Lithuania: the National Religion

Over the weekend Jane and I had lunch at a kavinė in the city center, where we have sometimes attracted a bit of attention as native English speakers.  This is how we have met some U.S. servicemen attached to the local NATO base.  It’s also how we have met some Lithuanians keen on exercising their English language skills.

This time it was a young couple seated at a nearby table who expressed curiosity about us.  “Where are you from?” the young man asked.  “Vashingtonas,” I answered with a smile, while Jane played it straight:  “Washington, D.C.,” she said.  “Ah,” said the young man, “I went to high school in Roanoke, Virginia.”

I ask you, dear readers, what are the odds of that?  Gradually, the young man—he looked to be in his late twenties—shared a few of the details.  It turns out that he had spent a “thirteenth” year at Roanoke Catholic High School after graduating from a Lithuanian secondary school, that his motives lay in pursuit of the Lithuanian national religion (basketball), and that his year in Roanoke changed his life (though we were too gob-smacked to ask him to elaborate).  He said that he now is now coaching with the Šiauliai professional team, which competes in the Baltic Leagues, and which has hired a handful of American players, alumni of top NCAA programs, such as Duke, Maryland, Georgia, James Madison, and Fairfield University.  The team’s policy, he said, is to help foreign players put down local roots by finding them flats in the city center.  Hey, it’s worked for us.

I figured that a man so young might be an assistant coach, but when I checked out the team’s website today, I discovered that we had been talking to Gediminas Petrauskas, head coach of the Šiauliai team, which currently is competing in the Baltic League playoffs.  “We have a game next Wednesday evening,” he said.  “You should come.”  And so we shall. 

We’re looking forward to it.  It won’t be exactly the same as rooting for Nene, Bradley Beal, John Wall, Marcin Gortat, and the other guys who play at Verizon Center—who are competing in the NBA playoffs for the first time in many years.  But it will give us a chance to demonstrate our support for a local boy who made good—by way of Roanoke, Virginia.  And that’s kind of cool.

Pica

 

Pica is the Lithuanian word for “pizza,” which helps some of us remember that the Lithuanian “c” makes a “ts” sound.  Now, pica is one of my favorite things, along with kava (coffee) and ledai (ice cream).  And everyone knows that the very best pica, kava, and ledai comes from Italy.

We have tried the two main pizza outlets in Šiauliai, which are called Čili Pica and Can Can Pica, and found them to be pretty decent if you’re really hungry.  But we’ve been hearing that the very best pica is to be had from a hole-in-the-wall establishment on Vilniaus gatvė about three blocks from our flat.  The sign outside says Pas Itala, which means something akin to “Of Italy,” or “From Italy.” 

We’ve tried numerous times to give Pas Itala a try, but it is almost never open.  The sign on the door reveals that business hours are quite limited to begin with, and these are often trumped by a whimsical note—Gone Fishing, or Back at 5:00.   

At noon today we discovered Pas Itala open, and we were able to grab the one table outside; there are two just inside the front door, making for a maximum capacity of six.  Once inside, I could find no menu, no blackboard, no list of daily specials.  The drill is to belly up to the counter.  When it came my turn, I asked for a pizza for two people, with mushrooms and bell peppers.  It turns out that the proprietor is a genuine Italian, and he had just returned from an extended Easter holiday in his hometown, which lies somewhere between Rome and Naples.  Between my fractured Italian and his fractured English—and with no help at all from whatever we shared of Lithuanian—we agreed to call mushrooms and bell peppers funghi and paprica, respectively.

It turned out to be pica to die for.  That’s Jane tucking into her half in the photo above.  Actually, she’s tucking into a quarter of the pizza, since the proprietor insisted on bringing it out a half at a time for better temperature control.  I wasn’t able to find out how this talented chef happened to settle in Šiauliai in the first place.  Nor was I able to get him to reveal what kind of cheese he uses as a substitute for real mozzarella, which is not available in Lithuania.  I did, however, get him to admit that his view of the work day is typically Italian:  it should be short, punctuated by a long siesta, and thrown over entirely if it gets in the way of la dolce vita. 

It gets one to thinking.  If the European Union can’t make buffalo mozzarella and French pastry generally available throughout Europe, then what good is it?
 

Atsibuskite!

 

A couple weeks ago here on Baltic Avenue I published a post having to do with the ever-so-slightly marginalized existence of American expatriates and non-Lithuanian speakers of all kinds here in Šiauliai (see “Life in the Slow Lane”).  I mentioned our brief but enjoyable encounter with a Roman Catholic nun and our incipient friendship with a pair of Mormon missionaries whom we have come to recognize in the streets of the city center.  Now there is a little more to report on this front.

