Ghetto victims

Links for Lithuania,Partisans,Antisemitism 2007-2008 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Napoleon

Sunday evening

Rabo Karabekian, the Armenian immigrant protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1987 novel Bluebeard, was an amusing footnote in the history of Abstract Expressionism due to the fact that the paint he used, Sateen Dura-Lux, was defective and fell off his canvases. His other medium, coloured tape, was laid on top of the paint in long vertical strips and was supposed to represent people, or to be more exact, people’s souls. That fell off too. I mention this because it reminds me of several things that went through my mind when I was out researching today. Žalgirio Stadionas, one of the places I visited, was at the time it was built in 1950 by German prisoners of war, a masterpiece of socialist realist architecture. It too has fallen to pieces (see the black and white photograph below). As already mentioned, the stadium was built on top of a Jewish Cemetery, which was moved to the outskirts of town and which I never managed to get to this afternoon. Art is a strange thing. Just like I have visions of Lithuanians roller-blading over the top of Jewish graves in the Botanical Gardens in Palanga, I can also see one of Lithuania’s top soccer teams, Vilniaus Žalgiris (followed by a notorious fan base of racists I might add) playing on more dead bodies. Whether they mean it or not, the Lithuanians have an uncanny knack of dancing on the graves of a race of people they once lived alongside for hundreds of years and who they helped obliterate during the Holocaust. We leave traces wherever we go, and I’m attracted to the idea of shooting these roller-bladers and footballers in low light using a slow shutter speed. A fitting example of photographic Abstract Expressionism indeed. I wouldn’t say this research is fun, but it’s certainly making me think. Jonas Basanavičius, the Lithuanian national(ist) hero mentioned yesterday, wrote of his outrage that people should be allowed to rule over others on territory that doesn’t belong to them (in this case the tsarist Russian Empire). He then goes on to mention how Lithuania was once the largest country in Europe and stretched all the way to the Black Sea. One can only wonder how he justified the fact that this former empire was made up of several parts of the world (now Belarus and Ukraine) that clearly didn’t belong to the Lithuanians. I’m currently reading the life story of Fidel Castro in his own words. He too makes the same mistake, in one breath justifying Cuba’s military intervention in the South African invasion of Angola, and in the next mentioning how this was only possible with the help of the Soviet Union, itself acting in an identical manner to South Africa and interfering on a massive scale with countries such as Lithuania. I don’t think I want to use any of this as a final photographic project, but it’s an interesting way of working towards projects. I’m certainly interested in the former multi-cultural makeup of Lithuania, and would like to somehow remember the previous occupants of the country who are little more than memories now. The Borders project I want to work on remains focused on Palanga and Druskininkai, but while I’m stuck here in Vilnius I might as well use the history around me. Finally, I didn’t get to fill my phone with photographs of people as I wanted to today, partially because of the weather and partially because Vilnius is practically empty of people on a Sunday. I did get one or two nice pictures of people, and was at least reminded that I like pictures of people more than anything else. The people-free pictures I’m taking as part of this research are interested in a notebook kind of way, but don’t do it for me on any other level. I think I’ve said enough for now. I’m off to Poland next week. Hopefully I can visit Druskininkai on the way and really start getting an idea of what it is I want to do with the Borders theme. I may even abandon the idea altogether, but as I already mentioned, I’m certainly enjoying the journey.

More notes

The Battle of Grunwald, fought between the joint armies of Poland and Lithuania against the Teutonic Knights on July 15, 1410, is considered to be one of the greatest battles ever to take place in medieval Europe. A defining moment in Polish history, the battle was immortalised in Kraków with the unveiling of this weighty monument in front of an estimated 160,000 people on the 500th anniversary of the event in 1910. Antoni Wiwulski's (1877-1919) original masterpiece was, not surprisingly, destroyed by the occupying Nazis during WWII and the copy that now stands in its place dates from 1976, having been faithfully reproduced using sketches and models of the original. At the top on his horse is the Lithuanian king of Poland Władysław Jagiełło, his sword pointing downwards in his right hand. At the front is his cousin the Lithuanian prince Vytautas (Vitold), who is flanked on either side by victorious soldiers from the joint army. The dead man at the front is Urlich von Jungingen, the Teutonic Order’s Grand Master, who lost his life during the battle.

