the European Union. She has a tulip garland on her head, a joint in her mouth and paints her nails on the square in Bagrationovsk. The varnish is red. One of her front teeth is missing, in spite of this she is smiling warmly at me. Hark! The herald angels sing
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Poška Linas Dalius Klaipėda, Lithuania Historian and playwright. Also works in advertising
Hic Gedanum. Hic Saltabatur
Wysiadłem pod Stocznią i ruszyłem w stronę bramy. Przy drugiej bramie już się kotłowało, ale straż uważnie sprawdzała przepustki, a ja od lat nie miałem wstępu na Stocznię. Skręciłem na prawo w stronę pierwszej bramy i tam między dwiema bramami, koło szkoły, jest gdzieś z boku taka mała uliczka, tam zaszedłem i przeskoczyłem przez mur.
One of the bus stops in a subjective bus-line that was functioning in Gdańsk last year was the place where Lech Walęsa leaped over a shipyard wall on August 14, 1980. I had lived as long as half a century before July 1st, 2013 — the date when I visited Gdańsk and found out about this leap that Lech Walęsa made to join the workers on strike. When I was younger, I used to work as a night watchman at a plant in Vilnius, so I was trying to find that wall in Gdańsk out of nearly professional interest. I was very surprised to learn that it has been demolished. On my journey I had no time to dig into the story of that leap. But much later, one bitterly cold evening in the far North, in my homeland in Samogitia, when I was sitting at my fireplace as usually, wrapping myself in my favourite bear skin, I took a deeper interest in the story. And something that caught my eye immediately was that our Polish brothers have been arguing passionately over that incident: its circumstances, its meaning and even the very fact of the leap.
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P-16 My knowledge of the history of Gdańsk is really more superficial than that of any bum who has been living in Gdańsk for many years. It would be arrogant to claim that I can tell you the true story of the leap, if not one significant circumstance: the Shaggy Samogitian who has written these lines has never participated in any political battles in Gdańsk, and has never known neither the name of a single political party there, nor the name of the president of the city. The conclusions that I make after I search narrowly into this affair will never have any influence on my own well-being or popularity. After all, you can only see big things from a certain distance. In my case, it is not just a distance in time, it is a distance in territory, and a political distance that guarantee the investigation of the case sine ira et studio. I have the millstones of Objectivity that I can use to grind the grain of facts into the flour of Justice.
Farm in Samogitia. Photo by E. Umansky, 2012
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The One Who Was Born to Fly In reconstructing the course of forcing the brickwall, first of all, we should decide upon whether Walęsa got over the fence by manner of climbing, or crawling by wriggling, or he just leaped over it. My common sense would choose version number one. The fence was 3-3,5 meters high, in some places it was basketed with barbed wire. A wise man would get over it slowly and cautiously, having three bearing points at any given moment in the process of climbing. However, there are indirect, but strong arguments to support exactly the leap version. First of all, the List of Demands as of August 17, does not contain Point 22 "To grant Lech Walęsa a new pair of trousers to replace the one that he tore during the process of crawling over the fence". Secondly — this argument is a little more powerful — crawling in that moment of history would absolutely contradict the very temper of his personality. His sublimated romanticism requires, in the moment of turning point in the history, do nothing but leap, not crawl, and even choose as high point of the fence as possible. 127
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Impossibilia Possibilia Sunt The rising generation of nowadays, with its obvious lack of experience, could challenge the leap because of the fact that they do not have any lofty ideals. In this century, Polish high jumpers have been demonstrating poor results in the Olympic games, so that they are not even included into the eight that would give them inofficial Olympic points. However, we should not rely on our own soggy epoque to make conclusions about those heroic times. Walęsa leaped one third of a century ago, just two weeks after Jacek Wszoła won an medal in the high-jump competition of the Olympic games. In that heroic epoque, high jumpers would not cowardly measure the height of the fence (as the envious sceptics would do nowadays), but would just leap over it in a courageous manner. I will set the leap case in the global context by noticing that in the previous century, great personalities would often demonstrate even unthinkably high (for our pitiable epoque) sporting achievements. On July 16, 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong swam across the river Yangtze by overcoming 15 km in 65 minutes. For those who are too lazy to count, I can tell that this is the average speed of a bicycle rider. Sure enough, three meters is still a bit too high. Therefore, it can be that the leap was also successful due to the drink that was energizing the jumper at that moment. Saxo cognomine Longus (aka Saxo Grammaticus), who was an expert in the habits of the tribes living along the Baltic shores, wrote that berserks would drink a so-called troll drink before going to a battle. The drink would give them such a surge of energy that even before the battle, the berserk would chew up as much as a half of his shield out of that power surplus. When Lech Walęsa recalled that historical morning, he claimed to drink only coffee before his leap. But I think that our berserk of the trade unions would really tell his story with regard to the harmful influence on the behavior of the young generation (that we can describe in many sad words on top of everything else) that the misunderstood information on energy drinks could make, so he chose an euphemism to name his morning drink.
Words of History Great personalities, when taking a decision that would make irreversable changes in the course of history, must say a historical phrase that their thankless offsprings will be learning by heart at schools. "Iacta alea est", "Paris vaut bien une messe", "Поехали!" ("Let‘s go!"), etc. In the case under discussion, those words of history also definitely had to be uttered, however, they did not remain, so now they are necessary to be reconstructed. If Lech would be crawling over the wall basketed in barbed wire, most probably his word of history would be kurwa! — a word that is hardly suitable either for raising the nation‘s young generation, or for export. 128
P-16 Fortunately, what he did was leaping over a brick-wall, so today we can have higher probability of reconstructing the more meaningful words that were uttered during the leap. I think that at the moment of the leap, he said something more or less like the following: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for all the people living in the countries of the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, including the Yugoslavian nations that do not belong to the blocs, the Marxist Ethiopia and the tribes of the Democratic Republic of Afganistan: the Pashtun, the Tajik, the Uzbek, the Hazara, the Aimaq, the Baloch, etc…" Perhaps someone thinks that the text seems a bit too long to utter at a single leap, so I would not protest if in the sanction process of the final version of the historical phrase, the list of the tribes of Democratic Afganistan would be shortened. I guess that schoolchildren will also thank me for this adaptableness.
One Man‘s Show We should have a separate discussion on the subject whether Lech leaped over the fence on his own, or along with Bolek. Yes, if they would have appeared together on the other side of the brick-wall, it would add some dramatic effect to the case, and the story would become more Shakespearean. J. T. K. Korzeniowski — now, there was the man to truly know real life! — would teach us the following: "All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it" (Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Agent"). So I have no doubt that the current 3179 Polish writers, who have read J. Conrad as early as at school, will reject the beatification of the hero and will choose the following turn of the events: Bolek helped Lech leap over the brick-wall, perhaps he even leaped over it along with him. Perhaps Bolek even pushed Lech back from the top of the fence, then put on a mask with Lech‘s face, and became the leader of the strike. But I am not a Polish writer. I am just a Samogitian historian. However, the scientific studies of historic sources are categorically telling me as a historian that Walęsa was on his own when he leaped over the fence, and that there was no Bolek around: Sam. Przeważnie w decydujących momentach człowiek jest sam. So I would accept only a trade-off alternative in the form of the following arrangement of the events: perhaps Mr. Bolesław was trying to leap along with him, but due to a heavy hunch of his sins, he only managed to jump 27 cm high. Actually, he just made some pitiable jumps on the exterior side of the wall. But this would be a compromise at its maximum on the issue of the leap that I could ever allow myself as a honest Samogitian historian — seeking, however, to draw my position as near as possible to the one of the Polish writers.
Only For the Golden Buttons I also find it necessary to discuss and disprove the version that Lech Walęsa was brought to the shipyard on a marine warfare craft. Even a beginning mythologist would prick his/her ears upon hearing that: for this legend echoes Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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as many as two myths of the Soviet Russia revolution: "Lenin was brought to Petrograd in a sealed carriage when the revolution had already started" and "It was the blank shot by cruiser 'Aurora' that determined the victory for proletariat". The version that Polish admirals have been enforcing blends those two myths into one: "Walęsa was brought to the striking local proletariats at Lenin‘s Shipyard in a sealed container, carried by a warfare craft". This marine version of the beginning of the revolution can only serve the egoistic interests of marine forces. Lithuanian admirals, before they administrate the budget of the Ministry of National Defence, usually "push" a propaganda campaign on the marine‘s services to the nation. I do not think that in this regard, Polish admirals are so different from the Lithuanian ones. If Polish historians check up the dates of the announced news on bringing Walęsa to the place and of the sitting of the Budget and finance board of the Ministry of National Defence, it would soon become clear that the sensational (mis)information about Walęsa on the board of the warfare craft was spread just before the discussion on the issue of gilding the buttons on the admirals‘ service coats.
