Kurtuvėnai, Part I

For one reason or another—the chief one being the usual end-of-semester pressure to tie up loose ends—we have been pretty busy, which is my excuse for neglecting my duties here on Baltic Avenue.  Yesterday was a truly memorable day, however, thanks to our public administration colleague, Vilma Tubutiene, who expertly organized a field trip to Kurtuvėnai, which deserves to be reported on in full.  This is the first installment.

Vilma and her husband have a flat here in the city center, and they also have built a country house some fifteen kilometers outside the city near the Kurtuvėnai Regional Park (KRP).  One of the highlights of yesterday’s excursion was a conversation with the director of the park, Rimvydas Tamulaitis, which took place in the park’s administration building.  We were given to understand that like most of Lithuania’s regional parks, all of which date to the restoration of independence in 1992, the mission of KRP extends to both conservation of nature and human recreation.  There must be tradeoffs in such cases, and it’s not easy to get the balance just right.

What I didn’t appreciate at first was the wide variety of wildlife that exists within the boundaries of the park, which is quite large (over 17,000 hectares, most of it heavily forested) and the extent of the park’s resourcefulness in protecting numerous species of endangered flora and fauna.  Park administrators also must be commended for their skill in securing outside funding for their various conservation programs and outreach efforts.  Photo #1 above shows the park director posing for the camera with our group (from left to right, front row:  Jane Kolson, Arwiphawee Srithongrung of Wichita State University, Vilma Tubutiene, Oksana Mejere, and Jurgita Mikolaityte; back row: Ken Kolson, Ken Kriz of Wichita State University, and park administrator Rimvydas Tamulaitis).

The Kurtuvėnai Regional Park is on the site of a former estate, one that had the usual amenities, including a manor house, a barn, a carriage house, stables, and a brewery on site, not to mention a nearby church that was generously supported by the local squire.  One thing we have learned in the course of this semester is that Lithuanian preservationists and conservationists are less timid than their counterparts in the U.S. about reconstructing buildings that were destroyed.  Negotiating a compromise between architectural aesthetics and historical authenticity doesn’t seem to bother Lithuanian preservationists, perhaps because so much of their built environment was destroyed by the wars and strife of the twentieth century.  What they call “restoration” often is simply reconstruction.  Whether  we realize it or not, Americans have had the luxury of being a little squeamish about these kinds of issues.

There is a carriage house that is in the process of being reconstructed.  While it is a handsome building, it completely lacks the patina of old age.  The same thing is true of the barn, or granary.  Because so many of the buildings are reconstructions, the structure that appealed most to me was the brick stable (see photo #2, above), which has room for 40 horses.  We walked through the stable.  Most of the horses appear to be thoroughbreds, though there also are a few workhorses (see photo #3, below).

 

The mansion at Kurtuvėnai was rebuilt at least five times over four centuries or so.  Early in the twentieth century, the estate was owned by a family named Plater.  The mansion was destroyed in the Russian civil war following World War I.  Soviet nationalization and the deportations to Siberia following World War II ruined the Plater family once and for all, and the estate became a collective farm, or kolkhoz.  It seems to have been the residents of the kolkhoz who ransacked the manor house in the late 1950s.

 

 

Nearby is a church, Saint Jacob the Apostle, which has a long history extending back to the 17th century (see photo above; yes that's my bride under the yellow umbrella).  Like most of the other buildings in the village, the church looked to me--despite the baroque bell towers--like a 19th-century construction; at any rate, it is not the palimpsest that one might reasonably expect of such a venerable building.

 

The A-Team

 

Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, is said to have been able to talk to and control wild animals.  Her Lithuanian namesake, Diana Saparniene, appears to exert similar powers as chairperson of the public administration department at Šiauliai University.  Here she is shown with some of her acolytes at Arkos Restoranas in the city center.  From left to right:  Jurgita Mikolaityte; Ken Kriz, Wichita State University; Arwiphawee Srithongrung, Wichita State University; Diana Saparniene; Jane Kolson, George Washington University; Ken Kolson, The Ohio State University; Oksana Mejere; and Anzelika Gumuliauskine.   

 

Khrushchyvoka

 

One of the more frustrating things about international travel is the way you notice distinctive features of the foreign environment at first, then slowly learn to take them for granted.  For example, I have become inured to two prominent features of the Lithuanian built environment.

