С большой грустью сообщаю, что наш дорогой друг Стас (Станислав Коновалов) скончался от послеоперационных осложнений во время лечения в больнице. Мы с женой Ольгой познакомились со Стасом в январе 2019 года. Нас познакомил с ним наш общий друг, художник Виктор Рябинин. Позже Стас рассказывал мне, что Виктор сказал ему: «В Калининград переезжает англичанин. Тебе следует с ним встретиться. Он интересный человек, и я думаю, вы найдете общий язык ». Я не совсем уверен, что заслуживаю быть названным «интересный», но мы нашли общий язык в нашей любви к истории в целом и в частности к истории Кенигсберга- Калининграда и его окрестностей. Важным элементом нашего общего языка было вдохновение, которое мы оба получили от нашего друга и наставника Виктора Рябинина. Вскоре после смерти Виктора Рябинина в июле 2019 года я сказал Стасу, что нашел две картины Виктора среди своих вещей в Англии. Он ответил с присущей ему скромностью, что, хотя у него нет картин Виктора Рябинина с его автографами, ему достаточно того, что у него есть «тайная гордость», заключающаяся в том, что он был «близок к этому великому человеку». «Я был его учеником много лет, – сказал он. Когда я рискнул предположить, что Виктор был его другом, Стас ответил, опять с присущей ему скромностью: «Виктор знал очень многих людей, но он, вероятно, не считал их всех своими друзьями. . Могу сказать, что я был его учеником, что я восхищался им и был счастлив в его обществе… »Затем он сделал паузу, прежде чем сказать:« Но я хотел бы думать, что он считал меня своим другом ». Стас был скромным человеком. Он скромно относился ко всем своим достижениям, даже тогда когда было совершенно очевидно, что у него было столько же, если не больше, прав их превозносить. В знак признания его достижений, я попросил Стаса написать краткий биографический отчет о его работе и жизни, в том числе о его отношениях с Виктором Рябининым, и поместил его очерк, вместе со ссылками на его практику экскурсовода на страницах своего постоянного блога под рубрикой “Виктор Рябинин Кенигсберг”. “Стас Калининград Кенигсберг Путеводитель”https://expatkaliningrad.com/personal-tour-guide-kaliningrad/ Стас очень много работал над своими проектами гида, оттачивая и совершенствуя их, снимая несколько видеороликов на YouTube и всегда спрашивая: «Что ты думаешь об этом аспекте?» “Все в порядке?” «Есть ли в сценарии видеоролика что-нибудь, что, по твоему мнению, требует пояснения?». Как и смерть Виктора Рябинина до него, смерть Стаса лишила Кенигсберг-Калининград еще одного его великого посла. Но нас его смерть лишила гораздо большего. Стас был человеком прямолинейным, открытым, искренним. Он был добрым человеком, всегда готовым помочь, он был сердцем хорошей компании. Вместе, мы делили общий язык прошлого, а я через него – общий, но очень важный язык – человеческий. В общем, Стас был самым ценным арсеналом – он был незаменимым другом, которого мы не могли себе позволить потерять.
It is with great sadness that I report that our dear friend Stas (Stanislav Konovalov) passed away recently from post-operative complications whilst undergoing hospital treatment.
My wife, Olga, and I met Stas in January 2019. We were introduced to him by a mutual friend, Victor Ryabinin the artist. Stas told me later that Victor had said to him, “There is an Englishman moving to Kaliningrad. You should meet him. He is an interesting man, and I think you will find a common language.”
I am not altogether certain that I deserve the appellation ‘interesting’, but we did find a common language in our love of history generally and specifically for Königsberg-Kaliningrad and the surrounding region.
An important element in that common language was the inspiration we both received from our friend and mentor Victor Ryabinin.
A short while after Victor Ryabinin’s death in July 2019, I told Stas that I had found two paintings by Victor among my possessions in England. He replied, with characteristic modesty, that whilst he did not have a signed painting by Victor Ryabinin the artist, it was enough that he had a “secret pride”, which was that he had been “close to this great man”. “I was his student for many years,” he said.