An Alternative Way of Forcing the Fence Further events in the shipyard on that Thursday in August allow me to suggest a tenable hypothesis on a possible manner of forcing the fence that seems not to have been discussed before. Most of our Polish brothers have still been wondering how a person who had not contributed in any way to organizing the strike and was never even employed at the shipyard, moreover, who was several hours late, could be included into the list of the strike leaders. I have been wondering too, and have been trying to remember at least one landowner, who would pay his worker independent of the time that they have worked and of meeting the work production standard: a landowner who would put the last one in the place of the first one. There is, actually, this kind of Landlord in the world, and He is the only one: "The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 'These who were hired last worked only one hour', they said, 'and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day'. But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?' 130
Ships in the Gdańsk Shipyard. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
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So the last will be first, and the first will be last". It is only this Landlord that could give the strike leader position to Lech, who was late. Only this Landlord could seal the lips of director Klemens Gniech, when he was just about to open his mouth to ask what an unauthorized person was doing at the meeting. And even more so, only this Landlord could lift the electrician up to the sky extra muros at 8 a.m. and put him down at 10 a.m. already intra muros. The formal discrepancy between the time of the day indicated in the evangelical narrative and Walęsa‘s appearance at Lenin‘s Shipyard in Gdańsk proves rather than rejects this hypothesis. For the lag time between Jerusalem and Warsaw is exactly one hour. 10 a.m. in Gdańsk corresponds just to 11 a.m. in Judaea (a proficient will surely pay his/her attention to the fact that counting the hours of the day in those times would start with sunrise, but in this sacred case, what matters much more to us is numerology). An impartial historian should acknowledge that this word-to-word repetition of the time and situation in post-modern history is irresistible proof that even as long as two thousand years ago, the Savior gave Lech Walęsa a special role of the Messiah in his plans. Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Верфь в Гданьске. Фото Х. Хёллера, 2013
Nowadays it is not so easy to test the hypothesis of Lech Walęsa‘s temporary ascension to heaven and his descending on the inner side of the fence. For this purpose, one should pick the brains of the still-alive participants in the meeting by asking them suggestive questions. If it came out that at that period, they could briefly observe a dim light emission over Walęsa‘s head, while his moustache was sparkling with static electricity, this metaphysical hypothesis, I guess, would also have its physical basis. Why Demolish? In this part of the world, vandalism is most often explained by business interests. Real estate developers had a need for some empty space — so they destroyed the fence. But in the case of the Gdańsk brick-wall, if not elsewhere, I would not agree to this kind of explanation. Yes, perhaps it was a real estate developer who gave this particular instruction to a bulldozer driver. However, he should have given it to him with a pain in his heart, for it was exactly the fence that gave additional value to that space. The fence was the pivot that one could use in order to build around it a business cluster, a Polish and world centre for political pilgrimage with a thick layer of commercial stuffing — from "Alpensztok" sporting goods store to tavern "U Trolla". After the Great Wall of China and the Wailing Wall, it was the third Wall in the world with full business potential. The only influential group that found the very existenece of the wall harmful, could be the chairmen of trade unions. For them, for those fat cats impregnated in whiskey and stinking with cigars, the fence was a living reproach. They were also under a threat that the workers, having lost their patience, would take them to the Wall again and again, demanding: "Here is Gdańsk, jump here!" What a poor show they would make with their business suits and briefcases in trying to carry their pendulous bellies over the fence to the people‘s side! 132
Revitalization of the Gdańsk Shipyard. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
P-16 …I do not know how much the trade unions have promised to the capitalists, who control the territory, for demolition of the fence, what interests of the proletariat they betrayed then, but I do not doubt that the fence has been destroyed exactly at their demand. Klaipėda‘s Version The dwellers of Klaipėda would treat their historical wall in a totally different manner. Unfortunately, only in that hypothetical case if that leap of universal importance was made by, let us say, the Lithuanian hero, professor Vytautas Landsbergis. First of all, we would restore the wall, and make it at least one meter higher in the process of restoration. Then it would be really higher than the one in Gdańsk. Secondly, we would add some statuary to the wall: a granite piano next to it, and the professor, stretched and concentrated before his leap, sitting at the piano. Klaipėda is European capital of creative industries, therefore, the statue of the professor would be not a simple, but a kinetic one, the one that keeps leaping over the wall. For practical purposes, we would mould it from rubber. Every day, at 11 a.m. (for it is Jerusalem time in Klaipėda) the statuary personnel would start a mechanism that would drive the rubber professor over the wall. On the days of local holiday practices, or in the case a holiday cruiser arrives, the procedure could be followed two times a day. While the rubber professor would fly over the wall, flapping the tail of his dress coat, the sound record would announce: "That's one small step for a man, but one giant leap…"(reading the full list of Afganistan tribes and adding Transkei and Ciskei Bantu locations, so that the effect of the leap on the world would be safely greater than the one made in Gdańsk). And if Klaipėda would adopt a praiseworthy custom of Russian newlyweds to place flowers at the memorials to national heroes, I guess our young couples could have the rubber professor making additional leaps at extra cost on their wedding occasion. In that case, the text on the sound record would have a meaningful prolongation. After all those Bantu locations, it would have beautiful ending adapted for the occasion: "Just like our dear professor made a leap from the communist slavery to freedom, so you are leaping from the stinky cradle of filth up to blissful matrimony… and this memorable leap by our beloved professor is presented to dearest Gediminas and Gražina by their loving aunt Aldona". Therefore, in our country, the historical wall would contribute to the rising fame of the city, an increase in its budget, and surely, the moral and patriotic education of our young generation, who is so prone to evil influences. For there is no more significant task for mature people who love their city than to put our young people and politicians — who are good by nature as well, but also have loose moral principles — on the right and straight way Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Romanova Evgenya
Romanova Evgenya Kaliningrad, Russia Chief editor of Internet portal o-culture.ru, journalist and producer in the field of culture and media
Beside the Border (Tilsit — Sovetsk) Translated by Irina Dewar
High sharp grass, which changes its color in the blinding sun, brings you to despair and you are about to cry. Why wander so far away from the river? What are we looking for in this baking hot field? Daisies, maybe? No, daisies were in the other photo: a mother and father, both young, are next to a doorway; dressed in haste — the father is in an old tracksuit and the mother in a light dressing gown with a raincoat on top — as if the photographer had just arrived and told them to hurry up as there was no time to linger. The photographs were taken in Leningrad, where you were brought from when you were three months old. You are a little tot in that photo and your laughing father throws you, also laughing, up in the air. That was the beginning of the summer of 1969 in Leningrad — and daisies grew in the yard of that house. And here, in this hot field, there aren’t any daisies but your father — here he is — again takes you in his arms although you are not such a little tot — you are three already. However, you still need to sob on his shoulder. At last, a happy return to the beach — across the hot dirt road, which has lost its colour in the sunlight. Beside it there are houses with manicured front gardens and behind them there is a Lithuanian village with a grocery store and a shashlik-house. To the left a sandy beach on the sloping right bank gently breaks up the smooth flow of the river with outcrops of slippery boulders. The beach is long and it is a goodly way to the first thickets of willow that grow down by the water. On our way, a strip of the beach becomes narrow and there is a patch of the sharp grass: let’s go back or you can climb up to the meadow where there is a path - no, we are barefooted and there are pebbles and grass over there. Sometimes father leaves you with your mother and goes off on his own to swim far out from the shore and drift with the current. "Mum, where did Daddy go to?" You are about to cry again. "Look, there’s your father swimming!" "And there is Raketa!!!" "Well, don’t be scared, it’s far away". In the navigation channel a hovercraft like a river goddess throws up big waves — half the people on the beach run to the water to jump in and from this choppiness, like Uncle Chernomor (a fairy tale character by Pushkin), father emerges from the water,
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House at the border crossing, Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by E. Romanova, 2013
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R-17 very happy and looking a little unfamiliar. From the quay at Tilsit across to Rambinas mountain on the right bank motor ships like Zarya (Dawn) also crawl along the river but no big waves are generated as with the Raketa, let alone by the slow-moving barges loaded with sand. Time to go home. It seems all the warmth of the sun is under your skin but it will keep saying goodbye to the river for a long time. And you, falling asleep on the shoulder of your father, through your eyelashes catch the play of evening light, shadow and water. Father climbs the high steps up to the bridge, mother follows carrying a bag of beach accessories in one hand and a panama hat that you needed today in the other hand. They walk across a long bridge where you are not allowed to stop; the river beneath flows faster and deeper and whirlpools beckon you with a siren’s allure. Pass through the arch — and after asphalt, slightly springy underfoot, sun-warmed boards — down from the bridge and go along the narrow sidewalk beside the long house with the dull white façade and empty windowless corner facing Fletcherplatz. Who came up with this idea to seal this bay window? There is still a long way to go before they reach home, nearly half the town. It seems that they will spend their whole lives together — in this city or another. "Where is Daddy?" You cannot leave the room, your mother, grandmother, younger brother have disappeared somewhere, you are left with the neighbour whose eyes are tearful with confusion and pity. Mother doesn’t have a husband anymore — and no tears — only two small children. But every summer, if you are lucky and if Mummy’s holiday and good weather come at the same time, you will go to the River Neman taking the same road, the same streets which are paved now with asphalt instead of cobbles; through the same — but at the same time — a different city. To the same beach and familiar places now located on a foreign bank. And after three decades, on the Internet, you can find a video from 1989, with this weird empty square in front of the bridge. You have walked through the city and after the shady streets have found yourself in a frightening open area unprotected from the sun; it is most important but difficult to cross the square. A child’s sandal steps onto the safe edge of the pavement, under a silent windowless corner which is a triumph over the void. The victor forgives you the round bay window, which you as inadvertent conquerors thought was superfluous. He also forgives those desperately dirty windows, the shabby colorless signboard, which says Film Library — my goodness, what kind of films are stored here! — the half-open front door that seems blacker-than-black against the bright whitened façade blind with the sun. Currently the town of Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Region
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A sandal of the victor is on the boards of the swing-bridge and underneath the river starts to flow. To the left, on the left bank of the river, there is a jetty and to the right a lifeboat station which is more important here than at the city beach because the bank of the river is steeper and deeper here; and in the shell-holes around Tilsit 1 from times of war — can you see this over there? — muddy river waters create treacherous whirlpools. The chilly mystery of an echoing arch for a short time cools the victor’s sandal. There is another long and open passage ahead but you are not allowed to stop on 137
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the bridge. However, through the bars of the fence, fighting the goosebumps inside you, you can glance down to the dark depths, the fast flowing current, the frantic dance of whirlpools, the strength of the concrete supports… and to the sandbanks where unidentified birds live. Those who have conquered the river by joining its banks, are confident and not afraid to look down. One of them is a man in a black three-piece suit, a coat and a bowler hat. He stands with his hands on his hips, keeping his balance over invisible rapids on the iron beam of the future bridge’s framework. The photo is from 1905 — and for some reason we would like to think that this man, who apparently likes to be photographed, is an engineer from Beuchel und Co (Breslau), which built the bridge. Moreover, in the background is a tree-lined avenue along the Memel bank leading to the future city beach of the 1970s. I wonder where this woman goes to at such a lonely hour from the 1989 video? Her back speaks of her determination to cross the square in a fast and businesslike manner. Maybe it is opening time at the Film Library? Or stepping along the pavement under the round cornered bay window of 7 Schlosstrasse, she looks back at the customs booth — it is closed still, too early — and walks along the windows of the Imperial Financial Office. The tap of her heels will wake some tenants of the house — and Helena Lengvenus climbs out quietly from under the blanket, leaving her affectionate lover to his dreams, gets dressed very quickly and on her tiptoes — praying that Frau Stashait will not spot her — goes up to her room. Five minutes later Karl Mener, a builder, knocks on the door of his assistant — time to go to work — and Bruno Mohtus, woken up by the noise and not finding Helena beside him, hides his face in her abandoned pillow and breathes in like a morning dream her fading scent from last night. The house will wake up: Mina Ostvald, a tradeswoman, hurries to the market; Johan Buntroyf, a customs officer, opens up his booth at the entrance to the bridge; Erich Tront rushes to the hotel. Only Augusta Kaul, freed by her good pension from labour worries, is left alone — to watch the waking street through the window and feeling grumpy with the world. Fraktur (German) — the division — of Tilsit in 1938 is as temporary as the Versailles impositions: a year later there wouldn’t be any crowds on the bridge waiting for permission to cross the border; they would be replaced with long congested lines of peasant carts loaded with hay from the meadows of annexed land across the Memel. A tap of heels on the cobbles of Schlosstrasse will be drowned out by the waking noise of Schlossplatz and the town market of the 1970s; or will be lost in the present-day five-storied courtyards; they were not able to justify the barbarism of erasing the past — the destruction of the house of the beloved queenand the defaced walls of the medieval castle. But the Film Library must function despite this strange twisted barrier at the entrance to the bridge: one end rests on the pavement’s edge, where there lingers the memory of the touch of the victor’s child sandal. In a top window where once had been the now vanished round bay window, stands a tall, thin, middle-aged man, Doctor Royhaus, a counsellor of the Imperial Financial Office (12 Hohe Strasse). He looks at the strange barrier, slowly rocking from heel
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to toe with his thumbs tucked into the arm holes of his waistcoat — a recognizable habit, just like the one whose profile (surrounded by communist party slogans) is splashed across the top of one of three twelve-storied buildings on the opposite side of the square. From now on there is a border control. *** "Is this the only road home — along the pier?" "Unless the Neman overflows." "And why is the barrier at the entrance to the pier closed. It was not like this before, was it?"