Last week, on our way back from the Maxima supermarket—it’s about a kilometer away from our flat—we stopped to rest our weary pack-mule haunches at a sunny bench on our pedestrian street.  Not a minute had elapsed before we were approached by a friendly woman who seemed undeterred by my effort at preemption.  “We don’t speak Lithuanian,” I announced.  No matter, she seemed to say, smiling, and then launching into a spirited one-sided conversation.  While Jane retrieved a handful of litai from her purse, the lady insisted we take a copy of her publication, Atsibuskite!—i.e., Awake!  We stuck it in one of our grocery bags and lugged it home.

Atsibuskite! is not an easy read in Lithuanian, but I was able to detect much that would be familiar to anyone who has ever perused the literature dispensed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses:  the obligatory story debunking Darwin’s theory of evolution; multiple images of earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, and other natural disasters, all construed as signs of Jehovah’s wrath; an account of the dangers of smoking that probably was more indebted to mainstream science than the Darwin article; a feature story about El Salvador designed to pique the curiosity of the reader’s inner turista; and an analysis of troubled relationships between husbands and wives (vyras ir žmona).  Everything was written in Lithuanian, even the fine print having to do with the Witnesses’ website (www.jw.org), and the address of their Lithuanian headquarters in Kaunas.  You have to hand it to the Witnesses; they put together a pretty slick package.

I come from a family of lapsed J.W.s on my father’s side, so I’ll confess that my interest in the sect is not purely academic.  To me it’s particularly significant that the sect was founded (by a man named Charles Taze Russell) early in the twentieth century in Pittsburgh, which happens to be my ancestral hometown, and a place where social stratification has always been pronounced.  Wikipedia describes the Witnesses as “a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity,” and that seems about right to me.  Historically, they have had issues with military service, the compulsory flag salute, and blood transfusions, which goes far toward explaining why they have been unpopular among conventional Christians and sometimes the victims of persecution by autocratic regimes.

What fascinates me about the Witnesses is that they are so self-consciously bourgeois, and this, I would submit, is because so many of them seem to be upwardly mobile blue-collar workers clinging to precarious toeholds in the middle class.  The sociologists refer to this phenomenon as status anxiety, and I think it is eloquently expressed in the image above, in which Jesus’s unidentified disciple is depicted as muscular, yet freshly scrubbed and entirely housebroken and non-threatening.  None of Caravaggio’s dirty feet for this saint!  I would submit that J.W. artwork expresses multi-ethnic yet arguably mono-cultural aspirations; only middle-class people need apply.

It is perhaps significant that the fall of the Iron Curtain generated a religious revival in eastern Europe, but not so much for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches as for the American apocalyptic sects—the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses—which have been growing rapidly in this part of the world.  Evidently, no one wants to be a proletarian anymore.  Atsibuskite!
 

Stork Sighting

Back in early March, when I had just finished Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I posted some musings about her book, and her dystopian vision of a spring without songbirds.  Reading the book in Lithuania made me a little uneasy, because up to that time we had encountered only pigeons and crows (and one majestic magpie) here in Siauliai.

Spring has now sprung—the temperature went up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, Easter Sunday—and we’re starting to hear songbirds, though they keep their distance, and the few we have seen were too small or too far away to be identifiable.  We don’t expect our neighborhood here to replicate our busy backyard in Alexandria, a happy home to sparrows, catbirds, cardinals, titmice, juncos, nuthatches, finches, pileated woodpeckers, and, of course, robins.  Still, we’re hoping for some birdsong to arrive along with the crocuses and forsythia.

And now we have seen our first stork.  In February and March we saw what were obviously stork nests, but they were always empty because storks migrate to Africa for the winter.  But when they return to the Baltic states in the spring, they reoccupy the same homes that they abandoned in the fall.  While we were riding the bus home from Tallinn on Saturday, we saw one settling into its nest.  Farmers regard them as talismans.  As the photo above demonstrates, they are big and graceful in flight (though somewhat ungainly on their feet). 

And as the photo below demonstrates, it is amazing what Google delivers when you search for “stork images.” 

Both of the images attached to this post are stock photos copied from the internet.

 

Schindler's Lift

We enjoyed a wonderful four-day adventure on the Princess Anastasia, starting with St. Petersburg, and followed by double quick-time salutes to three capital cities:  Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn.  Now we are recovering our land legs here in Estonia and are due to return to Siauliai tomorrow morning. 

In Helsinki, the highlight was a visit with Terhi Molsa, head of the Fulbright Commission in Finland, and her deputy, Johanna Lahti.  The photo at the top of this post, showing Terhi seated between Jane and Ken, was taken by Johanna.