When I ventured to suggest that Victor had also been his friend, he replied, once again with characteristic modesty, “Victor knew a great many people and associated with a great many people, but he probably would not have considered them all to be his friends. I can say that I was his student, that I admired him and enjoyed his company …” He then paused, before saying, “But I would like to think that he thought of me as his friend.”
Stas was a modest man. He was modest about all of his achievements, when it was quite obvious that he had as much right, if not more, to blow his own trumpet with the ‘best’ of them.
Stas worked extremely hard on his tour guide projects, honing and perfecting them, making several YouTube videos and always asking, “What did you think of this aspect?” “Was that alright?” “Is there anything in my tour guide script that you think needs clarification?”.
Like Victor Ryabinin before him, Stas’ death has robbed Königsberg -Kaliningrad of yet another great ambassador.
It has robbed us of so much more.
Stas was a straight-talking, open, sincere individual. He was a kind man, always ready to help and good company.
Together, we shared the common language of the past, and I, through him, the common but all-important language of humanity.
In summation, Stas was that most precious of all commodities ~ he was the indispensable friend that we could ill afford to lose.
A sunny afternoon with Stas Konovalov, ‘Stas’, [right of picture] Kaliningrad Königsberg Guide
A blog post for those who delight in quests for meaning with some compensatory tilts towards coincidence and the intervention of luck
12 February 2026 – Königsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad: a story of survival
It did not dawn upon me until recently, although it had been percolating around and around in my subconscious for yonks, that here am I dwelling in old Königsberg and to date have failed to write a post devoted to its wonderful cathedral, which only happens to be Kaliningrad’s most visited and popular tourist attraction and the last remaining marker of what is often described historically as Königsberg’s spiritual and cultural centre. I suppose that you will tut that I have been too busy taking potshots at the antics of the liberal left and writing curated highbrow on such topics as tin buckets and badgers dressed in underpants, but I confess that my penance is overdue, and so it is with humbled contriteness that I take you by the hand and lead you to the one and only Königsberg Cathedral.
Königsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad: a story of survival
The most profound, iconic and spectacular testimony to Kaliningrad once being Königsberg is the continued presence of Königsberg Cathedral. Contrary to appearances, the cathedral’s spiritual connections did not throw a shield around it during WWII. It was not singled out by divine intervention for survivalist dispensation. Although, the fact that it was gutted and that its outer walls remained intact, thus preserving a shell of its former self, could be offered up as evidence of how wrong I am in this assumption. For had the walls not remained, it is doubtful, if not impossible, that later, much later in fact, the remainder of this poignant tribute to the glory that was Königsberg would have become its advocate for conservation and regeneration.
I haven’t the vaguest idea whether you are asking how and why the cathedral escaped demolition from the postwar Soviet dictate to eradicate all things German. But just in case you are, the answer to such a hypothetical question is that Königsberg Cathedral owes a debt for its salvation to a coalition of culturally minded people and indulgent local history groups, felicitously supported by Moscow’s Ministry of Culture.
It is said that in the drive to expunge all things German, Kaliningrad’s local authorities actively sought to demolish the cathedral, as indeed became the fate of Königsberg Castle, but that a handful of heritage-conscious historians, emphasising the building’s historical value, countered with the argument that the building was worthy of reprieve. There can be no doubt at all that the Ministry of Culture’s backing must have applied crucial leverage for the preservationist’s cause. But help was also forthcoming from the most unlikely of sources, that of the city’s most famous inhabitant the German philosopher Kant, whose tomb, like the cathedral to which it is attached, had survived the aerial bombing and Soviet siege of Königsberg.
Ironically Kant, who was a lifelong resident of Königsberg, who hardly ever left the city that he loved, but who, in later life, it is said, tended to visit the cathedral less and less, played an indispensable part in saving the stricken building from the swoop of the demolition ball and alteration by dynamite.
Kant to the rescue
During the Soviet era, particularly in the immediate aftermath of WWII, all distinguished and distinguishing German buildings which in Königsberg had survived destruction were looked upon as offending symbols of a militaristic nature and objectionable reminders of Fascistic ideology.