Both involve Soviet-era concrete, which is nearly ubiquitous in Šiauliai, and can be seen anywhere just by bothering to look at what's under your feet.  Soviet-era pavers (see photo above) have not aged well.  Similarly, reinforced concrete stairs (see photo below) are pock-marked, and frequently have steel rods sticking out at odd angles.  Columbia Warren, author of the unconventional travel guide we carry with us, says that Lithuanians just aren't as litigious as Americans.  We see the opportunity for lucrative liability claims here; apparently, they don't. 
 

Then there are the Soviet-era apartment blocks, typically 5-9 stories high. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, which is why I haven't gotten around to photographing any of them yet.  The photo below will, therefore, have to serve as an archetype.  This one is faced with brick, as are many of the apartment blocks here in Siauliai, but  you can be sure that reinforced concrete lies just beneath the surface. 

It turns out that these apartment buildings have a name.  They're called khrushchyvoka, a reference to Nikita Khrushchev, who was party chief in Moscow when they came into vogue.  They were supposed to exploit the structural properties of reinforced concrete and prefabrication.  It didn’t take them long to metastasize and spread into every nook and cranny of the Soviet Union.   There must be millions of them at this point.

Our experience--limited though it may be--tells us that many of the flats inside these buildings have been renovated by the residents and are quite lovely.  Our suspicion is that the owners of the apartment blocks themselves, whoever they may be, have little or no incentive to make improvements to the entry ways, lobbies, staircases, and other public areas inside these buildings.  Click here to read the Wikipedia entry on khrushchyvoka. 

 

The Curonian Spit

 

 UNESCO’s World Heritage program is an exemplary case of international collaboration in pursuit of a larger—in this case, global—public good.  The list of World Heritage sites includes both natural and cultural treasures, and at this point it consists of close to 1,000 sites around the world—from the Pyramids of Giza to the Great Wall of China, from Yosemite National Park to the Leaning Tower of Pisa—that constitute the most splendid works of Divine Providence and mere mortals.  Some of these natural and/or cultural treasures are secure, while others (44 sites ranging from the Everglades to virtually every World Heritage site in Syria) are very much in danger of being lost forever. 

Four of UNESCO's world heritage sites are located, at least in part, in Lithuania: 

·        Vilnius Historic Centre, an example of a central European town that evolved organically over five centuries;

·        Kernavė Archaeological Park, a site that documents the remarkable encounter between Pagan and Christian funeral traditions;

·        Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, carried out in the early 19^th century by the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, and constituting the first accurate measuring of a long segment of a meridian; and

·        the Curonian Spit, a 60-mile long sand dune peninsula separating the Baltic Sea from a lagoon shared by Lithuania and the Russian Federation’s exclave of Kaliningrad. 

At the top of this post is a map of the Curonian Spit, which is a little reminiscent of the Florida Keys or the Outer Banks of North Carolina, except that it’s more than just barrier islands, in that it more definitively cuts the ocean off from a fresh-water lagoon.  Jane and I were very fortunate to have been shown around the spit by our Lithuanian friends, Laima and Jonas (see photo, below).  

 

 

When one thinks of the Curonian Spit, one thinks immediately of sand dunes, such as the ones in the photo below, which was taken from the top of a dune near the town of Nida (see map, above; Thomas Mann used to have a place in Nida).  Those are Russian waters (lagoon side) visible in the distance.

 

 

But much of the Spit consists of deep pine and birch forest, and so is home to wild creatures large and small, including cormorants, boar, and moose.  That’s right, moose (see photo below).  Honestly, I thought it was a donkey at first.  The absence of antlers means that it's a cow, i.e., a female moose.  

The Spit, finally, is home to a large colony of wooden sculptures that celebrate the mysteries of pre-Christian Baltic culture (see photo below).  These extraordinary images are part of an outdoor museum called Witches Hill, in the northern part of the Spit.

 

 

 

Palanga

 

Klaipeda is a seaport, but it is not a beach town.  Luckily, it’s a cheap and easy bus ride to Palanga, a resort community of some 17,000 souls that is very popular with Russians (among others in this part of the world).  There’s a reason why Klaipeda doesn’t have a beach, and we’ll get into that in a subsequent post.

 

The main attraction in Palanga is the beach (see photo above), and it is easily accessible from all parts of the city, which offers almost every kind of vacation housing—from summer cottages to upscale hotel rooms and everything in between.  There are attractive bike trails, and acres of parkland, including a vast botanical garden on the grounds of which sits a stunning palazzo (formerly the Feliks Tyszkiewicz manor, and serving later as the headquarters for Soviet border guards) that now houses an archaeological amber museum (see photo #2, below).