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"So many cars plunged into the river. People come, have a drink, enjoy watching the bridge, go back to their cars and start driving — there are no streetlamps there so people fell into the river. The barrier was put up after a young pregnant woman drove her car off the edge. Her husband was asleep in the back seat of the car while she went in circles around the pier — and straight into the water. She survived but her husband drowned." "It is interesting here… I noticed underneath the bridge is stone-paved." "It is stone-paved; there was a very narrow passage on the way up to the houses, hardly any room for a car. Slavik, a local resident, widened the passage and brought the slabs, not himself of course, but he paid for the delivery." "The houses are fairly high, does the floodwater ever reach you?" "We have water in the basements all the time. Moreover, if the flood is under the bridge — we are cut off, we can make our way through customs but our cars cannot get to the houses at all. We don’t get the rubbish lorry for half a year and more." "When the river is frozen over, can you drive under the bridge?" "It’s dangerous. Once a rubbish lorry driver took a risk and drove a car over the ice, nearly sank. Enough said, — that’s it, no more. When the ice goes, our full garbage bins float away under the bridge." "Can you walk on the ice under the bridge?" "That’s dangerous too. Also the winter days are short — there are no lights there, it’s scary." "How far from home is the barbed wire fence?" "It differs. From one side, where cars park, six or seven meters, from the other one, which goes to the square, around three meters, and from the third, entering the bridge, you’ve seen it, that’s a meter and a half." "And how do you go home through the border?" "Through a wicket gate at the corner of the fence, we ask the border guards who are on duty to open it for us and we go through passport control at the entrance to the town." "Your passport is checked every time you go?" "Sometimes for years nobody checks but when the head border guards are changed, it starts all over again… The Lithuanian drivers in the queue always joke: you must have committed an offence if you are being kept behind the barbed wire."
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R-17 "Do you have a good relationship with the customs officers and border guards? They must understand your situation?" "Of course they do. When we had a fire, they called the authorities for the fire brigade to come through the checkpoint. Everything was sorted out quickly; the gates were opened, the brigade arrived and extinguished the fire." "But it is not the way…" "Nobody wants us…" "Have you lived here long?" "Almost from birth. My grandmother, an immigrant, died two years ago. When they arrived, they were put here. There used to be an emigrant mobile fund in these two houses — Marketplace 1-3 ("Place Map of Tilsit and its Suburbs", published by I. Reylander and son, 1938, page 583: Schlossmuehlenstrasse, 7–8.) And two more houses were near — one was similar to our houses, and the second one, not so big a mansion, only the staircase remains, it goes down to the river. People settled in new places and the houses were demolished — we were supposed to be settled in new places too but perestroika began and all that stuff. Now we suffer." "How many families live in these two houses?" "Thirty — and all for a long time. No one has any expectation of getting new apartments. And the house is falling apart. Did you see the cracks, especially at the corner? My apartment is on the second floor in the corner." (Dr. Royhaus buttons up his jacket and moves away from the round bay window.) "The corner has long been gone, if it falls, it will bring down the entire house. The pavement collapsed over there." (The child’s sandal slips off from the victor’s foot and disappears down the hole.) "When the border crossing was built, a lot of sand was delivered here, but the water washes it away — the river is here and subterranean waters too. The house is full of holes, we hear everything that happens in the other apartments; when the big trucks pass under our windows at night, it shakes as if we are on a train, and we are frightened to fall asleep in case it collapses. In our neighbour’s apartment, the floor in the lavatory collapsed and hung from the ceiling of the apartment below. Thank God he got out or he would be a cripple or even worse. We live doing constant repairs: but the cracks get bigger — we cement them but they get bigger again — we cement them once more but they get wider and deeper." "And what about the foundations?" "They say wooden piles are underneath and boulders are between them. Similar to Venice. You have seen the holes at the berth, where the pier has crumbled, everything is visible inside. It’s the same here…"
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R-17 *** Having tightly closed the door with a faded request on a leaflet in the box — would swallows please stay away outside the kitchen — you go down the staircase following the maid, Helena Lengvenus. A pregnant cat by the window reluctantly breaks away from its contemplation of an old white Mercedes parked in the centre of the courtyard and looks at you suspiciously. Behind the courtyard barns and garbage bins one can see a flagstaff on the roof of the lifeboat station that was destroyed ten years ago. Faded by the sun a banner, Rescue Service Company, hangs still and limp in the heat. The head lifeguard, Uncle Slava Evghrafov, with a funny nickname — Sheriff — opens the door and calls out to your father running down the porch to the pier, "Tolya, so — tomorrow at nine or earlier?" "No, not early," Your father smiles turning back, "We’ll have time for everything. See you tomorrow!" Noiseless canvas shoes take his owner along cold stones under the dense shadow of the overhanging bridge. Then, through the square and the city, home. Tomorrow is the first Saturday in August. Sportsman’s Day, Father’s professional holiday. In the morning, he will put his best suit on and go off to the Red Star Stadium. You will see him off and wave at him through the window. Crossing the courtyard he will turn and wave back to you as usual, but today will be for the last time. You come around the corner of the house under the round bay window and walk along beside the barbed wire. Not tapping your heels on the now long-gone cobbles on Schlossmuehlenstrasse, you pass slab walls of five-storied buildings to emerge finally on Schlossplatz. On the shore of the Tilze, just before it joins the Memel, you look over the tops of the imperial roofs and suddenly find yourself thinking that long ago on the green Lithuanian shore, with its raised fortifications, there is no hint of the beach. The river flows right up to its banks while a rusty riverboat, once the local shipbuilding masterpiece, lies alongside the decaying jetty with a barbecue, Left Bank, which offers no hope for life. You go down to the river and slowly walk along the bank over the edge of the water — it is warm and gently lapping. Short beaches alternate with thickets of osier, which descend directly to the river; boys with their fishing rods are on the spits. Noise, laughter and shouts echo all around the water; it seems that one can hear everything taking place along the entire bank. A lone patrol border guard that you stumble across asks you whether you have your passport with you. After listening to your excuses, he says to you gently, "But you know it is a border zone here; next time make sure you have got your passport with you, promise?" "What do you think, officer, is it possible to reach Ragnit by walking along the bank?" "I don’t know. Try it — but only if you have your passport…" Both of you go your separate ways and in a couple of minutes you hear male voices inviting the border guard to join them for a picnic. Of course, I will try to get to Ragnit. Nevertheless, I do not understand why I need a passport on the bank of the river. I am at home
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Szczepańska Katarzyna
Szczepańska Katarzyna Gdańsk, Poland Activist of the Congress of Municipal Movements, councilor of the Council of the district Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz Górny
Wonders of the Region Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
The Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda region is full of extraordinary places and phenomena. The diversity of nature and culture, the abundance of outstanding personalities — there is truly something for everyone. Some will be enraptured with Kadyny in Poland, the model village of Emperor Wilhelm II, others will approach Immanuel Kant’s tomb in the Kaliningrad cathedral with beating hearts. Some will be forever changed by the visit in the house of a Lithuanian collector of paintings; others will admire the high level of urban development in Klaipėda. Lovers of nature will be delighted with the diverse flora and fauna, while fans of industrialisation will appreciate the shipyards of Gdańsk, Kaliningrad and Klaipėda. Some may be charmed by Lithuanian photography, others will experience unforgettable moments in Kaliningrad forts. Below you will find a selection of the region's wonders compiled according to my interests — although I am aware that each member of the expedition would make a different one.
Bird Ringing Station of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences In the village of Rybachy, located on the Curonian Spit within the Kaliningrad Oblast, there is a bird ringing station. It is open to visitors, who may witness the entire process: from catching a bird to setting it free with a ring on its leg. During our stay, a chaffinch was caught in one of the several dozen traps which resembled military objects. We observed how the bird was weighed and ringed, had its wing length measured and age checked, while the data was manually entered in a special form. The ornithologist firmly yet carefully held the chaffinch in his hand. At one moment, he loosened his grip and blew delicately on the plumage on the bird’s chest. No pink feathers — it is a female! Contrary to the male part of the population, she will remain grey all her life and will be brooding alone, while her beautifully coloured partner will mostly care about spreading his genes among the local ladies. 144
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Dancing Forest, Curonian Spit, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by K. Szczepańska, 2013
The Russian ornithologist explained each of his actions, so the ringing process took a few minutes rather than several seconds, during which time the little chaffinch bravely fought, trying to peck at the hand that was holding it. The more sensitive witnesses were convinced that the bird was going to die of stress and let a sigh of relief when, once freed, it sat on the tree above our heads and then flew away. It will get used to the ring after a few minutes. In season (April-September), around one thousand birds a day are ringed at the Rybachy station, which gives an indication of how important this place is for the realm of avifauna.
Dancing Forest Following the road through the Curonian Spit, we arrive at a mysterious signpost: "Dancing Forest" (naturally, only in Russian: Танцующий лес). The path leads to an extraordinary place, where trees are growing as if they owed their shape to an amazingly creative bonsai master. Most of them are unnaturally shaped: twisted, split or bizarrely gnarled. The most astonishing are those, which at a certain stage directed their trunks towards the earth in order to later again emerge towards the sky. After all, trees are not supposed to grow downwards! The entire forest is predominantly composed of ca. sixty-year-old pine trees, few of which are straight. The strangest group of trees is surrounded by a wooden jetty and separated with a railing, which does not prevent visitors from approaching them to pose for photographs. There is also an information board (unfortunately only in Russian), according to which there are many hypotheses as to the origin of this wonder of nature. Perhaps it is the result of natural conditions, such as wind, sun and soil? Maybe genetic factors were at play? Or some micro-organisms or extra-terrestrial energy?
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It is wonderful that in a world where everything is known, we may suddenly come across such a cosmic riddle which no one wants to solve. It would seem that one could simply collect the seeds and plant them in a different place in order to verify at least the majority of theories. Still, much more interesting mysteries remain unsolved in Russia…
Cormorants On the Lithuanian side of the Curonian Spit, near the town of Juodkrantė, there is one of the largest colonies of cormorants and grey herons in Europe. The herons are beautiful and dignified, which cannot be said of the cormorants. These black birds are not blessed with good looks: stout figure, short legs, head placed on a thick neck and piercing, and greenish eyes to boot. They also act in a peculiar manner: even though they are water birds, they feed on fish and have webbed feet, (in our region) they build their nests high up in the trees. As if they had a problem with defining their identity. Cormorants are amazing divers and very efficient fish catchers thanks to a characteristic which is unique among water birds: cormorants’ feathers are not waterproof and soak when they are diving for food. Owing to that, they are less subject to buoyancy, which is an obstacle for all other aquatic birds under water. In order to dry their feathers, cormorants can sit for hours with their wings stretched, recalling childish depictions of cloaked vampires. This characteristic silhouette makes it easy to recognise them, but in order to find the Curonian colony it is best to follow your nose. The odour of bird excrement permeates the area, and the forest path leading to the nests is littered with it. Suddenly, in the midst of the forest, we see tree skeletons with nesting cormorant couples. There are so many of them that it is hard to believe that not so long ago they were in danger of extinction. They recall Hitchcock’s Birds; eye-catching and fear-inspiring, they do not react to human company. Standing on a special observation jetty, I admired the Lithuanians for converting Juodkrantė into a tourist attraction. A similar colony is nesting in a Polish nature reserve in Kąty Rybackie, but there the cormorants are treated as a necessary evil (they are protected species). Openly despised by fishermen, since they allegedly pose competition in fishing, unpopular with the inhabitants, for their excrement destroys trees, the cormorants cannot count on a positive reaction.
Nida Four kilometres after crossing the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit begins Neringa, a municipality comprising four former fishing villages: Juodkrantė, Preila, Pervalka and Nida.