Žalgirio Stadionas

Sunday morning

Which bit of the border do I photograph? The dead bit in the past? The transitional bit like the flaking paint in this picture? The modern bit? A composite of all three? More research required. Bah! I’ll try and make it out to the Jewish Cemetery today. It dates from around 1950, when the original one, closed by the tsarist regime after the Rebellion of 1830, was removed in order to build a stadium in the centre of Vilnius. The stadium was built by German POWs. Remember, Vilnius had been occupied by the Poles since just after the end of WWI before being invaded by the USSR and given back to Lithuania in 1940 before being invaded again by the Germans and once again being recaptured by the Soviets towards the end of the war in Europe. Notoriously, many of the Jewish headstones were incorporated into post-war development projects including the infamous flight of steps leading up the hill in the centre of the city to the former Trade Union Palace. Oh, and yesterday in the cemetery at Rasos, which is almost entirely Polish, I found the grave of the Lithuanian national hero Jonas Basanavičius (1851-1927). Like many Lithuanian national heroes, Basanavičius spent a large amount of time not actually living in the country he was so fond of. An irrational nationalist who wrote as much gibberish as sense, the inscription on his tomb is in the old style of writing Lithuanian. I found that rather amusing. Anyway, not important at the moment. I’m enjoying the journey. No idea where it’ll end.

More visual ideas to help me remember

Help!

I don't think I've taken a decent photograph, either accidentally or by using every ounce of skill in my mind and body, for about 700 years. I need to get out and about in Vilnius and do nothing but take photographs of people. I feel like a fraud. I feel like somebody whose luck ran out. I feel crappy. The weather's looking good for tomorrow. I need to go out and do nothing but fill my phone with pictures.

More grave thoughts

Today I made it to one of the three Vilnius cemeteries I want to visit. More text to follow. I was also beguiled by the photographs on the graves (mostly a Polish thing) and found some more examples of strange Lithuanian writing. Watch this space.

In the southeast corner…

A nice day in Vilnius today. I finally caught up with my old friend Virginija who says the grave inscription is definitely Curonian (a language that I also discovered is still spoken, albeit only by a handful of people, on parts of the Curonian Lagoon), and this evening I was in the local Irish pub for a cup of tea with another good friend, Miglė, who just so happens to be from Druskininkai where, depending on the weather, I may or may not visit this weekend. As already mentioned, the small Lithuanian town of Druskininkai, which over the last 100 years has managed to find itself in Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, was the birthplace of Charles Bronson’s Tatar father. The Tatars, all of whom in Lithuania were men, came to Lithuania hundreds of years ago, gave up speaking Turkish some time during the 16th century in favour of Belarusian, which they wrote using the Arabic alphabet. Along with the even smaller ethnic group, the Kairate, the Tatars came as soldiers, intermarried with the local women and for reasons I’ve yet to discover were exceptionally good at gardening. Continuing with the Borders theme, I’m becoming increasingly interested in cemeteries, places in Lithuania that represent not only the border between this life and the next but also, such as with the Jewish, Tatar, German and other non-Lithuanian graves represent a racial border of sorts that I can’t quite put into words at the moment. The Curonian graves started me thinking about the language border as well, which in turn reminded me of some Islamic-looking graves I found and photographed in the Soldiers’ Cemetery in Vilnius on a snowy Saturday afternoon in 2004. Next step, find more cemeteries, and find a Tatar grave in Druskininkai. I need to get all of this that’s going round and round in my head written down. All I can say for now, in short, is that what ties it together is that it represents in one way or another the enormous border between the multi-ethnic Lithuania as it was and the nationalist, ethnically pure Lithuania of the 21st century. So many interesting stories to be told, and a fascinating voyage of discovery working out how to do it with photography. If the weather really is shit this weekend like it promises to be then I’ll try at least to visit a couple of cemeteries in Vilnius I’ve never been to. Virginija also told me that the biggest ever exhibition of Lithuanian photography is currently showing at the other end of the little street I’m staying in.

And finally...

I'm having some fantastic heated debates with the Lithuanians today over this gravestone inscription, but that's not why I want to work on this project. Simply, and without getting caught up in the Lithuanian nationalist psyche, I’m trying to find out what it is to be Lithuanian. Language seems to be a way of doing it that you can’t really argue with for very long. Anyway, the aforementioned inscription is no longer with us like the person lying underneath it, but it’s clear that it’s either New Curonian, Somogitian or a mangling of the two. Basically, it’s proto-Lithuanian, or more accurately a dialect that’s no longer spoken in contemporary Lithuania. The Polish spellings are interesting albeit obvious.

Here’s what it says.

Here lies with God
My dear wife*
And our dear mother
Marinke Matzpreiksch
Born June 12, 1873
Died October 2, 1912**

* The Lithuanian word for man and husband is the same, vyras. I’m betting that it used to be the same for woman and wife. The actual modern literal translation of this line is My dear woman.

** I missed the year from the original post.

The really interesting thing about this is that once you’ve arrived at the fact that the writing’s Lithuanian, you still can’t ignore the fact that the woman had a German name. And the really really interesting fact about it is that the (Germanic) word Oktober is no longer in use in Lithuanian (whereas it’s crept into Latvian (Oktobris), which was once the same language as Lithuania. The Lithuanians now use spalis. This is like literary ethnic cleansing!

