Story by Aleksander Przelecki
Sejny is a small town surrounded by lakes and forests of North-Eastern Poland. Historically, the land has been an area of interest for Lithuania, mighty as it used to be in early middle ages, for Byelorussia, always dominated by Russia, and for Poland.
Sejny is a melting pot of nationalities, cultures, religions and customs. Lithuanians make up thirty per cent of the population, the remaining percentage falling to Poles, forcibly resettled Ukrainians, Tartars, Gypsies and Byelorussians. Before 1939, Jews had accounted for fifty per cent of the population but they were swept away by World War Two, as effective as the Spanish reconquista. All that has been left is their White Synagogue. The religious spectrum includes Roman Catholics, Ortodox Christians, Greek Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Old-believers and even Muslims.
For a contemporary European who develops allergic fever whenever he recalls all the ethnic wars and atrocities the Sejny mixture may appear to be a dangerously explosive combination. However, owing to a programme implemented by a group of young people, Sejny has become a unique laboratory where European co-existence, mutual respect and understanding are tested and developed.
I cannot possibly imagine that any local Catholic would be capable of tossing a grenade into the garden of an Ortodox Christian, and neither would be an Ukrainian seen shooting at a Gypsy. Sejny has left Yugoslavia an entire civilizational era behind.
June 1990 saw the establishment of the Borderland Foundation and the Borderland of Arts, Cultures, Nations Centre, the latter serving to pursue the programme of the former. Another organization, the Centre of Small Homelands of Central and Eastern Europe was situated in a manor house that once belonged to Czeslaw Milosz's family and that sits near the village of Krasnogruda, virtually on the Polish-Lithuanian border and only eight kilometres away from Sejny.
The Foundation's objective is to study and promote the cultures of borderlands, to initiate creative collaboration and dialogue between ethnic minorities dwelling in the region, to establish opportunities for co-existence and multilateral influence of diversified artistic output and, additionally, to gather under the auspices of the foundation writers, artists, scholars and activists, both Polish and foreign. Foundation goals also include collection of documentation and protection of cultural relics and monuments.
This rather dry and inanimate phrasing of borderland's statutory objectives should not obscure the exeptionally rich and colourful activities which, though very interesting, cannot for practical reasons be elaborated upon here and are merely signalled in a rather brief way.
A several-dozen-strong group of actors and activists made their first trip to the coastal region of Western Pomerania (Pol. Pomorze Zachodnie - transl.), populated predominantly by the Kashubians and the Ukrainians, the latter having been forced into resettlement after World War Two.
The actors made a tour of eleven villages where they showed a Russian fable and staged a play by F.G. Lorca, both events providing ample opportunities to meet with the locals. Polish actor Mieczyslaw Giedroyc organized drama classes, Italian actress Simona Morini held drama and music workshops, while Sandro Mengall of Rome's Yalled Theatre created (whilst on tour) a spectacle called "A Land of Grief" featuring both Polish and Italian actors. Music classes were also taught by two Frenchmen Frederic Lassuce and Francis Monet, as well as by Olga Lapshina of Moscow.
Similarly plentiful was the agenda of "The Different Encounter, or About the Virtue of Tolerance". As part of the Programme, on All Souls' Day the White Synagogue saw a presentation of tradtional and religious rites related to the rememberance of the dead observed by Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Old-believer Russians and Gypsies.
During the event, children made drawings of relics of Ortodox Church art, while Andrzej Strumillo showed his paintings of the Psalm Series. Ortodox church music was played at the Sejny Basilica and a concert of traditional Ukrainian music was held at the Borderland Centre Hall. The two musical events had been labelled with a rather expressive Latin name "Musica sacra - musica tolerantia", which became even more explicit when the organizers came up with an invitation to a liturgical session of the Evangelical Augsburg Church.
Apart from presenting the diversities of folklore and liturgy, serious "Dialogues on tolerance" debates were also organized with the participation of most-reputable people with immense knowledge of all issues dealing with tolerance towards ethnic and religious minorities, as well as with social and political events. For this occasion Sejny hosted Gabor Csordas of Hungary, Janos Sas of Romania, Zvolnir Cicak of Croatia, Hennig Albrechsten of Germany, Halina Kubeckayte and Vytautas Toleykis of Lithuania, and - naturally - quite a numerous Polish representation.