 

Amber is formed over millions of years from the resin produced by a kind of pine tree that is now extinct—in part because a super-resinous tree proved unsuitable to an altered climate.  Anyway, amber is beautiful (see photo #3, below), and it is soft enough to be easily worked.  While it can be mined, there always is a chance that a big gob of it will wash up underfoot, which makes it worth keeping your head down on a Baltic beach.

 

One of the best things about the amber museum is that it has an extensive exhibit on "inclusions," which refers to the random flora and fauna trapped in the resin millions of years ago and encased in amber for eternity.  Remember the premise of Jurassic Park, in which the mosquito that has just dined on the back of a dinosaur gets entangled in amber, and so becomes the source of T-Rex DNA?  That mosquito was an "inclusion."

 

What use, you might ask, was made of such a bourgeois and frivolous substance as amber during the fifty years of Soviet occupation?  It’s hard to say for sure that the wives of the commissars were not attracted to amber, but the artifact in photo #4 is almost certainly closer to the official version of Soviet history.

 

 

 

          

 

Presidential Election in Lithuania

At last count, there were 37 political parties registered with the Ministry of Justice in Lithuania.  That makes the politics of this small country--there are only 3 million people living here--fairly complicated.  Plus, they have a popularly elected president in addition to a parliament and prime minister. 

The results of last Sunday's preliminary presidential election are in, and incumbent president Dalia Grybauskaite garnered 46% of the vote, not enough to preempt a runoff election pitting her against the #2 candidate, Zigmantas Balcytis, a social democrat.  The run-off is scheduled for May 25. 

Grybauskaite, a former EU budget commissioner and a black-belt in karate, is an ex-communist who has earned a reputation for harboring no illusions about Soviet expansionism as it pertains to the Baltic states.  She's also a Ph.D. who did post-doctoral work at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1990, around the time the U.S.S.R. was dissolving.  Click here to read the recent story about her in the Guardian. 

Why Men Don't Ask for Directions

 

Last Friday Jane and I boarded a train bound for Lithuania’s third-largest city, the Baltic seaport of Klaipeda.  Klaipeda is a little less Russian and Polish, and a bit more German/East Prussian, than the rest of Lithuania.  Some people say that Klaipeda is more cosmopolitan than other Lithuanian cities, perhaps because of its roots in the Hanseatic League and in long-distance commerce involving textiles and amber. 

It was a gray day when we boarded the train in Šiauliai, and a miserably wet one when we alighted at Klaipeda’s railway station.  I had booked us a nice place to stay, one with a little character and easy access by foot to the city’s old town, or senasmiesto.  See photo #1, above.   

 

Klaipeda’s somewhat curious status vis-a-vis Lithuania is best illustrated by two historical factoids.  One is that the city and surrounding area was, with French encouragement, annexed by a newly independent Lithuania in 1923, when German strength and resolve was at its nadir.  The second is that Hitler spoke here, and a statue of him was erected in the theater square in 1939, when German resolve had recovered (putting it mildly) enough to allow for the re-annexation of Klaipeda.  See photo #2, above, which shows the statue that currently sits in the square, replacing Hitler, in front of the theater, which currently is undergoing restoration. 

So, when we got off the train, we pointed our suitcases and umbrellas in the direction of what is, according to Tripadvisor, one of Klaipeda’s better guest houses.  It’s called Pirklių Namai, which means something akin to Merchant’s House, and it's adjacent to, but not actually in, the old town (see photo #3, below).  It was pouring.  Under the circumstances, any normal person in this situation would hail a cab and say, “Take me to Pirklių Namai.” And that’s how the fact that I am not a normal person becomes relevant to this story. 

 

I loath spending money on taxicabs, and I will go to almost any length to avoid it.  Getting from place to place by putting one foot in front of the other is a matter of pride with me.  In a pinch, I don’t mind taking subways, trams, trolleys, or buses.  The wonderful thing about these forms of mass transit is that the fares and the routes are fixed, published, and non-negotiable.  Ask a cabbie, “How much will it cost me to get to the senasmiesto?” and the response you are likely to get is some variation on the theme of “How much you got?” 