Except...

On gravestones.

Or...

A branch of Curonian grafted itself somehow onto the Samogitian language, Samogitian being the English translation of Žemaitijan (see below). The language of Žemaitija as already mentioned was the template for modern Lithuanian. My early notes from last week include a list of the main tribes that the Lithuanians are descended from.

Aukštaitians
Curonians
Galindians
Nadruvians
Prussians
Sambians
Samogitians
Skalvians
Yotvingians

More sense to follow.

Czon!

It's czon not gzon. It's Curonian!

I don't know if it's Old Curonian or New Curonian though. Whatever, it appears to be a mixture of High German, Low German and Lithuanian. Old Curonian died out centuries ago and was spoken in southwest Latvia. Palanga has been part of Latvia in the past. New Curonian was spoken on the Curonian Lagoon, immediately south of Klaipėda and down towards the general direction of Poland. In Polish, cz is pronounced ch.

There are no surviving written examples.

Gzon ilsis Dieweje

I’m jumping ahead of myself and will no doubt have anyone reading this lost before I even start, but this really is interesting and rather than just make notes I might as well put it here just in case anybody’s interested in commenting. I’m also of course supposed to be plotting my progress with this blog, so here we go.

Following on from the penultimate post, I travelled to the Lithuanian coast this weekend to visit friends and to start digging up ideas for a possible borders-related project in and around Palanga. Yesterday morning after a sumptuous breakfast we all set off in my friend Mark’s car armed only with a map, a head full of ideas and a little bit of local knowledge. I first wanted to see the tiny village of Nemirseta, which was the exact place where the border between the German and Russian Empires was for several hundred years. We found a big old empty building that I think was a hospital at one stage, and that appears in lots of photographs. The windows were broken so naturally I climbed in. Nothing of interest, but we did make a car stop, as a Norwegian friend of Mark’s (Mark is the British Honorary Consul in Klaipėda and knows every foreigner within a 100km radius of his front door) spotted us and asked us if we were planning to develop the building. This is a classic foreigner thing. Inevitable but so boring (for me anyway) that almost without exception the Westerners living in Lithuania are here to rape the country. As soon as we told him what were up to, he lost interest. As I keep telling the Lithuanians, they may think they’ve got their independence, but really they’ve been invaded again.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. Next up I was told that in the park between us and the sea was a huge, Soviet-built hotel, which was basically built for Brezhnev and his Russian nomenklatura. Brezhnev never visited but beyond the fact that this is a classic example of how the Soviet Union threw their money away is of no interest here. The hotel was once protected by soldiers and a huge fence, and only Russians were allowed inside. It’s still there today, so we drove to the entrance, and were told by the security guard that the place was closed. Hey ho. Next up, I wanted to find the Jewish memorial in the same park. Last week whilst reading up on Palanga I discovered that the town, which is one of the symbols of Lithuania, was up until WWII almost 50% populated by Jews. Some time during WWII they were all taken to this park, murdered and buried. The park is a fancy one with peacocks and rose gardens. That the Germans and their Lithuanian accomplices should carry out such an act is unthinkable, but to do it in a popular park is just freaky. The place is marked by a large stone, which has got words carved on it in Yiddish and English, but that are impossible to read. I need to find out what it says. The mass graves are now covered in paths which the locals and holidaymakers like to cycle and rollerblade on. The image is about as weird as it gets. Next we went to the beach, and found the back entrance to the Brezhnev hotel. Next to it is a military listening post, which I guess has been there for centuries due to its original geographic significance. Now a large tower with a huge radar on top sits and scans the Baltic Sea. More recently, this was the westernmost point of the Soviet Union. Interesting. After lunch on the beach I walked on my own through the park and into Palanga itself, thinking and looking. The town is full of classic (Jewish now I come to think of it) wooden houses. To the north is the Old Jewish Cemetery but that’s going to have to wait until the next time. I was picked up outside the bus station and driving back to Klaipėda I wanted to have a look at a cemetery in a tiny village that was marked on the map. It said it was of ethnographic interest, so I wanted to know why. After driving up two wrong tracks we eventually found it. It’s an extraordinary place, with graves going back a couple of hundred years, and with gravestones written in German, Lithuanian and a mishmash of the two. This incidentally was on what was the German side of the former border. Interestingly, the German graves are still well kept with fresh flowers. Clearly there’s a lot of German blood left in this part of the world. Klaipėda was known until 1923 as Memel, which again is another story. Anyway, one grave I found particularly interesting.

On it was written…

Gzon ilsis Dieweje
mano mielima Motriszke
ir musu mielima Motina
Marinke
Matzpreiksch
gim. 12. Juui 1873,
mir. 2. Oktober.

