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.