However, to have laid waste to Königsberg Cathedral would have entailed the simultaneous destruction of Kant’s tomb, which was and still is located at the cathedral’s northeast corner. Fortunately for both, Soviet ideology regarded Kant a progressive thinker whose work had greatly influenced the philosophical tenets of Soviet-approved Hegel and Marx.
The preservation-destruction debate continued unabated, but before a decision could be taken, Sovietism collapsed, ushering in a bold new era. Perestroika had arrived: It wasa time of possibilities for what before may have seemed impossible. And it was during this transitionary period, in the early 1990s, that the green light was finally given and restorative work commenced on raising the wounded cathedral out from under its wartime ruins.
Konigsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad: a story of survival
Harking from England, whenever I think ‘cathedrals’, I visualise, from experience, massive, conspicuous structures predominantly constructed of carved grey stone. The red-brick Gothic style, the category in which Königsberg Cathedral fits, is incongruous with this vision. Such buildings are predominantly Germanic and also Baltic in origin, erected in red brick rather than in stone due to a regional lack of the latter for use as a source of building material.
Historic buildings of note, particularly those initiated to fulfil religious purposes, are virtually never not preceded by an earlier version, and Königsberg Cathedral is no exception to this rule.
The forerunner to the red-brick building with which today we are familiar was smaller than its successor. It was made of wood and served the Catholic Church. This comparatively modest place of worship took shape at the end of the thirteenth century and beginning of the fourteenth. In 1322, Johann Clare, the Bishop of Samland, obtained the eastern quarter of Kneiphof Island from the Teutonic Knights. Here, development of the new cathedral is thought to have begun in 1330, with the first cathedral demolished in unison and parts of it removed for incorporation within the newbuild.
The bombing of the cathedral in August 1944 can be viewed as the apotheosis of a long line of setbacks and serious structural mishaps that plagued the building’s construction and threatened its existence from the moment of its debut on Kneiphof Island.
From the very outset, the island’s silt and mud ground presented a contradiction to the successful erection of a structure of the cathedral’s considerable size and weight. Soil had to be brought in from elsewhere and hundreds of poles driven into the earth to stabilise the foundation bed.
Mindful of past Prussian and Lithuanian conflicts, the cathedral, with Johann Clare’s blessing, began to take a formidable shape, with walls constructed in some places up to 3 metres thick. When the Master of the Teutonic Order, Luther von Braunschweig, got wind of this, it quite unsurprisingly fair put the wind up him. Instantly, he halted all construction whilst he attempted to ascertain what it was that Clare was erecting, a cathedral or a fortress, bearing in mind, of course, that the whereabouts of the structure placed it slap bang in the middle of the Teutonic Order’s domain.
For work on the cathedral to recommence, Clare had to sign a document confirming that all defensive elements pertaining to the cathedral’s spec would be dropped forthwith and also guarantee that certain walls of the building would be assembled within parameters that made their defensive role less credible.
It is doubtful that the cathedral would have gone ahead had these concessions not been made, but the making of them introduced serious inherent weakness into some parts of the cathedral’s structure, requiring buttresses and other remedial mechanisms to compensate for the heavy loads imposed by the arches and vaulted ceilings. Although these engineering features eventually lent the cathedral a distinctive look all of its own, they would later prove insufficient in preventing some of the walls from sinking and listing to the south by as much as 50cm.
Due to the unstable nature of the substrate on which the cathedral rested and the inadequate foundation base, by the turn of the seventeenth century cracks had begun to appear in various walls, particularly in relation to the placing of the towers. It was initially believed that the fault lay in the walls themselves, which explains why at the front of the building almost every window has been bricked up.
It took the complete collapse of the arch within the northern nave for the extent of the problem to be realised.