The highlight of our whirlwind visit to Stockholm was the Royal Palace in the Gamla Stan.  After our tour of the museums, we stumbled onto the changing of the guard, which was quite an elaborate and colorful ceremony (see photo #2, above).

In Tallinn we're staying at the Bern Hotel, which has an elevator built by a company called Schindler.  Sorry, but one of us finds puns irresistible; the other does a lot of groaning. 

We had a delightful dinner last night at a Tallinn restaurant called Ribe.  We shared a delicious trout appetizer that was like nothing we had ever eaten before; clearly, there is a real talent in charge of this kitchen.  For our main courses, Jane ordered the lamb, and Ken had the duck.  No pictures for the foodies, but afterwards Ken got a shot of the outside of the restaurant (see photo #3, above).

Today we spent most of the day wandering around the city, which is lovely (see photo #4), and which we had first visited on a cold November day in 2006.  On that occasion, Jane bought a hand-knitted sweater from a vendor in the stalls tucked under the inside of the city wall.  Today, Jane tried to sell a few sweaters for her successor (see photo #5), but the Chinese tourists were having none of it. 

There’s no shortage of photo ops in this picturesque city.  Photo #6 shows Jane in front of the colorful door at the House of Blackheads, a guild that was prominent in all of the cities of the Hanseatic League.  Finally, photo #7 shows Ken in front of the Estonian parliament building. 

Tomorrow's a travel day.  Sunday is Easter.  Then it's back to work Monday morning.

Princess Anastasia

At about 3:45 last Sunday morning Jane and I headed off on foot to the Šiauliai bus station to catch a 5:15 bus bound for Riga, Latvia.  There we cooled our heels for an hour before boarding another bus to Tallinn, Estonia, then hopping in a taxi that took us to the docks.  Weeks earlier, we had booked a cabin in a ferry called the Princess Anastasia (see top photo), one of two ferries on the Baltic Sea operated by the St. Peter Line, a Russian company that has close enough ties to the Russian government to have been granted the exclusive right to bring non-visa-bearing tourists into St. Petersburg for a maximum of 72 hours.  We knew that our stay in Russia would be far shorter than that—only one day. 

Our ship departed Tallinn on Sunday evening, crossed the Gulf of Finland overnight, and arrived in St. Petersburg on Monday morning.  The main purpose of our pilgrimage—it’s spring break at Šiauliai University—was to tour the Hermitage, one of the world’s great collections of visual art.

Trouble is, the Hermitage is closed on Mondays.  I like to think of myself as a pretty savvy travel planner, and this was an embarrassing rookie mistake; Jane and I were beyond disappointed.  We walked to the Hermitage, just to confirm that the doors would be bolted shut.  They were.  So we settled for a nice photo op (see photo #2, above).  Suddenly, we were in the market for a Plan B.

We set our sights on two churches filled with mosaics and other sacred images.  We went first to St. Isaac’s Cathedral (see photo #3, above).  The largest Russian Orthodox cathedral in Saint Petersburg, St. Isaac’s is full of paintings, sculptures, a few mosaics, and colored stonework.  From there we walked across town to a famous Russian Orthodox church called Savior on the Spilled Blood (see photo #4, above), which was built to commemorate Tsar Alexander II on the spot where he was assassinated in 1881.  Interestingly, both were billed as museums rather than houses of worship.

By noon we were getting pretty hungry.  We were in a quarter chock-a-block with fancy hotels, so we went into the nearest one, where the concierge directed us to an ATM in the lobby.  On our way out, Jane remarked that the hotel certainly had a beautiful lobby, prompting the doorman to sneer, “It’s almost enough to make you want to defect, isn’t it?"

Later, we were approached by a man who introduced himself, in excellent English, as a professor of history and a local tour guide; he said he had spent time in Washington, D.C.  After I explained that it was time for us to return to our ferry, he thanked us sardonically for meddling in the affairs of Ukraine, for it had brought all Russians together in a way that their own leaders could never have done.  Noting that Russians celebrated the reunification of Germany, he wondered why the U.S. could not enjoy seeing Mother Russia recover her prodigal sons.  I told him I was inclined to concede his point about U.S. double standards (I was thinking of the Monroe Doctrine), but I suggested that plenty of people in Ukraine might see the massing of Russian troops along its eastern border as something other than a happy homecoming welcome for the wayward Crimean child.  How widespread, we wonder, is this man’s view of the way that Vladimir Putin snatched Crimea away from Ukraine?

On our way back to the Princess Anastasia, we stopped by the Café Singer (see photo #5) for a very pleasant lunch in a gorgeous art nouveau building that reminded us of our quick trip to Riga a few weeks ago.   