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Cormorants. Photo by K. Szczepańska, 2013
S-18 Nida is small and beautiful, the icing on the cake. It is populated with small blue or dark red houses, some of which are thatched. The streets are clean, the people are smiling, there are plenty of flowers and sky blue water. And dunes: huge sand hills covered with trees, bushes and grass. The landscape sparkles with a thousand shades of yellow and green, while the clouds casting their shadows add an unrealistic touch to this image. Even Thomas Mann, who built his summer residence here, was not impervious to the charm of Nida and its surroundings. The house, situated on a hill, surrounded by similar buildings, currently houses the writer’s museum. A breathtaking view of the lagoon stretches from the studio located on the first floor. It is so amazing that I think each of the visitors is convinced that given such conditions they too would create a literary masterpiece.
Natural Environment of the Kaliningrad Oblast What is most striking after crossing the Polish-Russian border are the vast acreages of uncultivated land. Kilometres of fields with no crops or pastures. These are splendid conditions for the expansion of Sosnowsky’s hogweed. In Soviet times, Eastern bloc countries were supplied with plants from the Caucasus, which spread fast and were thus to become a cheap source of fodder. The hogweed, which looks like enormous dill, naturalised in our part of the globe very quickly and began to grow in an uncontrollable manner. Unfortunately, it proved to be the source of many problems. The sap which leaks from the stipe after it is cut causes burns in people. The wounds take a long time to heal and often leave lasting marks. Furthermore, contact with hogweed may cause serious injuries of the respiratory tract. Animals did not take to hogweed either. Employees of an experimental farm in Biebrza still recall how cows swelled up after eating the plants, mooed terribly and their milk stank. Since the 1980s, hogweed is regarded as an invasive plant in Poland and combated. In the Kaliningrad Oblast no one fights the hogweed because there is no need. The land lies fallow anyway; no one goes on walks in the fields, so the plant is not a nuisance for anyone. Both the hogweed and other plants grow vigorously, which is probably good for the ecosystem. The lands of the former kolkhozes (collective farms) are teeming with flying insects, and numerous tracks of rodents, reptiles and amphibians are visible on the ground. It is an abundant eatery for birds and predators. The benefits of nature are also used by storks, which reach incredible numbers in the Kaliningrad Oblast. They adapt anything they can to build nests. In the small town of Druzhba (formerly Allenburg) storks made five nests at the tops of the Gothic church’s towers — and these were not the only storks nesting there.
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It would seem that the ratio of storks per inhabitant is the greatest in Kaliningrad Oblast, but this results both from the great number of birds and the small population.
The Border The Russian border is a brilliant place for nature. The broad, unpopulated stretch of borderland is conducive to the development of flora and fauna. Untrampled plants grow beautifully and animals, not scared by man, breed dynamically. Nature takes control over the border. Waiting in the long line, one may take pleasure in birdsongs and lush vegetation. Sometimes a fox or wild boar steal across, or an eagle may be seen gliding above our heads. However, the biggest wonder of the borders is their absence. The small Luxembourg village of Schengen became world-famous in 1985 thanks to the treaty that was signed there. The Schengen Code abolished the control of persons crossing the borders of the signatory states. One may freely and without stopping travel from the Finnish town of Rovaniemi on the Polar Circle to the hot Faro in Portugal. You have to pay attention to signposts bearing the names of countries so as not to overlook the fact that you have just crossed a national border. Travellers are given full trust and controlled in an inconspicuous 148
S-18 Crossing the border. Filming of the "Baby" by Mika Kaurismäki in Kaliningrad with the participation of KB NCCA. Photo by E. Umansky, 2003
manner. Open borders contribute to mobility, getting to know other cultures and encourage travelling. Things look rather different in the Russian Federation. Every time I am nearing the border with the Kaliningrad Oblast, I am scared out of my wits. My first thought is: run! Long-forgotten memories from my trips to Russia return as well as the anxiety of what I will experience this time. Again I check whether the visa is not smudged, whether my passport is indeed valid; I take off the black protective cover, which once aroused the anger of a Russian border control officer. Fortified by the thought that there are over thirty of us (they surely cannot lock us all up), I leave the coach and dutifully stand in the passport control line. Then the humiliating, repetitive comparison of my face with the picture, scanning of documents which takes ages, filling in and printing a small white card, which will be my ticket out of Russia, and finally a stamp. Border control officers, whose large hatbands resemble saintly halos from icons, do not even try to be polite. They do not say good morning, please or thank you. Serious and tense all the time, their movements are nervous. In comparison with my previous stay in Russia, I notice positive changes: I do not have to fill in any documents on my own (this means a lot to me, as I am very bad at writing Russian), there are female border control officers, who sometimes even venture a smile, they do not check our luggage and there are computers around. And when I begin to believe that Russia is a country like all the others… the veil of pretence falls. On our way back, they do not want to let us out of Russia on account of the lack of one (!) document. Our coach is directed to a parking lot around seven kilometres from the border. The almighty officer sets about his duties and contradicts himself when explaining the nature of our fault. He is very angry because he got lost in the maze of regulations. At the same time, he is aware that even the slightest mistake will influence his future career. Our quiet question as to how long this would last is briefly answered in military fashion: long. Will we be able to go on once we pay the ticket? No. What should we do? Wait. Until the case is cleared, our coach is arrested and we come back to Poland on a different one. Unaware of what will happen next… Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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Wróblewska Marta Gdańsk, Poland Curator in Gdańska Galeria Miejska
Close Stranger — Impressions from a Trip Through the Looking Glass Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible 1. L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Translated by Aleksandra Szkudłapska
L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Puffin Books, 2010, p. 9
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Though based on exciting and well-founded assumptions, the Close Stranger project, aimed at eliminating physical and mental distances between countries that are neighbours and yet hardly know each other, often proves risky and difficult in reality. This is because it treads on the swampy ground of historically and politically fossilised divisions and common stereotypes deeply rooted in the subconscious, which are very hard to combat despite growing openness and ever more pure intentions. By generating impressions and events full of contrasts and extremes, the project often takes a downright amazing form, bordering on surreal absurdity. The name itself, "Close Stranger", is an intriguing oxymoron. After all, "close" means familiar, safe, understandable; "stranger", on the other hand, has the opposite meaning, evoking negative, unsettling associations. Is it then possible to be close and strange at the same time? Mentally, this appears to be a real challenge, for — as it turns out — Russia, Lithuania and Poland seem extremely far from one another, despite being direct neighbours. However, this is perfectly possible in the geographical sense. When travelling between them, it took me surprisingly long to realise that Kaliningrad — one of the main points of interest on the map of the Close Stranger research expedition — is located just about two hundred kilometres from my home town of Gdańsk. This distance could be covered in less than three hours, were it not for the border formalities. The distance from Kaliningrad to Klaipėda — another major stop on our route — is less than two hundred kilometres, too, which also means a three-hour drive if we disregard the stop on the Russian-Lithuanian border. A simple calculation gives an amazing result: the distance from Gdańsk to Kaliningrad and then from Kaliningrad to Klaipėda is smaller than to Warsaw!
W-19 Just like the contrarian name of the "Close Stranger" project, all this thinking about close strange neighbours is certainly full of distortions, exaggerations or underestimations, following from perceptual or cultural contrasts, mental creation or the destruction of crossable and non-crossable borders. I feel a little like on the other side of the looking glass, where everything is surprising, as it seems similar to what I know and what I have managed to familiarise, and yet suspiciously different. We start our research expedition in Gdańsk, where one of our main points of interest is the Shipyard, or rather what has remained of it thanks to the indomitable efforts of enthusiasts devoted to the cause. Among them — the Gdańsk photographer Michał Szlaga, who has accumulated a large archive in his shipyard studio for over ten years. Spending days and nights on documenting the transformation of the Shipyard, he immortalises on thousands of files and films the buildings and cranes, so dear to the hearts of Gdańsk residents, which all of a sudden disappear from the face of the earth, leaving nothing but sentimental memories. Szlaga ceaselessly collects information on the Shipyard from various sources, searches the archives, interviews people portrayed by him, who keep this place going with their muscles. For a part of the Shipyard is still in operation on the island of Ostrów, which — paradoxically — is separated from the rest of the city by a pontoon bridge, making it even more inaccessible for normal visitors who do not have a special pass 2. I would like to recommend Michał Szlaga’s blog www. szlaga.com and the album publication Stocznia Szlaga [Szlaga Shipyard], Fundacja Karrenwall, Gdańsk 2013.
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We set off from under the Monument of the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970, colloquially dubbed by Gdańsk residents the Monument of Three Crosses, which towers over the square in front of the Shipyard entrance. One of the authors of the artistic concept of the monument, Giedymin Jabłoński, is among us and his story takes us back to the year 1980, symbolic for Gdańsk and all Poland. It was then that, partly as a result of a mobilisation of the Shipyard workers and local artists, the design and the monument itself, weighing over one hundred tonnes and forty-two metres high, was created within just a few months, commemorating the workers who went on strike in December 1970 to protest against the political order and another rise in food prices. Crossing the symbolic Gate No 2, where a wooden board with the 21 demands of the striking shipyard workers was hung, we go past the impressive building of the European Solidarity Centre, currently under construction, and the nearby gates to freedom designed by Grzegorz Klaman: the first one modelled on a rusty hull, and the other deceptively similar to the well-known design for the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin of 1919. Forcing our way through the construction site of the so-called Nowa Wałowa (a street running straight through the middle of the Shipyard), being a bone of contention between the local communities, we get to Hall 90B, currently housing an international art exhibition Alternativa. The exposition "Till tomorrow!" is a perfect commentary on the Shipyard’s status quo outside the building. Among several dozen works by artists from around the world, one film captivates my attention. Its central idea will stay with me for the next two weeks of attempts at familiarising the close strangers. In a video called "A subjective history of Gdańsk", the Copenhagen artists Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum
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Hangar in Soldatovo, Kaliningrad Region. Photo by E. Tsvetaeva, 2013
present a former worker of the Gdańsk Shipyard, Marcin, who talks about his city in a specific way, referring to its size, appearance, relations between the historical and the contemporary. As explained by the curators of the exhibition, Aneta Szyłak and Jacek Friedrich, this work consists in "falsifying wisdom", mixing real facts with made-up tropes, aimed at verifying and redefining the place we live in, rediscovering it anew from a different perspective 3. The neurological disorder of the hero of the Bojen/Ørum duo’s work, Marcin, which was, as it were, used to spin this subjective history of Gdańsk, known in psychology under the poetic name "Alice in Wonderland syndrome", was identified in medicine in the 1950s and named after the main character of Lewis Carroll’s book, whose adventures, involving grotesque changes in body proportions and surreal visions of objects and creatures, bordering on hallucinations, corresponded to the accounts of the examined patients. The symptoms of this condition include distorted perception of proportions, distance, movement, scale, size and colours, migraine attacks and hallucinations. The perceived objects 152
Obieg, http://obieg.pl/rozmowy/29309; Alternativa Guide, http://alternativa.org.pl/alternativa-przewodnik/?lang-en (date of access: 14.08.2013).
