Out of the clouds...

I have amazed myself and probably not only. It's a year since I started doing my blip and I have managed to post something every day and what's more, people have been kind enough to take the trouble to take a look at them. So, thank you all for your kind words and encouragement!

I had the idea today to go to Krasnogruda to take some shots of the beautiful and refurbished manor house, donated by Czeslaw Milosz to the Borderland Foundation and which is the base for their Centre for International Dialogue. I did in fact take a few shots, but owing to the weather, which has been somewhat inauspicious, they were rather rained off. Another time!

This would have given me the logical opportunity to write something about this part of the world, the meeting of cultures and those which are sadly no more.

There is no living memory of Jacwingian culture but the good people of the Borderland Foundation are maintaining a vivid continuation in particular of the memory of the Jewish life that the Nazis tried to obliterate. Many of the towns and villages up to that time were about 50 percent Jewish. Some of their architecture remains, like the Synagogue in Sejny, but very little else is identifiable. Without being maudlin, it's something that needs to be stated from time to time.

That said, there are many other remarkable features of these borderlands which have survived: the Muslim Tartars whose ancestors were rewarded by Sobieski III for lifting the siege of Vienna, the Old Believers - an orthodox sect that escaped the wrath of the Czar for doctrinal differences of opinion, Ruthenian, Russian and Ukrainian dialect speaking communities along the forested borders and even Scottish names which have remained from an influx of Scots invited by libertarian landowners to help develop their visions of utopia. Sztabin, where I went to see the flame thrower was once for a short time an unofficial republic, with its own local laws and landed peasants. Brzostowski was not the only landowner in this region to give the peasants their own land. Unfortunately when he died, his vision disappeared too, but maybe there are still some remaining farm implements buried in the back of a barn somewhere which he developed to make peoples' lives easier.

The Lithuanian community living in this area enjoys its own schools and I quite often hear people speaking Lithuanian and their traditional food is quite naturally eaten by most people in the area. At the time of the Polish Commonwealth, Poland and Lithuania coexisted with the Lithuanian principality stretching as far as Tykocin.

So without turning this blip into an unsolicited history lesson, I'll leave you with a view which probably hasn't changed much since the ice age. This was the view looking backwards. The sun should have been in the other direction and I hope that's the direction we are heading in.