So anyway, at the train station I looked for a Tourist Information Office to secure a more detailed street map than the one in my guidebook.  No luck.  I thought we’d have a 10-minute walk to our guesthouse.  After 15 minutes of slogging through a steady downpour, I could tell that Jane was fast running out of patience.  Finally, we reached Naujoji Sodo gatvė, one of the city’s main drags and home to Pirklių Namai at #12.  It can’t be that far, I thought to myself.  But where, exactly?  We could see the city's docks ahead of us, and there was nothing between us and the docks that looked anything like a guest house.

At #1 Naujoji Sodo gatvė, we saw one of Klaipeda’s iconic hotels and conference centers.  So, despite my allergy to asking for directions, I crossed the street to inquire at the front desk as to the whereabouts of Pirklių Namai.  Two young women huddled to compare notes, and concluded that we should be heading south, not west.  “It's in the old town.  As soon as you cross the bridge, you can’t miss it,” one of them said. 

It didn't seem possible, since we were already on the right street, but given our level of desperation, we did what we were told, crossed the drawbridge over the Danė River, and sure enough, even though you “can’t miss it,” we saw no sign of Pirklių Namai.  This is why men don’t ask for directions.  Half the time, the person providing you with an answer that sounds authoritative is just guessing.   

 

We stopped in a coffee shop on the far side of the bridge. (Later, under sunnier skies, I took a picture of Jane on that bridge, with a tall ship called the Meridian in the background.  See photo #4, above)  “You need to go back to Naujoji Sodo gatvė,” said the barista, pointing us toward the place from which we had just come.  We retraced our sloshy steps and, pressing some 50 yards farther west than where we had given up the search the first time, there it was, Pirklių Namai, sitting sideways on Naujoji Sodo gatvė and with its façade on an adjacent alley.  

If the young women at the front desk of the iconic hotel at #1 Naujoji Sodo gatvė had known or wanted to, they could have walked us out the front door and pointed to the Pirklių Namai across the street at #12.  But they seemed never to have heard of it, nor even of Naujoji Sodo gatvė, the street on which their own hotel sits, ruling the roost.  

Next time, I’ll still try to find my way without asking for directions, but I might consider hailing a cab.

 

 

Chaimas Frenkelis Villa

 

The Frenkelis Villa is one of Šiauliai’s main attractions.  We were taken there by colleagues in the public administration department for an independence day celebration back in February.  One day last week we returned to spend a little more time studying the permanent collection.  Here’s what our Lonely Planet guide has to say about the villa:

To the east of the town centre stands Frenkelis Villa, built in Art Nouveau style in 1908 for the then leather baron of Šiauliai.  It survived WWII unscathed and was used as a military hospital by the Soviets from 1944 until 1993, at which time it was turned over to the city.  The . . . interior has been lovingly restored to its former glory, with dark wood-panelling and period furniture featuring heavily throughout.

The villa actually is part of a complex of buildings that includes the structures (or their replacements) that accommodated the tannery, a synagogue, a Jewish school, and a courtyard that is now hired out for private events.  The complex is managed by the Šiauliai Aušros museum, Aušros meaning Dawn and referring to a newspaper that played a key role in the nationalist rising of the late 19^th century.  Here’s how the Frenkelis villa is described in one of the museum’s brochures:

In 1879, Chaimas Frenkelis arrived in Šiauliai possessing the capital of five thousand roubles, which he invested in a small tannery workshop.  The start of business was successful—already at the beginning of XX c. the factory grew into one of the most modern and biggest leather processing companies in Russian Empire. . . .  There were [in the villa] all technical innovations of XX c. beginning:  water supply, central heating, electricity, telephone.  Till the World War I, the Frenkeliai family who lived in the villa during the interwar period shared the building with Šiauliai Hebrew Gymnasium.  Since 1940, there was a military hospital in the villa.  In 1993, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the villa was given to Šiauliai Aušros museum.

Museum publications make it clear that the Šiauliai tannery was very much a family business.  Chaimas was a self-educated business innovator.  His wife Dora was evidently responsible for rationalizing business correspondence and accountancy.  Their only son, Jocūbas, studied chemistry at Berlin University and later assumed responsibility for “the implementation of the most modern methods of leather tanning in the factory.”  Although it is clear that the family lost its shoe factory when it was nationalized by the U.S.S.R., the exhibits unfortunately say little about the fate of Jocūbas and his co-religionists resulting from the German and Soviet invasions of the 1940s.