Gzon ilsis Dieweje
I can’t find the word gzon in any language except, strangely, Albanian, which is almost certainly a red herring. The word zgon however is Polish, and it means dead, or dead person. It's what the coroner says when he pronounces someone dead. Czas zgonu means time of death. You can also say you're a zgon when you're dead tired. Ilsis minus the final s in Lithuanian means weary. Dieweje is interesting. The Lithuanian word for God is Dievas. Using simple Lithuanian grammar, Dieweje translates as in God (Lithuanian doesn’t have a word for in, it’s added to the end of words), only it uses the feminine form, and God is masculine (in God in modern Lithuanian is Dieve). Also, the word uses the Polish w instead of the Lithuanian v.

mano mielima Motriszke
Mano is Lithuanian for my or mine. Miela/mielas in Lithuanian means lovely, sweet, dear etc. Mylimas/mylima means more or less the same thing. So, mielima is almost certainly an old version of dear, etc. Motriszke also screams out some Polish with the sz, pronounced sh, and replaced when written Lithuanian was standardised and the letter š was introduced into the language. In modern Lithuanian, moteris means woman, moteriška means feminine, or in the style of a woman.

ir musu mielima Motina
And our dear/sweet Mother.

Marinke
Marinke is a fairly common first name in Germany and Holland.

Matzpreiksch
From a quick Google search this is clearly also a German name. Note the classic horizontal line through the z (which I can’t find in any fonts!).

gim. 12. Juui 1873,
Gimti, Lithuanian for born. Juui, clearly June or July, but not in any language I know of.

mir. 2. Oktober 1912.
Mirtis, Lithuanian for death. Something interesting but not relevant here, mirtis is only used for humans and bees in Lithuania. All other living things have another word meaning death. More about the place of bees in Lithuanian culture another time. Oktober is the German spelling of October. 1912 was an interesting year in Europe, the year of the First Balkan War, and effectively the start of WWI and the remapping of the continent.

So there you have it. I’m no expert (yet), plus you also have to take into account the two main Lithuanian dialects that still exist to this day. The grave is more or less physically located in Žemaitija (the Lithuanian Lowlands), whose dialect was used as the template when the modern Lithuanian language was standardised by Jonas Jablonskis (1860-1930) in 1901… although not entirely. The modern Lithuanian language uses some 2,770 loan words, many of them from early trading with Prussia. Prussian is an extinct language that I know nothing about… yet. Lithuanian incidentally is an ancient language, almost untouched by progress over the centuries as it was only spoken by peasants, Polish being the language of the ruling classes until Lithuanian independence in 1918. This is fascinating.

I believe I’m onto something, although Gzon only knows how I’m going to turn this into a documentary photography project.

Watch this space.

Taking stock (of stock)

As mentioned very briefly here before, I recently signed up for a free PhotoShelter account and entered the world of stock photography. The reason why I’m with PhotoShelter and nobody else at the moment is simply down to the fact that my crappy old dSLR can’t deliver enough pixels for the bigger, better stock photography sites. So, until such a time arrives when I can upgrade (ie. when the next decent commission comes along), I’ll have to make do with PhotoShelter. All is not entirely lost however, as using PhotoShelter has been an education, and I recommend a free stock site to anyone, as the hard rules and regulations enforced by the Stock Police work as a kind of picture editor. For those who don’t know about these things, when you upload to a stock photography site, the photographs are kept in a holding area until somebody at their end looks at your pictures and decides which go on the site and which don’t. Criteria ranges from just plain crappy shots (rejected) to the more subjective decisions based on how many copies of the thing that’s in the photograph is already on the site. Some rejected pictures come with an explanation of why they were rejected, plus there’s even a Soft Rejection category in which you’re given the option of changing the photograph slightly and submitting it again. I’m enjoying the education personally, and am learning a lot, including the simple fact that much of my previous photography that was getting published in travel guidebooks doesn’t cut the mustard in the world of stock. I’ve also quickly learnt that my circular polarising filter is rubbish. I won’t be using it again. Onwards and upwards.

Borders

Druskininkai and Palanga, two of Lithuania’s most popular holiday resorts, were not that long ago situated on the edges of vast empires. Lithuania’s unofficial summer capital, the coastal town of Palanga in the northwest of the country has in its time been a part of Lithuania, Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and Poland, and was until the First World War right on the border of the far eastern part of the German empire. The popular health resort of Druskininkai in the southeast of the country was the favoured holiday spot of the Polish military hero Józef Piłsudski, the birthplace of the famous Jewish sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and is best remembered locally as the childhood home of the Polish-Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. The late actor Charles Bronson, born Karolis Bučinskis, was the 11th child of a Tatar immigrant born in Druskininkai. Can I turn these simple facts into two postcard projects?

Test

Thinking