Nine Months of Deep Baltic, or See You in September

Deep Baltic is taking August off while we work on a few big changes to the site, but we hope you’ll be back for more in September. In the meantime, we thought we’d put together a list of everything that we’ve run on the site (along with links) during our first nine months of existence, just in case you’ve missed anything. We hope you enjoy this selection, and we’ll see you in September…

• In October, we kicked off with editor Will Mawhood’s visit to the city of Valga/Valka, split between Estonia and Latvia by a border that war, independence and occupation has made disappear and reappear several times since it was first drawn in 1919.
• He also contributed “Why This is Deep Baltic”, an article meant to “sort of justify our existence“.
• And designer Lewis McGuffie explained the thinking behind Deep Baltic’s beautiful logo.

• November started with Richard Martyn-Hemphill giving his thoughts on new Latvian documentary Double Aliens, which gives a glimpse into the tensions between different ethnic groups in the Georgian region of Samtskhe-Javakheti.
• We followed this up later in the month with an interview with the director, Uģis Olte. Geoff Chester told us the story of Estonia and Latvia’s national game, Koroona/Novuss, and how it reached the shores of the Baltic in the 1920s, brought by seamen from Great Britain via India.
• We also shared pictures of Lithuanian photographer Agne Gintalaite’s project to document the colourful doors of her homeland’s vast Soviet-era “garage towns”.
• Will Mawhood wrote about how an anthology of Latvian literature published by exiles in Toronto gave him an insight into a country where he had found himself accidentally.
• Meanwhile, Piia Veikolainen explored Tallinn’s hipster district Kalamaja, a “hodgepodge of old wooden houses and old-fashioned industrial complexes” whose name translates as “fish house”. 
• And we finished the month by talking to Anatol Lieven, a British journalist based in the Baltic states during the late ’80s and early ’90s drive to restore their independence and the author of The Baltic Revolution.

• We began December with Tharik Hussain’s long read about Lithuania’s Muslim heritage, exemplified by Keturiasdešimt Totorių, a small village where descendants of Tatar soldiers have lived for hundreds of years.
• Geoff Chester told us the story of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of the Russian Empire who passed through Latvia’s port city Liepāja in search of a better life in the USA.
• Daniel Armstrong took us through the tale of the Estonian football club Flora Tallinn, formed just before the restoration of independence to reduce Soviet influence on the Estonian game.
• Lithuanian-American writer Laima Vincė remembered what it was like to grow up in the US during the Cold War, loyal to a country that had disappeared from the map.
• Helen Wright visited Setomaa, south-eastern Estonia, home to the Setos, a people with their own language, customs and religious rituals whose ancestral home is now split between Estonia and Russia.
• Geoff Chester filled us in on the forgotten details of Latvia’s Viking history, taking a trip to the small town of Grobiņa in western Latvia, where Vikings from Gotland established a settlement in the 7th century.
• We ended the year by talking to British writer Owen Hatherley about his book Landscapes of Communism, and the impact that Communism had on the built environment of the Baltic states.

• We began the new year with Agita Salmiņa’s account of the past and present of Miera iela, long known as the centre of bohemian and hipster life in Riga.
• We also learnt about the 50mm Vilnius blog, which aims to create a record of the Lithuanian capital via a different photo every day.
• Liana Ivete Benke paid a visit to Aigars Bikše, the irreverent and political sculptor, in the formerly-abandoned manor in the Latvian countryside he has restored. 
• Samuel Gruber wrote about the ongoing project to restore a centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Vilnius that was destroyed and used as building material during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania.
• A long read from Will Mawhood focused on the ways that the people of Riga are trying to make a positive of the drastic population decline since the restoration of Latvia’s independence, which has seen the city shrink by as much as a third.
• We also spoke to Jöran Steinhauer, the German musician whose song about Latvia’s former currency went viral and ended up representing the country at Eurovision. 
• Finally, Lewis McGuffie gave us a selection of memories, true and less so, about starting Estonia’s first English-language second-hand bookshop.

• In February, Laime Vincė wrote for us about how a visit to a Soviet “reality experience” in a decommissioned bunker outside Vilnius gave her a new understanding of what occupation really meant for Lithuanians.
• Helen Wright visited another relic of occupation – Patarei Sea Fortress in Tallinn, built as an army barracks and then used as a prison by both the Nazis and the Soviets.
• We started our literature section with an extract from Estonian author Mari Saat’s The Saviour of Lasnamäe, the story of an ethnic Russian single mother in Tallinn.
• Will Mawhood criticised the poor research and judgement of the makers of a BBC programme which posited a conflict between Russia and NATO resulting from a pro-Russian uprising in the Latvian city of Daugavpils.
• Darmon Richter explored Skrunda-1, a Soviet-era secret city built around a radar station in remote western Latvia, now a ghost town.
• Kristina Jõekalda examined how Estonia has dealt with the monuments and memorials left by previous occupiers – the Baltic Germans, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union.