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I wish to express my sincere thanks to Aneta Kiwnik-Dahm, a PhD student from the Institute of Psychology of the University of Gdańsk, for consultations on specialist literature containing descriptions of the disorder discussed in this article, see. e.g.: Sherifa A. Hamed, A migraine variant with abdominal colic and Alice in wonderland syndrome: a case report and review, "BMC Neurology" 2010, http://www.biomedcentral. com/1471-2377/10/2
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appear too big, too small or too far away; visual images persist or recur despite the lack of the exciting stimulus; shapes and objects multiply, taking on distorted forms 4. A similar state of confusion and distorted perception of proportions, both physical and mental, bearing a resemblance to the above-described syndrome, will accompany me many times during the exploration of subsequent lands to the east of my home city of Gdańsk. Driving through the vast fields and meadows, resembling Polish ones, interspersed here and there with villages hidden in thick bushes of Sosnowsky’s hogweed, at first glance identical to those I pass when travelling around the Kociewie region in the vicinity of Gdańsk, I do not feel as if I were in a foreign place. Surprisingly enough, the abovementioned plant, which was officially banished from Poland several years ago due to its strong toxic properties and is now systematically, ruthlessly annihilated, is doing very well in the Kalinin-
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grad Oblast — it has become rampant, arousing the admiration of people driving by with its impressive size and arrogant existence. Rumours about the dubious charm of Kaliningrad dictate a suspicious approach and cautious reserve to the city. For many years functioning as an island on the map of Russia, separated from the rest of the country due to its outermost western location and military character, today Kaliningrad bears no resemblance to the ruined, grey, concrete city from the accounts of those who visited it many years ago. At the historical gates of the city, visitors are welcomed by the House of Soviets. I would have paid no attention to it, as currently it is naturally integrated in the urban space with other rather numerous high rise buildings. The concrete grey giant with feet of clay and gaping gouged-out eye sockets of windows, which seems to have fulfilled an apotropaic rather than encouraging function for Kaliningrad for many years, has fallen into oblivion. Although it is said to be still empty and useless, playing the role of a monument rather than a building, this symbol of Soviet-Prussian power struggles is in a sense an allegory of the whole region, where reminiscences of the old times are mixed with recent history, creating a more or less attractive amalgamation. To Polish readers who would like explore the subject in greater depth, I particularly recommend the publication edited by Ryszard Łużny, under the title Opowieść o niewidzialnym grodzie Kitieżu. Z legend i podań dawnej Rusi, wyboru dokonał, tł., wstępem i przypisami opatrzył R. Łużny [Tale of the invisible town of Kitezh. From the legends and tales of the old Russia, selected, translated, provided with a foreword and annotated by R. Łużny], Warsaw: "Pax", 1988, containing a selection of tales and legends on old Russian Christian saints.
In the very heart of the city stands another symbol of the new Russia — the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, gleaming in white and gold, majestically crowning the Victory Square, in the Prussian times known under the more cosmopolitan name of Hansa Square. The finishing work on the building, erected only a couple of years ago, is still underway, while the nearby miniature — its architectural brother on a smaller scale, the Chapel of St. Peter and Fevronia — has already been completed. Not so enormous and grand, and thus easier to familiarise and take to, this wooden church fulfils the function of a sacred wedding palace, as obligated by the couple of patron saints, who look after the happiness of lovers. The old Russian tale of the love between Duke Peter and Fevronia — a peasant miracle-worker with a noble heart and beautiful mind — certainly introduces an element of humanity to the monumental and official city centre 5.
For example, one of the latest events commemorated in the visual shipyard’s chronicle was the christening of a ship, performed by the Russians with the traditional champagne, and by the Indians with a coconut and turmeric.
Leaving behind me the secular and sacred Kaliningrad, I enter the non-public zone, half-military, half-industrial. The infrastructure of the huge Kaliningrad shipyard resembles, just like the Gdańsk Shipyard, a city within a city, inhabited by workers. However, while the Gdańsk Shipyard is cut through by streets with appropriate autothematic names (Foundry Workers’ Street, Toolmakers’ Street, Installers’ Street, Transport Workers’ Street), in the Kaliningrad shipyard the main artery is known by the charming name of the Enthusiasts’ Avenue, which is probably supposed to put a spin on the reality of workers who walk this street every day on their way to work. The Kaliningrad shipyard, just like its Gdańsk counterpart, has two faces: a formal, industrial one, and an informal, romantic one, with a lot of charming corners. One of them is the shipyard museum, which tells the history of the plant until several months ago, using props in the form of somewhat sentimental mementos, photographs and models 6.
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G. Grass, Dog years, translated by Ralph Manheim, Vintage Classics, 1997, p. 402
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Cf. summer residence of Thomas Mann in Nida, the family home of Lovis Corinth in Tapiau — currently Gvardeysk.
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Keeping to the shoreline of the Baltic Sea, which connects us all, we set out for Klaipėda, driving along the beautiful Curonian Spit, with real treasures hidden in the thick forest, such as a colony of cormorants, dancing trees, Witches’ Hill, the Lithuanian National Park with breathtaking dunes or the Nida Art Colony — impressive both in terms of architecture and artistic programme. Klaipėda, separated from the sea by a patch of land, gives the impression of an island protected by a moat, which is actually the Curonian Lagoon. To many, the city appears very "Scandinavian" in character — perfectly tidy, with care taken of public space and historical heritage — from the whole to details. Just like in Gdańsk, "there was not much kindling left" 7 after the devastating toll of the Second World War. What has been saved, however, is cherished and respected. New buildings are erected with extraordinary culture and architectural taste, so that they do not compete too much with the few original historical monuments (the best example are the granaries by the Danė river). The public space is full of elements adding variety — from fancy flower beds in the form of ladybirds, to funny animal sculptures, which are scattered around the Old Town, to a more ambitious park of contemporary sculpture. After all, Klaipėda is an interesting balance between the old and the new. New symbols of the city emerge right next to the few historical monuments. Skyscrapers in the form of letters K and D, towering over other buildings, symbolise the modern, independent Klaipėda. On the other hand, many intriguing corners may be found in the old docks near the ferry port, including the art centre Švyturys Art Dock, where — sinking in huge armchairs made of Euro pallets, at a cable reel table, I feel a bit like in the unbridled Berlin district of Friedrichshain, and a bit like at the Hatter’s tea party… The places I have described used to be an integral part of the Kingdom of Prussia, divided into the provinces of East and West Prussia, and then to united Germany and lost this nationality only after the Second World War (i.e. in perceptible and tangible time, not so distant in historical terms). Prussia was united by a common name, a common model of governance and what we would today call a common visual identity, manifesting itself in comparable organisation of the public space and similar architecture, both sacred and secular (especially if we look at administration and public utility buildings, such as schools or station buildings). At that time the Prussian lands were predominantly inhabited by German speakers. It is still possible to encounter reminders of the German past in Gdańsk, Kaliningrad and Klaipėda, in the form of inscriptions written here and there on house walls in the distinctive old Gothic script. Each city or town we have passed through has a historical German name: Danzig, Marienburg, Elbing, Koenigsberg, Pillau, Memel… Some streets still have German sounding names. Trails of artists, associated strictly with a typically German legacy, suddenly emerge in towns which are now part of Russia or Lithuania 8. No wonder everything around me seems suspiciously familiar. Maybe these are reminiscences of the emotional memory, hidden in the subconscious associations generated by specific stimuli, activating certain sensations instilled under my skin in my own — Gdańsk — backyard of history, which, after all, is not so distant from the history of its neighbours — those close strangers
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GDAŃSK — KALININGRAD — KLAIPĖDA Collage by Vladislav Efimov, 2013
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Poland ŁAŹNIA CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Gdańsk Dolne Miasto, 1 Jaskółcza St. ARTISTIC EDUCATION CENTRE ŁAŹNIA 2 Gdańsk Nowy Port, 5 Strajku Dokerów St. Municipal institution established in 1998. The CCA currently consists of two branches located in the buildings of the former Municipal Baths, in the Dolne Miasto and Nowy Port districts. The centre is focused on contemporary art, both Polish and foreign. It has its own collection, organises exhibitions and is involved in publishing activities. It also holds concerts, film screenings, meetings and workshops activating the local community of Dolne Miasto and Nowy Port. The most important on-going projects of the CCA include: External Gallery of the City of Gdańsk, Cities on the Edge, Art&Science Meeting. www.laznia.pl
GDAŃSK ART GALLERY, GDAŃSK OLD TOWN Gdańsk Günter Grass Gallery (4G), Gdańsk, 34/35, 36, 37 Szeroka St., I ½ Grobla St. Gdańsk Municipal Gallery 1 (GGM1), 27/29 Piwna St. Gdańsk Municipal Gallery 2 (GGM2), Gdańsk, 13/15 Powroźnicza St. Municipal institution established in 2008. GGM includes three galleries located in the Gdańsk Old Town. GGM1 is mostly focused on the cycle Dialogue, which is a creative meeting of young Polish and foreign artists. GGM2 presents foreign art and the cycle Logos-Bios, showcasing sculptors from Gdańsk and its vicinity. The programme of 4G is associated with the oeuvre of Günter Grass and created in cooperation with the writer. The most important on-going projects of the GGM include: Gdańsk Biennale of Art, Grassomania and Narrations. www.ggm.gda.pl
WYSPA INSTITUTE OF ART Gdańsk, 1/145B Doki St. Non-commercial art institution established in 2004 by the Wyspa Progress Foundation. It stems from and is directly related to the post-shipyard area where it is located, and the social and historical heritage of this unique place. The Institute is focused on organising exhibitions, workshops and debates related to contemporary international artistic culture. Wyspa Institute of Art also has its own collection, holds a residency programme and issues publications. The most important on-going projects of the WIA include Alternativa and the Subjective Bus Line. www.wyspa.art.pl
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GDAŃSK SHIPYARD Main entrance: Gdańsk, Plac Solidarności One of the largest Polish shipyards, located on the site of former German shipyards: Jan Klawitter’s (since 1804), Kaiserliche Werft Danzig (since 1844) and Schichau (since 1890). This is where, in December 1970, workers’ strikes were brutally stifled by the communists authorities and three shipyard workers lost their lives. This is also the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union — the agreement sanctioning its existence was signed here in August 1980. In 1996, the shipyard was declared bankrupt. At the moment, only a part of it is still used for production. The remaining area is being transformed into a new district: Młode Miasto (i.e. Young Town). The European Solidarity Centre is also located here.
ARTISTS’ COLONY In 1999, some of the land belonging to the Gdańsk Shipyard was sold to a private company, Synergia 99, which — for promotional and image-building reasons — between 2001 and 2002 offered some of its buildings to artists associated with Tricity. One of those buildings, used as a telephone exchange during the workers’ strikes, began to be referred to as the Artists’ Colony. Between 2001 and 2008, the building housed studios used by over 60 artists, who called themselves residents of the Artists’ Colony. Apart from studios, there was also a dynamically operating gallery under the supervision of Mikołaj Jurkowski and Sylwester Gałuszka — Workers of Art. In 2008, BPTO, which had taken over Synergia’s shares, decided to remove the artists from the telephone exchange building. Some of them decided to move to the former Administration’s building, which — apart from studios — housed Na korytarzu (In the hallway) and Gablotka (Small Cabinet) galleries.