Incidentally, the map above is one of a number of historic street plans of Šiauliai mounted on the walls of the Frenkelis villa’s secondary staircase.  The location of the villa and tannery, designated as #11, is shown in the lower right-hand corner of the map.  Dating from the German occupation of 1915-1916, the street names are a who’s who of the Kaiserreich; what is now Vytauto gatvė, for instance, was called Hindenbergstrasse in honor of the celebrated German general of the Great War.    

 

 

 

 

Šiauliai 95, Klaipeda 66

 

Two weeks ago, as reported here, we had a pleasant conversation in a local restaurant with Gediminas Petrauskas, head coach of Šiauliai’s professional basketball team.  Coach Petrauskas reported on that occasion that spending a thirteenth year at Roanoke (VA) Catholic High School changed his life.  We suspect what he meant was that playing basketball in the United States and perfecting his English language skills made him completely bicultural and bilingual, which is how he can be a credible coach for both American and Lithuanian players.  (In the top picture, above, Coach Petrauskas has his back turned to the camera, just to the right of his blond-haired assistant in gray suit.) 

Anyway, Coach Roanoke urged us to come to Šiauliai Arena to see a game, and we did so last night—a playoff game, at that, though we don’t really understand how the playoffs work in the Baltic Basketball League.  It was an interesting experience.  We took the bus.  We went early so we could get something to eat, only to discover that the menu at Šiauliai Arena, at least for basketball games, is limited to potato chips and beer.  Here are a few of the more subtle differences we noted between Lithuanian basketball games and the NBA.

·        We were able to get two front-row tickets for last night’s game for less than $10 per ticket.  I hate to think how much two front-row seats would cost for a playoff game at the Verizon Center, assuming such tickets could be had in the first place, which they could not be.

·        There were no ushers at the arena, which meant that seating assignments were  somewhat provisional, though that proved not to be a problem for us;  Lithuanians might be a little more law-abiding than Americans.

·        The public address system was loud, but not bleeding-eardrums loud, like NBA games at Verizon Center.

·        Both teams were skilled, well-coached, aggressive, and (unlike recent Washington Wizards teams) interested in playing defense.

·        Šiauliai was clearly the better of the two teams, and one wonders whether that has something to do with the fact that they have five Americans on their roster, compared with only one for Klaipeda.  And that in turn suggests something about the value of Coach Petrauskas’s bilingualism.   

·        There were no extra time-outs or breaks in the action for the purpose of slipping in more television commercials.

·        The coaches didn’t try to manage the clock at the end of the game by purposely fouling the opposition or calling time-outs (though concededly, this might have something to do with the one-sidedness of the game).  So, the game started at 7:00 and ended almost exactly at 9:00.

·        We enjoyed watching Chris Cooper (uniform #20, see photo #2, above), who played his college ball at Old Dominion University, and whom Ken saw strolling through the pedestrian district the other day.  A 6’9” African-American man tends to stand out on the streets of Šiauliai.

·        We noticed, finally, that the cheerleaders’ uniforms were reminiscent of the Grinch’s heart—i.e., two sizes too small (photo deleted on the advice of attorney, and wife).

 

The Frescoes of Tytuvėnai

 

The Shroud of Turin.  The Great Wall of China.  The Stones of Venice.  The Whore of Babylon.  You’ve heard of them all.  Maybe you’ve even seen all of these treasures of world civilization.

But I’ll bet you’ve never seen, or even heard of, the frescoes in the courtyard of the Bernardine monastery at Tytuvėnai, a small town in the Kelmė district of Lithuania.  And maybe you should get on a plane right away, while they’re still in decent enough condition to fully appreciate.  I was there on May 1—ironically enough, since May Day is still a workers’ holiday here in Lithuania. 

Here’s the micro-level background.  I have a colleague, Jonas Jasaitis, in the public administration department at Šiauliai University who heads up something called the Rural Development Centre.  His English is excellent, mainly because he spent eight years in the United States—most of them in Cleveland, where he edited a Lithuanian language newspaper.  Jonas wanted to show me some of the unheralded treasures of the Lithuanian countryside.  He and I, along with the leader of a residential community in suburban Šiauliai—her name is Zita Kilniene—spent a day on the road, and our very first stop was Tytuvėnai.