• We began March with Agris Dzenis’s history of the now-extinct Baltic tribe the Old Prussians, who once lived in what is now north-eastern Poland and the Kaliningrad region of Russia.
• Kaspars Zaltāns asked what the Riga barricades, which were constructed in early 1991 by residents of Latvia to protect sites of national importance from the Red Army, mean today.
• We carried an extract from Mike Collier’s novel Baltic Byline, which follows the unusual life of a not-particularly-successful foreign correspondent in the Baltic states, whose life is dictated by the visits of foreign dignitaries, the whims of local officials and occasional outbursts of civil unrest.
• Will Mawhood visited Viljandi, south-western Estonia, which he described as “the most attractive country town in a nation that rather specialises in attractive country towns”.
• We ran an extract from Laima Vincė’s novel This Is Not My Sky, which takes as its subject three generations of Lithuanian women living in New York City during the Cold War.
• Daryl Worthington gave us an overview of eccentric Latvian artist and musician Hardijs Lediņš, described as “the patriarch of multi-media”, and asked whether he is finally getting his due.
• Finally, we spoke to Mike Collier, a British author who has lived in Cēsis, Latvia for a number of years, about life, fiction and journalism in the Baltic states.

• We started April by speaking to British photographer Richard Schofield, who told us about how a chance encounter with a mysterious set of photos in a Lithuanian museum led him to set up a project to preserve the Jewish history of the country’s second-largest city, Kaunas.
• In “The Way We Lived Then”, Marcelijus Martinaitis, a Lithuanian poet and essayist born in the 1930s, reflected on the many changes he had seen during his extraordinary life.
• Lithuanian-American author Barbara Chepaitis told us about how the Baltic custom of drinking birch juice connects her to her roots.
• Stuart Garlick gave us an in-depth guide to the current scene of “musical gem”, Estonia.
• Italian photographer Valerio Vincenzo told us about his project to document all of the EU’s Schengen borders, and shared pictures and memories from his trip to the Baltic countries.
• In connection with this, we looked at how the Baltic states got their current borders, as well as at a couple that no longer exist (the Latvian-Polish and Lithuanian-German borders).
• Maximilian Matthews provided an itinerary through a couple of less appreciated parts of Riga, the largely Soviet-built suburbs of Ķengarags and Mazjumpravmuiža.
• We ended the month with Swedish collector Tomas Alexandersson’s pictures of the many faces of Soviet-era Tallinn.

• May began with Liuba Timonina’s account of the more than hundred years of history of the rail link between Riga and Latvia’s most popular beach resort, Jūrmala.
• We spoke to Valts Ernštreits, editor of the first Estonian-Latvian dictionary in 50 years, about the differences and similarities between Finno-Ugric Estonian and Baltic Latvian.
• Photographer Mindaugas Kavaliauskas presented images from his exhibition “Portrait of Kražiai”, a snapshot of a small Lithuanian town just prior to the country’s EU accession.
• Darmon Richter visited the Hill of Crosses, a pilgrimage site in northern Lithuania where hundreds of thousands of crosses are arranged and which survived multiple attempts to destroy it during the Soviet occupation.
• Anarchist historian Philip Ruff told us about an extraordinary Latvian, Kristaps Salniņš, who spied for the Soviet Union in the USA, worked as a gun-runner in China and fought in Spain and Bulgaria.
• Adam Garrie argued that Estonia’s many links to Finland mean it should be seen primarily as a Nordic, rather than as a Baltic or Eastern European country.
• In response shortly afterwards, Will Mawhood contended that Estonia’s historic ties to Latvia are also numerous and shouldn’t be forgotten.

• June began with news of a drive in Vilnius to hug British people in the hope of getting them to vote to stay in the EU.
• Will Mawhood reported on the often-forgotten history of Latvia’s Polish minority (2% of the population), a now-highly assimilated group repressed under the Soviet Union, and looked at what was the community was doing to preserve its culture and language.
• George East presented a selection of Art Deco and modernist buildings from Kaunas, Lithuania’s capital between the wars and a showcase for the bold, adventurous architecture of the ’20s and ’30s.
• Geoff Chester filled us in on a little-known chapter of the Latvian struggle for independence after World War I, how the Latvian government was for a couple of months stationed on a British ship moored just off the port of Liepāja, after being forced out of the city by German troops.
• Stuart Garlick attended the Latitude59 event in Tallinn, northern Europe’s biggest gathering of tech insiders, and offered his prognosis for Estonia’s start-up scene.
• Helen Wright spoke to Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, the former foreign minister of Iceland, a country that was a committed supporter of Baltic freedom and became the first nation to officially recognise the restoration of independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

• July began with Norwegian beer expert Lars Marius Garhol telling us about the revelation of discovering Lithuanian beer, and how traditional brewing techniques have been preserved there in particular.
• Laima Vincė described how a visit to a village on the Lithuanian border with Belarus showed her that folk remedies and traditions are very much alive, including an alarming encounter with a snake preserved in alcohol.
• Tuuli Lepik presented images from her current exhibition in Tallinn focusing on Estonian computer art from the early ’90s, the unexpected side-effect of the drive to create “E-Estonia”.
• The Riga-based group of Russian-speaking poets, Orbita, shared a selection of poems from their new collection with Deep Baltic.
• British artist Dillwyn Smith showed us how the colourfully-painted windows of Mark Rothko’s home city – Daugavpils, Latvia – helped him find a new understanding of his work.
• Rounding us off for July, we spoke to Latvian parliament representative and Latgalian native Juris Viļums about the challenges facing Latgale, Latvia’s poorest and most idiosyncratic region.

Deep Baltic will return on 1st September
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