GDAŃSK OLD TOWN The origins of Gdańsk date back to the 9th century. Its heyday took place in the 17th century, when its most magnificent buildings were erected. During the so-called "liberation" by Soviet and Polish troops in February 1945, 90 % of the historical Old Town was destroyed. After the war, the Old Town was reconstructed. Its most precious monuments include: Długa and Długi Targ streets (the so-called Royal Way), Town Hall, Artus Court, Neptune Fountain, Golden Tenement House (Złota Kamienica), Golden Gate (Złota Brama), Green Gate (Brama Zielona), Uphagen’s House, Crane (Żuraw), St Mary’s Church, Royal Chapel, Mariacka Street, Great Armoury, Prison Tower and Torture Chamber. www.Gdańsk.pl/turystyka,89,685.html
GDAŃSK UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Main building: Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz, 11/12 Gabriela Narutowicza St. The Gdańsk University of Technology was established by Wilhelm II and began functioning in 1904 under the name Königliche Preussische Technische Hochschule (Royal Prussian Technical University). The school was to educate Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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engineers specialising in various fields. Its main architect was Albert Carsten. The main building represents Netherlandish Neo-Renaissance. A Foucalt pendulum can be seen in one of its courtyards. www.pg.edu.pl/uczelnia/historia
GDYNIA The origins of the city of Gdynia date back to a small village. The city was constructed in record-breaking time between 1923 and 1934 under an ambitious economic plan. It was to serve as a "window on the world", allowing Poland access to the Baltic Sea. By 1934, it was the largest port on the Baltic and the most modern port in Europe. The characteristic feature of the city’s architecture is modernism, with its flagship white tenements of cubic or aerodynamic shapes, alluding to ocean liners. The grid plan of Gdynia followed the assumptions of the so-called functional city. The most consistent fragment of modernist architecture may be seen along Świętojańska street. www.modernizmgdyni.pl
MUSEUM OF THE VISTULA Tczew, 4 30 Stycznia St. The museum was established in 1984. It is the largest museum of a river in Poland. It is devoted to the history and culture of the Lower Vistula region. There are two permanent exhibitions: History of Navigation on the Vistula and Historical Vessels of the Vistula River Basin. The main building of the museum is a typical example of 19th century industrial architecture. It was erected in late 19th century as the Factory of Metalworks of Emil Kelch. During World War II, it served as a temporary displaced persons camp. www.nmm.pl/muzeum-wisly
THE TCZEW BRIDGE, TCZEW The bridge is featured in the International List of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. It was handed over for use in 1857 — at that time, it was the longest bridge in Europe and the first iron bridge on the Vistula. On 1 September 1939, it was one of the first locations attacked by Nazi troops and was partially blown up by the Polish Armed Forces in defence. www.most.tczew.pl/index.php/pl/
THE CASTLE MUSEUM IN MALBORK Malbork, 1 Starościńska St. Medieval castle constructed after Pomerelia was taken over by the Teutonic Order and the seat of the Grand Master was moved to Marienburg (today’s Malbork). The complex is composed of the High, Medium and Low Castle and the Holy Virgin Mary Church. It served as the capital city of one of the most
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powerful states in the south Baltic region. The current Castle Museum was established in 1961 and boasts, among others, a unique collection of artistic objects made of amber. www.zamek.malbork.pl
EL GALLERY ART CENTRE Elbląg, 6 Kuśnierska St. The institution is located in a Gothic church dating back to the 13th century. When the town was under siege by Soviet troops in February 1945, it was seriously damaged through shelling and burnt out. After the war, it remained a ruin. The building began to function as an art centre in 1961, when artist Gerard Kwiatkowski obtained permission from the municipal authorities to use it as his studio. In 1965, Kwiatkowski organised the 1st Biennale of Spatial Forms and in 1967 — its second edition. The events took up one of the flagship mottos of the avant-garde movement: the integration of artists’ and workers’ workshops. In 2010, the building was renovated and adapted to serve as an Art Centre. www.galeria-el.pl
OPEN GALLERY OF SPATIAL FORMS, ELBLĄG The 1st and 2nd Biennale of Spatial Forms attracted several dozen artists, mostly from Poland. The Elbląg-based Zamech Mechanical Works served as a patron of the event, providing the participants with materials (scrap metal) and technical assistance in the implementation of their projects. In turn, the artists were obliged to donate their works to the city. This is how Elbląg came to own a unique collection of 51 spatial forms — abstract metal sculptures created between 1965 and 1986. www.galeria-el.pl/formy-przestrzenne-w-Elblągu.html
KADYNY The so-called "Imperial village" of Kadyny was enlarged on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries on the order of Wilhelm II in order to serve as the emperor’s summer residence. The new architecture of the village followed the so-called Ordenstil. A tile factory was also built there, producing Maiolica tiles for the court. The palace of Wilhelm II can still be seen today. There is also a Horse Breeding Site of the State Treasury.
MUSEUM OF NICOLAUS COPERNICUS Frombork, 8 Katedralna St. Nicolaus Copernicus lived and died in the town of Frombork. This is also where he is buried, most likely in the cathedral. The Museum of Nicolaus Copernicus presents exhibitions devoted to the Polish astronomer. It has two branches:
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planetarium and astronomical observatory as well as the former Holy Spirit Hospital which now houses the collection of the history of medicine department. www.frombork.art.pl/pl
Russia BALTIC BRANCH OF NATIONAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS Kaliningrad, 38 Litovskiy Val (ул. Литовский вал, 38), Kronprinz barracks A federal state cultural institution, the Baltic branch was created in 1997 as one of seven regional divisions of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Russia; it is the only Kaliningrad-based museum-cum-exhibition space and a research organisation with a focus on contemporary art. The institution implements large-scale international projects in the field of sound art, BioArt and public art, as well as projects aimed at redefining and interpreting the historic and cultural heritage of Koenigsberg / Kaliningrad. The institution, not unfamiliar with the most pressing problems of the contemporary society, concentrates on building a local audience and offers a wide range of educational programmes. In 2003 and 2006, National Centre for Contemporary Arts was granted a tower and some of the rooms inside the mansard of Kronprinz defence barracks, a historic and cultural heritage building from mid-19th century. With the financial support of the Russian Federation‘s Ministry of Culture, the space is currently undergoing extensive renovation and restoration. The mansard (1445 sq m) is scheduled to be opened in 2016, while the 1900 sq m tower — in 2017. www.ncca.ru/kaliningrad
KVARTIRA Kaliningrad, 13 Koloskova street (ул. Колоскова, 13) Kaliningrad’s „Kvartira" creative space consists of a shop, a café and a club. Capacity — twenty five people. The venue is used for film screenings, photography and graphic art workshops, computer game presentations, art therapy, concerts and literature readings. The shop is a place where everything and anything can be purchased: be it books, records, tables, chairs, or frames, "by request we can even remove the wooden floor". This is how, in the words of Kvartira’s manager Artiom Ryzhkov, the interior of the venue changes. vk.com/kvartira_koloskova13
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MONUMENT TO 1200 GUARDSMEN Kaliningrad, Gvardeyskiy Prospect (Гвардейский проспект) The Monument to 1200 Guardsmen is a grave and a memorial to soldiers of the 11th Guards Army who lost their lives in the siege of Koenigsberg in April 1945. The memorial is located in the pedestrian zone of Gvardeyskiy Prospect (Guardsmen’s Prospect), alongside a park and a water reservoir. It is one of the first monuments commemorating the great victory in World War II as well as a requiem for fallen heroes. Its unveiling ceremony was held on 30 September 1945. The monument follows best traditions of world art. Its creators include Moscow architects I. Melchakov and S. Nanushyan as well as Lithuanian sculptors J. Mikenas, B. Pundzius, P. Vaivada, B. Petraukas, R. Jakimaviczus and K. Jaroszaunas.
KALININGRAD REGIONAL CHILDREN AND YOUTH CENTRE OF ECOLOGY AND TOURISM; FORMER BOTANIC GARDEN OF ALBERTINE UNIVERSITY Kaliningrad, 2 Botanicheskaya street (ул. Ботаническая, 2) The history of the garden dates back to early 19th century, when it was one of the most beautiful botanical gardens that became the kernel for artistic, philosophical and scientific progress of Germany. In all likelihood, this is where Immanuel Kant took his strolls and Johann Wolfgang Goethe conducted his research. The bases for European phenological studies were created here. Despite war damage, negligence of the authorities and lack of funding, the garden remains a green pearl in the urbanised part of the city. In the early 1950s, it became part of an education institution and in 1965 it was declared a stateprotected monument (A Short Guide, Weldwerk Workshop, Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts).
KANT’S ISLAND Kaliningrad The island’s historic name is Kneiphof (Polish: Knipawa). One of Kaliningrad’s isles, it is the last one before Pregolya river’s estuary. Since 1327, Kneiphof comprised one of the three cities of Koenigsberg. In 1944, it was completely destroyed in the British air raids. The island is located in the central part of Kaliningrad, on the border of two large historic precincts: Sambia (in the north) and Natangia (in the south). Above the island on the north-south axis runs one of Kaliningrad’s two main transport arteries, while the island itself is home to an Orthodox Cathedral, Kant’s grave and a sculpture park.
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ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL Kaliningrad The Orthodox church has survived intact and is located on urban flatland of Kneiphof island. An important historical monument, the church was officially completed on 13 September 1333. The Orthodox cathedral contained over one hundred tombstones with epitaphs (located both inside and outside the building); among those buried here were Teutonic Knight Grand Masters, bishops of Sambia and professors of Koenigsberg university, including Immanuel Kant. Kant’s portico is one of the most beautiful sites in and around the Cathedral. The Orthodox Cathedral is the main historical monument in Kaliningrad and one of the city’s symbols. It is also the only structure in Russia built in Northern German gothic style. www.sobor-kaliningrad.ru/eng.html
FISHING VILLAGE Kaliningrad Kaliningrad’s ethnographic and trade-and-crafts hub, the village mimics the architectural style of pre-war Koenigsberg (as a plot of land with houses built in German style). The fishing village is located on Oktyabrsky Island — between Oktyabrska street and Pregolya river — that stretches all the way from the Honey Bridge to the High Bridge. Construction of the site began in 2006.
CEASAR’S BRIDGE Kaliningrad A pedestrian drawbridge over the river Pregolya in Kaliningrad. Current name: the Jubilee Bridge, stems from the fact that the opening ceremony, held on 1 July 2005, was connected to celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the city. The bridge connects Oktyabrskaya and Epronovskaya streets and is considered part of the Fishing Village. The bridge stands on pillars from Ceasar’s Bridge (Kaiserbrücke), which was built in 1905 and destroyed during World War II. The Jubilee Bridge is slightly taller and more narrow than its predecessor, which is why it can stay open when small ships are passing underneath. However, its appearance resembles that of the Ceasar’s Bridge. Not far from the bridge is a small building with mechanisms responsible for raising the bridge to a vertical position inside.