And here’s the macro-level background.  Lithuania was the last country in Europe to fully embrace Christianity, and by the time it did, the Reformation was on the march in Germany and elsewhere.  In Tytuvėnai, the first Christian church was established in 1555, very late by European standards.  It was the Counter-Reformation that finally sealed the deal.  Plans for a new church in the baroque style were drawn up by a local aristocrat in 1614, with construction beginning in 1618.  The church was completed in 1633, and in the ensuing century and a half a Bernardine monastery was added.  In the late 18^th century, a courtyard was built to enclose the church and monastery ensemble, and frescoes were inserted into the niches of the courtyard’s arcade. 

The Tytuvėnai church is being restored, a massive effort given the devastating effects—not of a twentieth-century war, for once—but of fire.  The monastery and its courtyard will be restored also, which is why you need to see the late-eighteenth-century frescoes while they retain the patina of authenticity. 

See the photos above.  #1 shows the restored side of the baroque church; the scaffolding is protecting work underway on the façade.  #2 is a photo of Jonas and Zita on site.  #3 shows the baroque façade and the monastery courtyard.  #4 is a shot of what I thought was the most remarkable of the frescoes, one that is reminiscent of some of Lorenzetti di Ambroggio’s murals in the Siena Town Hall (photo #5).

As always, the Jewish presence in Lithuania constitutes a barely perceptible parallel universe.  There was an important Jewish community in Tytuvėnai until the local rabbi, Yaakov Kamenetsky, emigrated to the United States in 1937.  Now, of course, the Jewish experience must be regarded as local history tragically and irretrievably lost. 

Thank you, Jonas and Zita, for a memorable day in the Lithuanian countryside.

 

The Street Gang

 

In a previous post, I reflected on how easy it is for Americans living abroad to interact with other Americans with whom they have little in common and to whom they would have nothing to say at home.  Nationality trumps a lot of other stuff, in other words. 

Jane and I have always found a great deal to admire in the Mormons we have known in the DC area.  But our admiration was almost always  bestowed from afar.  Here, we have come to know the LDS missionary assigned to Šiauliai, Elder Michael Marshall (left in the photo above), who is never seen without his understudy—formerly Elder Hanson, but as of three days ago Elder Peterson (on the right in the photo above), whom we met today.   

We do not know them well, only well enough to make small talk when we encounter them on Vilniaus gatvė.  I’m sure they must think of themselves as being in the business of saving souls, and not as engaged in public diplomacy.  But we’re inclined to think that our country is very fortunate to have voluntary ambassadors of their caliber.  The USA sends mixed messages to the world; I’m thinking of some of the Broadway plays that we export, not to mention Donald Sterling and Miley Cyrus and the Kardashians and the random crazed gunman shooting up a public school.  We think having Elder Marshall and Elder Peterson here with us in Šiauliai says a lot of positive things about America.

The United States:  is this a great country, or what?

 

Uncle Olav, We Hardly Knew Ye

 

 

 

The origins of my father’s family are somewhat obscure.  I have always assumed that we came from a long line of eastern European peasants, an opinion that I continue to hold despite the experience of having met a few of my Old World relatives (in Atlanta—long story) and discovering that they are as middle-class as you (giving you the benefit of the doubt, dear readers) and I.

And it turns out that there is at least one capitalist success story in the Kolson line, though it involves the Danish branch of the family (There is a Danish branch?  Who knew?)  He may not have been an overnight sensation, but Olav Kolson’s beer is now readily available in many parts of Europe after only 120 years of incubation (since 1896, according to the can).  Anyway, everyone deserves to have a master brewer in the family, and here’s what the corporate website has to say about Olav’s lager:

Brewed and canned under license in the EU, for Kolson Ltd. Kolson lager has already made its mark in Europe with sales making it the fastest growing brand in nine countries. Due in no small part, to its recipe created by Olav Kolson in Copenhagen more than 100 years ago. This recipe together with the name and rights were purchased by us in 2004.

Today the Maxima in Šiauliai, Lithuania.  Tomorrow the world!  Eat your heart out, Sam Adams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Red Prison

 

 

We’ve reached the three-month mark, and during our time here Jane and I have wandered along most of the streets of central Šiauliai.  Last weekend, we set out for Trakų gatvė, in part because we hadn’t yet explored that quarter of the city, and also because it had been home to a sizable Jewish ghetto.  There, we discovered an unusual building, one that bore the marks of a prison of some type (see photo #1, above).  A prominently displayed plaque on site refers to the “occupation regime” of 1940-1990 and alludes to the unfortunate inmates of this facility (see photo #2).  I'm pretty sure žiauriai kalinami means Jewish prisoners, and politiniai kaliniai means political prisoners. 

