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In Which I Enter A Strange & Mysterious Place

November 13, 2006 by Mike

Kaliningrad, Roosia

Route: Nida - Zelenogradsk - Kaliningrad

Well, fancy that. Mike With from Norwich, writing a blo-- I mean diary, and starting it by recording where I am --

     *Kaliningrad*.

I really have come a long way.

I know there are lots of places in the world that are harder to get to; more remote; less accessible; less of our world. (I'm looking at this from my own perspective. If you live in Timbuktoo or Kamchatka or Manchester, then the bright lights of London are going to seem a long way away.)

But to me, here and now, and certainly for the purposes of this trip around the coast of Europe, then Kaliningrad seems about as remote and otherly as it's going to get. I mean, there's no Starbucks here. Sadly, I can't say the same of McDonalds.

To prove my point: had you heard of Kaliningrad before? And if you had, haven't you noticed that nobody else has? Apparently Putin had to point to it on a map during a press briefing. The assembled cream of Roosia's political journalists didn't know where it was.

And where it is, is Europe. There's no escaping (not with these border guards. -Ed.) that fact. Kaliningrad is an enclave of Roosia cut off from the rest of that benighted country by the European Union. To get to the Motherland overland, Kaliningraders must travel through Lithuania or Poland. Two countries that, you may correctly deduce, don't have the fondest memories of the Russian Occupation/ Soviet Era [delete according to very different views of history] and therefore make it hard for Roosians to travel.

Which is bloody ironic, considering how hard Roosia makes it for the rest of us -- and for her own citizens.

Add to that: Kaliningrad, as an important cog in the Soviet military machine, was a 'closed city' for nearly 50 years, right up until '91, so it wasn't so much *hard* to get in to as *impossible*. There were 250,000 troops stationed here. Think what that did to the way of life, to the psyche; to the economy. Now there are "just" 20,000 troops: how must the loss of so many people have affected the area?

It is still, literally, remarkable to see foreigners here. As I was riding through the centre this afternoon, in addition to the usual stares and glances, the passenger in one car took snaps with his digital camera as we drove along. "You'll never believe what we saw on Leninskaya Prospekt..."

Oh, and while we're on the subject of why this is a strange place: until 1946 it wasn't Kaliningrad at all. It was Köningsburg. Had been for over 700 years. Köningsburg meaning King's Mountain - in German. Because, like Klaipeda/Memel, this was part of East Prussia. In fact, it was the capital.

316,000 people lived here in 1939. Not all of them ethnically German - there were Russians and Lithuanians and Poles.. and Jews. When the Roosians arrived in 1945 there were 50,000 residents left. The rest were away fighting, had managed to escape, or were dead. Those survivors who were German were put to work on reconstruction -- effectively as civilian prisoners of a war that had now finished -- and finally expelled in 1949. They, their children and their children's children formed the first wave of tourists after the city emerged into the world after 1991. They came to see where they were born: the city, but not necessarily the house. On the night of 29-30 August 1944, 189 Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force dropped 480 tons of explosive on the city. 20% of all industry and 41% of all housing was destroyed that night. Oh, and 100% of the historic centre.

That statistic is in all the travel literature - but if you're British you needn't worry that people will hold you in any way responsible, as the travel literature is all but impossible to find. As are the hotels: they don't bother to put 'Hotel' on their signs because they don't expect foreigners to be looking for them.

It took me a long time riding through difficult streets to find, eventually, the Hotel Moskva.

I run the bath. The water phizzzzes as it sits there. It smells, not unpleasantly, of bleach. I'm too tired to argue with radioactive water. I have a long soak. I appear to be the same colour as I was before I got in.

--

This morning, as I rode down the Curonian Spit on the Russian side, I stopped to see the Spit, its incredible and unique dunes. To breath it all in.

I almost choked on the vodka fumes. These guys were barely able to stand upright. At midday. They were from all over Russia - Murmansk, Smolensk, Yekaterinburg, Siberia. They all appeared to be called Sergei.

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