AMBER MUSEUM Kaliningrad Opened in 1979, the only amber museum in Russia is located in the centre of Kaliningrad in Dona Tower, which dates back to mid-19th century. The vast majority of the collection consists of samples of amber-trapped elements of fauna and flora from fifty million years ago. www.ambermuseum.ru/en 164
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YANTAR BALTIC SHIPBUILDING PLANT Kaliningrad Built in 1945 on the grounds of a German shipyard Shichau, which was not affected by the British bombings of Koenigsberg in 1944. Yantar specialises in constructing military and passenger ships, but also in ship repairs, machine construction and metalworking. Nearby is a museum devoted to the history of the site. www.shipyard-yantar.ru
MUSEUM OF THE WORLD OCEAN Kaliningrad This is the first maritime museum compound in Russia. Apart from hosting exhibitions presenting ship routes, maritime flora and fauna, geology and hydrology of the ocean, the museum is also home to a maritime library and an active marine ecology station. Visitors have the opportunity to see some of the vessels including "Vityaz", "Kosmonaut Viktor Pacayev" (the ship that belonged to USSR Academy of Science’s Space Research Service), a B-413 submarine, a lighthouse and a skeleton of a sperm whale. www.museum-ocean.ru/en
ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN Kaliningrad One of the largest and oldest in present-day Russia, this zoological garden was established in 1896 by the German entrepreneur German Klaass. It became part of Kaliningrad in 1945, after the capitulation of the German army. Kaliningrad zoological garden doubles as an arboretum. Local attractions are not just its animals, but also rare plants, such as the relic gingko. Additionally, a few pre-war buildings and fountains are also located on the premises of the garden. www.kldzoo.ru
UPPER LAKE (UPPER POND) Kaliningrad A water reservoir in Kaliningrad. The Upper Lake shores constitute a green leisure zone. This artificial reservoir was created in 1270 by the knights of the Teutonic Order for the purposes of fish farming and is one of the oldest sites in Kaliningrad.
VICTORY SQUARE Kaliningrad Kaliningrad’s main square, home to a number of organisations and institutions, is also the city’s transport hub. The Russian Orthodox Church of Christ Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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the Saviour is located nearby. Before Kaliningrad’s 750th anniversary, the square underwent major renovation which saw the removal of Lenin’s statue and installation of fountains and the Triumphal Column resembling the Alexander Column in St. Petersburg.
"VYHOD" GALLERY Kaliningrad, 16 Uralskaya street (ул. Уральская, 16) Gallery of young contemporary art, located in Alexander Lubin’s photography studio. Opened in 2011, the venue uses the exhibition space in the hallway (as "Vyhod", i.e. "exit" gallery) or the toilet (as "Govno", i.e. "shit" gallery). Venue hosts aim to break through the cultural brick wall of Kaliningrad. This art institution presents works by young artists from Kaliningrad and Moscow. www.facebook.com/GalleryGOVNO
FORT NO. 1 "STEIN" Kaliningrad, Bolshoie Isakovo A local public benefit institution in Kaliningrad, "Fort no.1 Stein" was created in 2005. Its activity pivots around reconstructing, restoring, protecting and using for historical and cultural means the Fort no. 1 "Stein" — a 19th century architectural monument located in suburban Kaliningrad. The foundation conducts in-depth and comprehensive studies of the object, maintains it and seeks funding for its renovation and further development. It also organises fort tours and seminars pertaining to the fort’s history, as well as reenactments of wartime and historical events and reconstructions of historical costumes and crafts. The fort also serves as a venue for concerts and other artistic activities. fortstein@mail.ru
SVETLOGORSK A resort town in Kaliningrad oblast, located at the Baltic seashore. Until 1946, the city was called Rauschen. In the city centre stands its symbol — a water tower erected between 1900 and 1908 in German national Romantic style. Svetlogorsk is situated in a park, so each building in the city seems to be "entwined", or separated from its neighbours, by a forest. The Svetlogorsk coastline is steep and winding.
OTRADNOYE A resort town on the Baltic coast in the Kaliningrad Oblast. Until 1946 known as Georgenswalde, the town is three kilometres away from Svetlogorsk and forms part of the latter’s urban complex. A number of hotels, guest houses and sanatoriums are located in the area. Since 1993, the former house of German sculptor Hermann Brachert in Otradnoye has been home to this artist’s museum.
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YANTARNY An urban locality on the Baltic Sea coast, the town was known as Palmniki until 1946. It is home to the only amber-mining and amber-refining company in the world. Nearby attractions include the largest beach in the Kaliningrad Oblast, a large picturesque lake created from the old amber pit mine and a park with a number of rare specimens of trees. A Lutheran church built in the 19th century by Moris Bekker still stands in the town.
ARNAU CONGREGATION One of the oldest Russian Orthodox churches in the Kaliningrad Oblast, a historical and architectural (gothic) monument, the congregation stands in the town of Rodniki in Gureyevsky region. The church was erected in 1364 and still contains many original medieval frescoes from the 14th century. www.prussia39.ru/sight/index.php?sid=93
GVARDEYSK A city in Kaliningrad district located at the fork of Pregoyla and Deyma rivers, established in 1255 and prior to 1946 known as Tapiau. The city’s historical monuments include the castle in which Albrecht Hohenzollern, founder of the Prussian state, died on 20 March 1568. Today, the castle houses a prison. Other sites of historical value that survived to the present day are the two bridges over Pregoyla and Deyma rivers, the city hall, the school at Koenigsbergerstrasse and a water tower. Tapiau is famous for being the birthplace of two world-famous German artists: Lovis Corinth and Ernst Mollenhauer. www.gvardeysk.gov39.ru/tourists
ZNAMENSK Town in the Kaliningrad Oblast dating back to 1336. Prior to 1946 known as Eylau-upon-Preg (Iława nad Pregiem), the town is located at the confluence of Lava into Pregolya river. Pregolya’s sluice no.1 is located in Znamensk. The town’s historical monuments include Protestant church of St. Jacobi, a Catholic chapel, a school built by the Teutonic Order, a seven-arch bridge over the marshes of Pregolya, a municipal and railway water tower as well as the waterfall on Lava river. www.znamensk.astranet.ru/gorod/histori_new.html
DRUZHBA A town in Pravdinsky district of Kaliningrad Oblast. Home to a Protestant Church from the 15th century and a sluice on the Masurian Canal. The town was established around the Alembork castle in the 13th century. www.prussia39.ru/geo/geo.php?id=767
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SOLDATOVO A town constituting Gvardeysk municipality of the urban district of Kaliningrad Oblast (prior to 1946: Friedrichsthal, Köthen). The town’s former military compound is filled with abandoned hangars, bunkers and air-raid shelters. An enormous boat is kept inside one of the hangars. www.prussia39.ru/geo/geo.php?id=236
PRAVDINSK A town on the river Lava in the Kaliningrad Oblast, known prior to 1946 as Friedland. The Protestant church of St. George is well preserved. On 14 July 1807, Prussian army under the command of Bennigsen clashed with French army under Napoleon at the battle of Friedland. www.pravdinsk.gov39.ru
DOMNOVO A town in the in the Pravdinsk district of Kaliningrad Oblast. Until 1946 known under the name of Domnau with granted city rights. In the town’s vicinity is a mass grave of Russian soldiers fallen in the 1807 battle, a mass grave of Soviet soldiers, a hill fort from the 13th century and a Protestant church from the 14th century. www.prussia39.ru/geo/geo.php?id=766
BAGRATIONOVSK A town in Kaliningrad Oblast, known prior to 1946 as Prussian Eylau. The town’s most important landmark was a castle built in 1325. On 7-8 Februrary (26–27 January) 1807, French fought with allied Russian and Prussian forces in the battle at Prussian Eylau. The town’s historical monuments include the castle grounds of Prussian Eylau and the building of the former Royal Institute. www.pr-eylau.ru
NESSELBECK An apt reconstruction of a medieval knight castle, created on the basis of old sketches as a true copy of the Teutonic Order fortress. The building currently houses a museum of medieval tortures, a hotel and a restaurant. www.nesselbeck.ru
CURONIAN SPIT NATIONAL PARK The largest sand stretch of the Baltic spits, unparalleled by anywhere else in the world, the Curonian Spit runs between Baltic shoreline and Curonian Lagoon, reaching from the town of Zelenogradsk in Kaliningrad Oblast all the way north to Klaipėda in Lithuania. The spit’s location and formation are unique. The most striking feature of the spit’s makeup is its uninterrupted complex of sandy dunes. Curonian Spit is sometimes called the "bird bridge", as it is on the migratory route for Northern European birds heading south and towards Northern Africa. The spit is home to a bird observatory, the world’s 168
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first and the oldest one in Europe, located in the town of Rybachy. The observatory was created on 1 January 1901 by a German theologian and bird admirer Johannes Thienemann. There are a number of beaches along the spit that allow bathers to swim both in the freshwater lagoon as well as the saltwater Baltic Sea. www.park-kosa.ru
Lithuania NIDA Nida is a settlement in the Curonian Spit, a peninsula with sand dunes that separate the lagoon from the Baltic Sea. At the end of the 19th century, German expressionists began to spend their summers here, forming an artists’ colony. Fascinated by the Curonian Spit landscape and the aura of Nida fishermen’s village, writer Thomas Mann built his summer house in Nida, where he spent three summers (from 1930 to 1932). Recreational business in the Curonian Spit particularly flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, becoming an economic alternative to the traditional fishing. The development of resorts led to architectural innovations: in addition to the old fishermen‘s houses that were decorated with lėkiai ("flyovers") on roofs and were dominated by blue, small, often brick villas grew around the town, as well as big hotels, whose names date back to local ethnic tradition ("Kuršių kiemas" or "The Curonian Yard" — "KurischerHof", "Kuršių elnias" or "Curonian deer" — "KurischerElch"). The ethnographic cemetery of Nida, dating back to the 19th–20th century, has preserved the wooden grave markers of original shapes — krikštai ("baptisms") — typical of the Curonian Spit. The krikštas is one of the most ancient forms of tombstone in Lithuania. The Curonian Spit has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural landscape object. In 2002, the Nida beach was awarded the Blue Flag. www.visitneringa.com/lt
NIDA ART COLONY OF THE VILNIUS ACADEMY OF ARTS Neringa, 43 Taikos St. Nida Art Colony or NAC is a new subdivision of the Vilnius Academy of Arts opened in March 2011. NAC is a meeting place for experienced and emerging artists, designers, architects, curators, art critics and researchers from around the world. The artistic, curatorial and educational processes are at the core of its activities, which mostly focus on the professional development of artists and informal art Close Stranger: Gdańsk — Kaliningrad — Klaipėda
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education for the young. NAC offers time, space and professional support for exchange, work, reflection, research, production, and experimentation in contemporary visual culture. Through collaboration with international and national partners as well as cooperation with departments of the Vilnius Academy of Arts it develops and runs a variety of art production and art education projects. NAC also runs an artist-in-residence programme, which offers curated and independent stays for invited professional artists or those or selected by open call. NAC encourages interaction between different programmes running simultaneously. NAC operates all year round and gives space to workshops, intensive courses, seminars, artist talks and screenings. Its activities may result in presentations, exhibitions, broadcasts and publications. In 2012-15 NAC has been encouraging critical reflection of the issues of remoteness, tourism, art research as artistic practice, site specificity and how to avoid it, and sustainability in life and arts. www.nidacolony.lt
THOMAS MANN MEMORIAL MUSEUM Neringa, 17 Skruzdynės St. The cottage that belonged to Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann has been turned into a museum. The house was built in 1930. In 1930–1932, Thomas Mann and his family spent their summers in Nida. In 1939, the house was nationalized and became the property of the German Reich. After the war, the vacation home was planned to be demolished, but in 1967 the building was refurbished. It has been equipped with the writer‘s memorial reading room and exposition. In 1995, the rebuilt summer house was given the status of a museum. The ground floor of the museum hosts a permanent exhibition. The sitting-room regularly holds chamber music concerts and seminars. Since 1996, the museum has opened its Thomas Mann Cultural Centre, which has become a centre for international cultural cooperation. www.mann.lt
JUODKRANTĖ Juodkrantė is a historic urban reserve, the second largest settlement on the Curonian Spit. Here you can see one of Juodkrantė‘s most beautiful old parabolic dunes — known as the Hill of Witches (Raganų kalnas). At this point, in the 19th and 20th century, the local Lithuanians (inhabitants of Lithuania Minor) used to celebrate Rasos, or St. John's Day. The hill has been known for the feasts of witches and demons, who held their celebrations here since time immemorial. In 1979, the artists launched open-air sessions in this area, where local craftsmen (carvers and blacksmiths) would build their sculptures, and in this way, the mountain has accommodated an ensemble consisting of more than 80 sculptures. Juodkrantė is also the home for colonies of grey herons and cormorants. This is one of the largest colonies of these birds in Europe. www.visitneringa.com/lt 170
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PALANGA Palanga is the largest resort in Lithuania, the symbolic summer capital of the country, a border city, and a coastal city. It represents the architectural trends of the 19th and early 20th centuries with its palace of the Polish-Lithuanian magnate family Tyszkiewicz with a park, ten villas, fourteen houses, two hotels (Nemirsetos Kurhaus and Palanga Kurhaus), a pharmacy, baths, ship rescue station, and bus station. It is understood that this heritage composition reflects only a part of the city’s development stages. Today’s image of the town of Palanga was formed during the 1970s-90s. Palanga then became an important resort of national importance, and due to this it differed clearly from similar-sized towns both in Lithuania and the whole Soviet Union, while the artistic quality and the scale of investment in its architecture was in line with those of the larger regional centres. www.palangatic.lt
ANTANAS MONCYS HOUSE-MUSEUM Palanga, 16 S. Daukanto St. Antanas Mončys (1921–1993) was a Lithuanian modernist sculptor. In 1941, he graduated from high school in Kretinga and studied architecture at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. In 1944, Mončys retreated to the West. There, he met Lithuanian sculptor Vytautas Kašuba and became interested in sculpture. In 1947–1950, he studied sculpture at the Arts and Crafts School (Ecole des Arts et Metiers) headed by another Lithuanian, Vytautas K. Jonynas, in Freiburg. In 1950, after receiving a diploma in sculpture and a scholarship from the French government, Mončys arrived in Paris. Then, the artist was head of sculpture studies: in 1973–1988, at the Paris University International Centre, in 1977–1981, at the European Art Academy in Trier, and in 1983, at UNESCO's sculpture studio in Toulouse. The sculptor was a member of The House of Artists (Maison des Artists). Antanas Mončys created works on religious topics, tombstones, abstract expressive figurative compositions, constructive sculptures of tangled structure, reliefs, whistles and masks. In 1992, he donated his works to Palanga. In 1999, Palanga opened the Antanas Mončys House Museum. www.antanasmoncys.com
KLAIPĖDA Klaipėda is Lithuania‘s third largest city, founded in 1252. Klaipėda Old Town is characterized by a regular network of streets, the old architecture of carcass construction design, typical of German cities, and the fortification fragments of Klaipėda fortress that have survived since the 17th-18th centuries. The Old Town of Klaipėda is arranged geometrically in a very regular way, almost all of the streets intersect at a right angle to each other. During World War II, most of the Old Town was destroyed.