There were two more events which I would like to mention in this context: an ethnographically- and musically-rich trip to Transylvania, inhabited jointly by Hungarians, Gypsies, Romanians, Saxons and Jews, and an event with the poetic title "Where Green Meets Blue", which focussed on Gypsies, and more specifically, on the culture of the Romanis.
Part of the second event's programme was organized in the Gypsy village of Borki hidden away in the Knyszyn Forest, on which youth, teachers, journalists and cultural activists converged. It was a genuine festival of Romany culture and the underlying idea was to learn about the Romanis, their culture, history and customs. Historians, ethnographers and linguistic gave lectures as part of the so-called "Romani Summer School". There was dancing and music, and scores of both Gypsy and artist visitors from Russia, Estonia, Finland and Italy.
"The two values we place above anything else are remembrance and tolerance", I read as I study a brochure of the Borderland Foundation. The idea of remembrance concerns our historical heritage and our place of residence with which wecan identify.
"We could start looking for other solutions but it might turn out then that our efforts would resemble the unfortunate commercial where the columns of the ancient Capitol were replaced with Coca-Cola cans", said krzysztof Czyzewski.
And now we come to the Small Homeland Programme, which is basedon the awarness of our identity and the ability to co-exist with others.
"Central and Eastern Europe is a region where it is extremely difficult to distinguish areas uniform in terms of nationality or denomination. And hence the emphasis we place on tolerance and openness towards other people, cherising the permeatability of many cultural traditions, and the resulting co-existence of those small social organisms of which today's europe should be made up", say people of Sejny.
"The point is also to shed the stigma of a "homo sovieticus", or a man of the past system, a nowhere man who has only common qualities and no distinctive features, who became an owner of common property while, in fact, he owned nothing and was responsible for nothing".
Obviously, the European laboratory of Sejny does not operate in a vacuum. Its projects are sponsored by such institutions and organizations as the Minisries of Culture of Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, George Soros' Stefan Batory Foundation, the Open Lithuania Foundation, the Illyes Foundation of Budapest, the Paris-Warsaw Foundation for Poland. New York's Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe or West European Centres of Pluralism.
The Borderland Foundation Council groups many famous personalities, including Polish Vice-Minister for Labour Michal Boni, Lithuania's Kaunas museum custodian Oswald Daugelis, Hungarian Ambassador of Poland Akos Engelmayer, Lithuanian Culture Minister Darius Kuolis, poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz along with his brother Andrzej (film director), artist Andrzej Strumillo or Heidelberg University professor Andrzej Vincenz.
I am happy to see that the Borderland Foundation has atracted not only the enthusiasm of young people who have embarked upon the implementation of an interesting project, but also the intellectual and material support from both prominent individuals and renowned international institutions.
We came to Sejny several years ago of the frontier zone rich in historic drama, a land abounding in myths and talents of people who left it and have been coming back. We wanted to check our identity here and see whether the myths we read so much about can have a contemporary continuation and whether we can take some part in it.
Borderlands are full of paradox. They are improvished, sometimes even devastated both civilizationally and culturally. But they always provided the soil upon which outstanding people were born: Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought for the freedom of both Poland and the United States, our poet Adam Mickiewicz and founder of Polish national opera Stanislaw Moniuszko.
It was, after all, in these lands where different cultures bordered on one another that composer Karol Szymanowski, writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and painter Marc Chagall were bred, three outstanding creative personalities of the 20th century. Contemporary celebrities who trace their roots back to this region include also Nobel-Prize-winner poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz and painter Andrzej Strumillo.
Czeslaw Milosz spent his youth in a manor house which used to be owned by his family and has now been donated to our Foundation. Having spent over 40 years in the West, Milosz paid a visit here recently and has referred to this place in his writings. Strumillo, in turn, after long years in New York came back to settle in the nearby village of Mackowa Ruda.
Their return is an attempt to restore the roots which sprang from this soil. It is an attempt to reconstruct the world that is no more - and neither are the worlds described in Singer's prose or depicted in Chagall's paintings.
We have come to the land praised in the books we read, books which were our only experience and intellectual background. We have brought our families with us, we live and work here. We start our presence here at time when somebody else's presence ends. Our mythology begins now but we keep on contrasting it with reality trying to fit it into history.
The Borderland Foundation and the Borderland of Arts, Cultures, Nations Centre were both set up shortly after Czeslaw Milosz's visit here and our talks in 1990.
Krzysztof Czyzewski
"Poland Now", Autumn'93