Lithuania
Border: Poland – Lithuania
At present: Lithuania
Lying on the route of the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw Railway, the town of Turmont is the most northeastern bridgehead of Polishness in Lithuania. Cut off from the Vilnius Region, saturated with Poles, with dense forests surrounding dozens of lakes in the Braslav Lakeland. Hidden in the shadow cast by the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant and built for the purposes of serving it, the city of Visaginas, inhabited mostly by Russians, has fallen into oblivion since the facility’s closing in 2009.
“Visaginas is a settlement of a people of engineers who can split and understand the atom, but cannot split and understand human souls,” says Alex Urazov, while sitting in a room full of strange masks, futuristic rifles, cybernetic limbs. This place is the artistic commune “Toczka” created by him in Visaginas, which is to give young visaginians hope for a different life.
Meanwhile, the Poles who had lived in the surrounding villages for centuries merely took note of the rise and fall of the power plant. “In my puppies years, the Republic of Poland was still reaching to over here,” says Florian Szałksztet. “They built the power plant, and now they are closing it, and I am sitting in the same place where I was born in 1927. Nothing has changed. My children and grandchildren speak Lithuanian. I haven’t learnt it because I had neither the opportunity nor the need for it. Almost a century has passed and the world has not noticed me. That is probably why I have lived for so long.”
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At the other end of Lithuania, hundreds of pilgrims cross the bridge over the Mereczanka River in the town of Orany. The river divides this region into two opposite worlds. The other one, left behind, inhabited almost exclusively by Lithuanians and the Vilnius region stretching under your feet, inhabited by the Polish minority.
Until the outbreak of the war, this had been the border between the Second Polish Republic and Lithuania. This prayerful and singing procession sets off from Suwałki every year to reach Vilnius after ten days of hiking. The organizer is the Salesian community from Suwałki, but the initiative is participated by pilgrims from all over Poland. They march through glacier fields and forests, covering thirty kilometers a day and approaching the Gate of Dawn, at which they want to pay tribute not only to the Holy Mother, but also to Poles in the Vilnius Region.
At the head of the march, next to the cross and the Virgin Mary, there are two flags - Polish and Lithuanian. “We arrive to Lithuania as guests and they are the hosts. There is plenty of talk about Polish-Lithuanian dialogue, but the pompous words of politicians, visits by officials and international conferences are not enough to build a true reconciliation. The most important thing is to experience a personal encounter. Looking into one another’s eyes and seeing that this Lithuanian or that Pole is the same person as me, even if in our everyday lives we speak different languages,” says Father Tomasz Pełszyk.
Scenes for the HBO series “Chernobyl” were shot here.
Dukszty, Contemporary eastern Lithuania.
Contemporary eastern Lithuania.
Lithuanians represent less than 20%, and Belarusians and Poles 9%. Many Russians still do not speak Lithuanian, and Lithuanians, in turn, often treat the Visaginas with suspicion of being a potential Russian “Fifth Column.”
“In Visaginas, a silent apocalypse has occurred after the shutdown of the power plant, but no one takes interest in silent disasters.”
When the power plant no longer functioned, they remained lost like some ancient tribe stripped of their idol and their temple.
"We have not been taught what life is all about. This is what we want to learn in Toczka. We do it in the dark and blindly, but at least we try.”
“At least someone here has time to listen to me.”
“They built the power plant, and now they are closing it, and I am sitting in the same place where I was born in 1927. Nothing has changed. My children and grandchildren speak Lithuanian. I haven’t learnt it because I had neither the opportunity nor the need for it. Almost a century has passed and the world has not noticed me. That is probably why I have lived for so long.”
This tree was planted before the war in the place where there once used to stand the cradle with the future statesman and one of the fathers of the independent Second Polish Republic.
They cross the contemporary Polish-Lithuanian border, the former border of Lithuania and the Republic of Poland, and cover the areas of the Vilnius Region inhabited by Poles.
In the interwar period, the territorial dispute over Vilnius and the Vilnius Region was the cause of a deep conflict between Poland and Lithuania.
From the very beginning, it had an international dimension, beyond borders, but it was also patriotic. Meetings with Poles who kept their identity here.
In the town of Ejszyszki, almost 80% are Poles.
“Wherever I go, they treat me like someone close to them. We create a community that reaches beyond borders.”
There are numerous controversial issues in Polish-Lithuanian relations: no bilingual city name plates, or the obligation to spell surnames only in Lithuania.
"There is plenty of talk about Polish-Lithuanian dialogue, but the pompous words of politicians, visits by officials and international conferences are not enough to build a true reconciliation. The most important thing is to experience a personal encounter. Looking into one another’s eyes and seeing that this Lithuanian or that Pole is the same person as me, even if in our everyday lives we speak different languages,” says Father Tomasz Pełszyk.
In 1944, the Soviet partisans, which also included Lithuanians, murdered at least 38 Polish inhabitants of the village. This place shows how difficult Polish-Lithuanian history is.
Her family was saved from death by a partisan who had warned them about the pogrom.
A place of exceptional importance for Polish identity.
“We formed one country after all: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I hope that both Poles and Lithuanians will be able to overcome their disagreements, and to look ahead shoulder to shoulder - this time not into the past, but into the future“ - heard during the pilgrimage.