We saw a sign over a door that refers to the interrogation of persons accused of crimes (see photo #3).  Evidently, there is some kind of museum-like exhibit inside, where, according to an Italian journalist named Francesco Lo Piccolo, “they keep prison memorabilia in a showcase:  knives made out of lighters; shoes hiding mobile phones; blowpipes to send messages outside; jailbreak schemes.”  There is at least one website designed to promote cultural tourism that lists the Tardymo Izoliatoriaus Muziejus—oddly translated as the Museum of Isolator of Investigation—as one of Šiauliai’s tourist attractions—though when we made inquiry at the Tourist Information Office, we were told that there is no museum at the prison.

We noticed that while the building clearly is old, the razor wire running along the top of the enclosure is shiny, as if it were brand new (see photo #4). That in turn made us suspect that the facility still is in use—for real criminals, presumably, rather than for Jews, political prisoners, and sundry dissidents.  We went home and did some serious Googling, and we can report that this facility is in fact open for business as the Siauliai Remand Prison, and here's what we have learned about it. 

First, we know that it was built in 1911, thanks to a grant of 17 hectares of land from the tsarist government—yes, Lithuania was still part of Tsarist Russia at that point. We know, too, that the facility originally consisted of cells for 150 inmates, plus “hospital, kitchen, bakery, church, pharmacy, doctor's office, toilets and bathrooms.”  Administrative offices and apartments were included in the prison complex.  Bathing facilities and a laundry room were “located in a separate red-brick two-storey building.”  The church and the prison (!) were consecrated on December 4, 1911. 

There was a mortuary on site.  On the brighter side, there also was a school, with training provided in several trades and crafts, including carpentry, shoemaking, binding, blacksmithing, and various skills related to farming.  In fact, the prison managed a small farm and a library, not to mention a 16-17 person orchestra.  All of this is reported in the official website of Šiauliai Remand Prison—here.

Interestingly, the official history, like the plaque on the exterior wall of the prison, dwells on the abuses of the Soviet occupation (e.g., “Lithuanian people who didn’t suit the Soviet government were imprisoned here”), while soft-pedalling or ignoring some of the grimmer details associated with Nazi Germany, which occupied Lithuania in June of 1941.  Websites that exist to document the Jewish experience, such as this one, provide a compensatory perspective.  It is perhaps enough to know that there were 8,000 Jews in Šiauliai at the beginning of World War II, and that fewer than 500 survived the Holocaust.  Leaders of the Jewish underground were routinely incarcerated here in what was known informally as “the red prison.”

Evidently, the treatment of persons accused of crime continues to be an issue, one that has been the source of tension between the Lithuanian government and the European Union.  Both Great Britain and Ireland have refused to extradite defendants to Lithuania for fear of mistreatment.  The United States Department of State, in its country report for 2011, expresses concern about overcrowding in Lithuanian prisons, and the Šiauliai Remand Prison is singled out for being particularly deficient in this regard.  According to the report, there were at that time 708 inmates in a facility designed to accommodate 452 at full capacity.  In fairness, I should hasten to concede that the United States also has a serious case of prison overcrowding.

A slightly more pointed Google search brought to light the account of the aforementioned Francesco Lo Piccolo, who toured the Šiauliai Remand Prison in 2012.  Afterwards, he reported that he had the feeling that he “was in a movie about Nazi concentration camps, in Dachau or in a Stalinist Gulag.”  The razor wire that keeps prisoners inside and which had piqued our curiosity made an impression on Lo Piccolo, also; “I did not like it,” he writes, adding that he was accompanied on his hike across the prison courtyard by the “frantic barks” of vicious dogs on long chains.  Eight inmates are assigned to each cell in this facility, where they spend 23 hours of every day, waiting for weeks, months, or even three years or more, “because in Lithuania the pace of justice is what it is:  slow, exhausting, terrible.”

It seems that there has been some renovation of the physical plant in recent years.  That’s encouraging.  And yet, Lo Piccolo says that he was shown a photograph of a cell taken in 1990, just prior to the declaration of independence, and when he compares it with his memory of what he witnessed on his tour, “I don’t see a great deal of difference.”  Plus ça change?