Druskininkai

Last year I bought a collection of early Krzysztof Kieślowski documentaries on DVD, films that in my opinion far outshine any of his later works of fiction. If you ever get the chance to see them, do. This has got nothing to do with this post. I’m currently in Krakow, where I travelled to via Druskininkai and Warsaw. Druskininkai, which if anybody ever reads this blog will know, is the second Lithuanian town that I’m thinking about producing a series of postcards for using Borders as the theme. I arrived there lunchtime last Tuesday, visited a few cemeteries but failed to find any Tatar graves (at least any with Arabic writing on them). My suspicion is that the Tatars assimilated so much into local life that their gravestones were marked in either Russian, Belarusian, Polish or Lithuanian. The town’s old cemetery, conveniently located next to the bus station, was as I suspected a truly multicultural affair, although as usual the Jewish cemetery was located apart from the main one. As well as skulking about looking for suspicious writing, I got some nice pictures of old ladies in traditional coloured headscarves as you can see before spending the rest of the day and the following morning wandering around, visiting places I’d planned to see as well as allowing myself the space to have plenty of happy accidents (see recent posts for more). I also visited the local museum, little more than a collection of small rooms that with the help of old photographs, furniture, maps, letters, bottles, pianos etc charts the rise of Druskininkai, showing without a shadow of a doubt that the town was predominantly Polish despite it being yet another place that the Lithuanians like to consider their own. One thing I didn’t realise is that Druskininkai was between the wars well and truly a border town. Nowadays it’s a couple of kilometres from Belarus, but between 1920 and 1939 it was in Poland, separated from Lithuania by the Nemunas river which runs through the town. There’s a tiny island on the river, called Love Island (Meilės Sala), which according to maps of the time was half in Poland and half in Lithuania. This is quite common throughout the world, but what was extraordinary in this case was that the island was in use as part of the holiday resort. There were even photographs in the museum of Poles lying on the island’s miniscule beach some time during the 1920s. The mind boggles. There’s an entire story just in this, but I’ll save it for another time. For more information about some of the interesting characters who lived in Druskininkai, see earlier posts. The Jewish Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz (born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, Lithuanian Žakas Lipšicas, 1891-1973), was born here. His childhood home, opposite the hotel his father owned that’s now the town’s Best Western, is a museum, but has been closed for ages, and nobody knows when it’s going to open again. I’m still trying to make some logical conclusions from what’s clearly a national obsession with obliterating anything from the past that wasn’t Lithuanian. Anyway, more about Druskininkai later. I just want to mention before finishing that the ancient bus that took me from Druskininkai to Marijampolė (known as Kapsukas during the Soviet occupation, after the founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas (1880-1935), and, incidentally, the only town in Lithuania to be renamed under the Communists), where I picked up the Warsaw train, was full of country folk. These people are like they’re straight out of the Middle Ages. Lithuania is Africa. I’m beginning to understand and even occasionally sympathise with the Lithuanian obsession with clinging onto the past, although I’ll never truly admire it. Writing about photography is like dancing about architecture. Onwards and upwards.