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.