Back on the ferry, we departed on schedule—it was still bright and sunny—for our overnight voyage to Helsinki.  As St. Petersburg receded in the east, we encountered some precipitation, during which we were treated to the most spectacular rainbow that either of us had ever seen.  Pretty soon passengers, crew, maids, and kitchen staff were pressing themselves against the windows to witness a vivid display that lasted at least fifteen minutes.  It seemed an appropriate way of punctuating the end of our curious journey to the Land of Oz; we continue to wonder what to make of its enigmatic Wizard. 
 

Anglophiles Anonymous

 

For some time I have complained about the bane of Anglophilia in the American professoriate, a malady to which I have for no good reason considered myself constitutionally immune.  I have in particular decried the left-wing version of the condition, which typically manifests itself in veneration of those quintessential British institutions:  the House of Commons, the National Health Service, and the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Why, liberal academics want to know, can’t we have American versions of these institutions?  Why do we have to import all the good stuff, such as parliamentary majorities, affordable health care, and Downton Abbey?

Teaching here in Lithuania and reflecting on my experience as a Fulbrighter in Finland back in 2006 have, however, impressed upon me the centrality of the British experience to American studies.  Gradually, I am coming to the conclusion that if we are truly to understand the American experience, we must all be Anglophiles, at least a little bit. 

When I have taught foreign students about the United States Congress, I like to use Woodrow Wilson’s classic, Congressional Government.  But that celebrated book may be best understood as a response to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution.  When I describe Congress as a “broken branch,” to use the Mann and Ornstein shorthand, I feel I must introduce students to Edmund Burke.  Never heard of him, they say.  When I talk about the civil service, I like to invoke Whitehall and Lord Salisbury.  Never heard of him either, they say.  I tell students it’s important that when John Marshall was named Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court—he already was serving as Secretary of State—he embarked upon a careful reading of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England; that was pretty much the sum total of his legal education.

You don’t have to count the first folios at the Folger Shakespeare Library (see photo above) in Washington, D.C., to understand that we Americans think of the Bard of Avon as part of our own cultural heritage.  Here in Lithuania, as in Finland, there is no deep knowledge of British history because Great Britain is more or less irrelevant to the local experience; why should they know who Lord Salisbury was?  They do not look to Britain to establish context the way we do; nor do Lithuanians regard their own institutions as being in any way derived from those of the United Kingdom.  While my Lithuanian students might recognize Shakespeare as one of the towering figures of the early modern period, I get the distinct impression that they have not read Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Julius Caesar, as I was required to do in high school (not that I appreciated it at the time).  Recently, one of my Lithuanian colleagues asked me about the origin of the expression "all's well that ends well."  It's the title of a Shakespeare comedy, I explained.  Oh.

I honestly don’t know where Lithuanians look when they wish to trace the origins and development of their own institutions, which are in any case European, Great Britain being, historically as well as literally, an outlier from the continent.  I think some Lithuanians look back as far as the Middle Ages, when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a force to be reckoned with, stretching as it did from the Baltic to the Ottoman Empire on the shores of the Black Sea.  Others seem to think of their national destiny as related to that of Poland, and that would make sense given the important place of the Church of Rome in both cultures, though it isn’t clear with respect to the act of wagging which has been the dog and which the tail.  As this part of the Baltic world was once home to East Prussia, it would be surprising if there were not some Lithuanians who considered their country to be seriously indebted to Germany.  Surely there is something owed to the French and to Tsarist Russia, as well; in 1814, when Napoleon vacated his apartment in Vilnius, Tsar Alexander moved in.  Again, while I have not sensed any widespread nostalgia for the Soviets, surely we would expect some of that as well.  Finally, there is the Jewish and Zionist cultural heritage of Lithuania—historically, second to none in importance, though now almost entirely and tragically absent. 

The point is, it’s hard to know exactly how to contextualize the Lithuanian experience in terms of other nations and cultures.  Lithuania is simply less indebted to any one of its neighbors than the United States is to Great Britain.  It may be true that pluralism in America requires that we acknowledge the contributions of France, Spain, maybe the Dutch, black Africa, and the indigenous peoples to our cultural stew, yet it’s also the case that politically we are essentially, as Louis Hartz liked to say, a cultural fragment of English (or Scottish, if you’re keen on Adam Smith and David Hume) liberalism.  There is, in short, a case to be made for American Anglophilia, and maybe we need to care, after all, whether the Scottish referendum on political independence passes next week, whether a rapidly aging demographic will lead to NHS bankruptcy, and whether Anna and Mr. Bates will ever recover the domestic bliss that they briefly enjoyed in Series Three.  Stay tuned.