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A truly distinctive character and spirit — these are characteristics of the Soviet period architecture in Klaipėda and the entire coastal region in Lithuania. Even though the centre of the city has been altered, especially by mass construction in the socialist realism style, and the preparation of the first master plan (1959–1960) did not consider the specifics of the seaside town very much, the generation of architects who started to work here in the beginning of the 1960s have developed their concept for the architectural future of the city. www.Klaipėdainfo.lt
KLAIPĖDA CULTURE COMMUNICATION CENTER EXHIBITION HALL AND ART YARD KCCC Exhibition Hall, Klaipėda, 2 Didžioji Vandens St. Art Yard, Klaipėda, 4 Bažnyčių St. Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, established in 2005, is a municipal budgetary institution. The mission of the Centre is to present the most relevant art issues, tendencies, and creative process to society through contemporary art forms and means; to develop and promote the relationship between the artist and the end-user of his/her artworks; to facilitate integration of the artists of the city into national and international contexts; and to reduce the exclusion of art makers and end-users of culture from different art regions and countries. The creative structure of one of the biggest art centres in Lithuania comprises the Exhibition Hall, the International Art Residence, and the Studio, as well as the Culture Portal www.kulturpolis.lt. The institution organises exhibitions, educational events, lectures, concerts, shows films, and extends its artist-in residence programme. www.kkkc.lt, www.menokiemas.lt
HISTORY MUSEUM OF LITHUANIA Klaipėda, 6 Didžioji Vandens St. One of the oldest buildings in Klaipėda’s Old Town, built at the end of the 18th c., hosts the largest history museum of the Klaipėda lands. Here one can discover the land’s Pagan and Christian cultures, wander through maps made by ancient cartographers, understand the processes and driving forces of formation of the East Prussia and Klaipėda land, and view Old Klaipėda in postcards and photographs. The exposition also includes paintings by K. Eulenstein and other painters. And those interested in the crafts of this region will see many interesting details — from costumes and adornments for the local people to unique beehives made of straw. www.mlimuziejus.lt
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CASTLE MUSEUM Klaipėda, 4 Pilies St. The Castle Museum is located in the authentic 16th-18th c. posterns of the city castle. Here you can learn about evolution of the castle and the city, see archaeological finds, documents, Klaipėda city seals found by archaeologists on the site of the castle and in the Old Town, and reconstructions of 17th c. costumes. Among the most interesting exhibits — a symbol of Renaissance Klaipėda — is a golden ring with a precious stone (dating to the middle of the 16th c.) found on the site of the castle during archaeological excavations. The exhibition also displays a model of Klaipėda castle and town of the second half of 17th c. In the 20-seat cinema hall one can watch Soviet Klaipėda city newsreels, and the most curious guests will see a future vision of the 21st c. city. www.mlimuziejus.lt/lt/ekspozicijos/2.php?Itemid=272
LAM PRANAS DOMŠAITIS GALLERY Klaipėda, 33 Liepų St. P. Domšaitis gallery, part of the Lithuanian Art Museum (at that time it was called Klaipėda Art gallery), was opened in 1973. In 2001, a permanent exhibition of works by painter Pranas Domšaitis (1880–1965) was opened in the oldest part of the gallery. The Lithuanian Art Museum holds the world’s largest collection of the painter’s works — 665 oil paintings, pastels, watercolours, drawings, and prints donated to Lithuania by the Lithuanian Foundation (USA). The cosy and romantic atmosphere of the "painter’s atelier" was created in the halls exhibiting works by P. Domšaitis. In 2004, in commemoration of the expressionist painter P. Domšaitis the Klaipėda Art gallery was renamed the Pranas Domšaitis gallery. www.ldm.lt/PDG/Index.htm
KLAIPĖDA CLOCK AND WATCH MUSEUM UNDER LITHUANIAN ART MUSEUM Klaipėda, 12 Liepų St. The Klaipėda Clock and Watch Museum was established in Liepų Street № 12 in 1984, while the first exhibition of historical clocks and watches in Lithuania was opened in 1977 in the Klaipėda Art Gallery. This exhibition of items gathered by Klaipėda collectors received wide acclaim from local residents and guests of the city. In 1979, on the initiative of the management of Lithuanian Art Museum the exhibition — supplemented and extended by clocks and watches from the Art Museum collections — became the Clock and Watch branch of the Lithuanian Art Museum. The museum introduces the history of evolution of clock construction, models of sundials, water-, sand-, fire-clocks, and details of mechanical clocks and watches from various historical periods. www.muziejai.lt/klm/index.htm
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ŠVYTURYS ART DOCK Klaipėda, 3 Naujoji Uosto St. The "Švyturys Art Dock" ("Švyturio menų dokas") was established in 2010 in the renovated former ship dock hall and the adjoining quay. It is a venue for all types of creative activities: music, theatre, cinema, dance, fashion, various festivals, conferences and educational activities, and interdisciplinary projects. The "Švyturys Art Dock", with a total area of 1100 square metres consists of two facilities: the small and the big dock halls. Since 2010 the international street circus festival "Wonderland" ("Stebuklų šalis") has been organised by the "Švyturys Art Dock".
BAROTI GALLERY Klaipėda, 3 Aukštoji St. This gallery, established by Klaipėda County Artists’ Association in 1992, was among the first in the city to open after the restoration of Independence. The gallery presents artworks by Klaipėda artists as well as works by contemporary Lithuanian artists and authors who have already become classics. The gallery organises exhibitions, cooperates with various city events and festivals, and initiates creative projects. It sells painting, sculpture, ceramics, and prints, etc. by Lithuanian artists. www.barotigalerija.lt
KLAIPĖDA GALLERY Klaipėda, 6 Bažnyčių St. This gallery was established by the Fund of Lithuanian Artists in 1997 and is engaged in promotion and dissemination of professional art, organises exhibitions by local and Lithuanian professional artists, and initiates and implements art projects both in its own facilities and other exhibition halls in the Republic of Lithuania or abroad. The gallery presents artworks in various genres: fine art, sculpture, graphic art. Solo and group exhibitions form an integral context based on an alteration between fine and applied art. The character and format of the exhibits displayed is determined by the specific exhibition space: the gallery is located in a cosy timber-framed 18th century building, has 4 exhibition halls, and a gallery in the supermarket. www.artistsassociation.lt/index.php?cid=13
STUDIO OF ANATOLIJUS KLEMENCOV Klaipėda, 25 Danes St. Anatolijus Klemencovas (born in 1954 in Klaipėda). Graphic artist, designer, scenographer, member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association, Klaipėda branch, long-term art director of Klaipėda Sea Festival. Studied in Vilnius Academy of Arts Klaipėda faculty. His creative activity includes: graphic art, placard art, calligraphy, scenography, installations, and applied graphic arts. Member of 174
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the Lithuanian Association of Graphic Design, the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. Since 1979 he has been taking part in exhibitions and other art events in the UK, Poland, Russia, Finland, Israel, Germany, Czech Republic, and other countries. In his creative work A. Klemencovas realizes his dream to see his hometown as if alive with phantasmagorical scenography, where everyone’s role is to play oneself. He lives and works in Klaipėda. www.klemencov.com
STUDIO OF REMIGIJUS TREIGYS Klaipėda, 1A Minijos St. Remigijus Treigys (born in 1961 in Kaunas). Photo artist. Graduate of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Klaipėda faculty. Member of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers (LFS), for six years he was the head of the LFS Klaipėda branch. With the help of analogue photography, R. Treigys analyses existence through a minimalist approach, slowly taming things, streets, cities, never including humans, as physical figures into his pictures, avoiding too much light. So far, he has held 38 solo exhibitions and participated in 60 group exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. He lives and works in Klaipėda. www.photoartKlaipėda.lt/lt/fotografai.html?k=1
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This publication has been produced with the assistance of the European Union under the Lithuania-Poland-Russia ENPI Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2007â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2013. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union The Lithuania-Poland-Russia European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2007â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2013 aims at promoting economic and social development on both sides of the EU-Russian border, addressing common challenges and problems, and promoting people to people cooperation. Under the Programme, legal non-profit entities from the Lithuanian and Polish border regions, and the entire Kaliningrad oblast implement joint projects co-financed by the EU and the Russian Federation.