A worse fate awaited the cathedral in 1544. Up until this time, the cathedral’s front elevation possessed a symmetrical grandeur, with towers of equal style and proportion positioned on either side. In the conflagration of 1544, both towers were destroyed. Only one tower was replaced, where its facsimile stands today, on the southern flank of the entrance. Instead of replacing the northern tower, a gable roof was added, with one of a smaller but similar nature in the intervening space where the twin towers once had stood.
Fast forward now to January 1817, the year of a ferocious hurricane, which promptly, impudently, and with blatant disregard for acts amounting to sacrilege, whipped away the cathedral’s roof.
The cathedral’s checkered structural history pursued it through the nineteenth century, during the second half of which substantial soil erosion caused parts of its walls to collapse and associated damage to wreak havoc with other build elements. Enter Richard Dethlefsen, a German architect and monument conservator, who, during the first decade of the 20th century, directed a major engineering project, which included shoring up the cathedral with foundation beams of concrete, stabilised and reinforced with metal tension cables.
Königsberg Cathedral: the destruction of WWII
After all this sterling remedial work, come 1944, along came the RAF, which, on August 26th and 27th of that year, very nearly succeeded in adding the ancient monument to the greater part of Königsberg, which it systemmatically bombed into almost total oblivion. As it was, however, the incendiary devices the RAF dropped, burned the cathedral out, leaving in their wake a gutted, hollow shell.
It is only by comparing photographs of what remained of the great cathedral after that fateful raid and how long it endured as a burnt-out husk with photographs of its present self, or better still by visiting the monument in person, that one can fully appreciate the dedication, time, effort, professional skill and money that have underpinned its restoration.
Within six years, the initial, visible transformation of the cathedral’s shattered exterior was complete. In 1994, a new spire was lifted into place by helicopter; in 1995, a new clock, replicating the earlier one, was added, and between 1996 and 1998, the entire cathedral roof was reconstructed. Six years from the start of the project, Königsberg Cathedral had been reborn!
With major reconstruction work to the outside now completed, the focus then was turned to detailed conservation and restoration. The cathedral’s interior is widely accredited with having undergone restoration to a high standard, the veracity of which can be validated by once again comparing photographs of the wreckage of the building wrought by World War Two with the Cathedral as it appears today.
Among the many fine examples of restoration detail is the cathedrals’ baptismal font. Housed in a small room separated from the main hall by a carved wooden screen, this replica of the destroyed original is deceptively authentic. The atmospheric baptistry, the original of which dated to 1595, also contains two ancient plaques. Other plaques of interest displayed on the interior include two on the southern wall: one devoted to Luther von Braunschweig, the Master of the Teutonic Order; the other to Johann Clare, the Bishop of Samland.
The pièce de résistance of the interior restoration, discounting for the moment the omnipotent presence of what is famed to be one of Europe’s largest and most impressive organs, are faithful copies of Königsberg Cathedral’s tablature and mural monuments – wall-mounted memorials to the passed-on ‘great and good’.
The best examples of reconstructed wall tablets are to be found behind the main hall’s stage in what once was the choir. This chamber is also the burial place of the Prussian nobility as well as masters of the Teutonic Order and figures of royal descent. Not surprisingly, therefore, these devotional monuments contain the full ornate regalia befitting the status of those whom they serve to consecrate, complete with intricate scrollwork, chubby cherubs, a portrait bust or two, the family’s coats of arms and the traditional symbols of death, skulls with bone accompaniments – embodiments of both the material-spiritual worlds readily associated in style and execution with the late Renaissance and Baroque periods.
The most ornate and intricate of these epitaphs are devoted to the last master of the Teutonic Order and Albrecht Hohenzollern Ansbach, the first secular duke of Prussia. His first and second wives are buried in the same chamber, causing cynics among you to say, ‘No escape there then!’
The former choir benefits from the illumination of eight stained-glass windows, bearing the coats of arms of the most influential East Prussian families: Oulenburg, Greben, Don and Lendorf.
Twelve stained glass windows, recreated by Kaliningrad master artists, permit and modulate the ingress of light within the cathedral’s basilica.
Konigsberg Cathedral, Kaliningrad: a story of survival
The cathedral in its modern format plays a multifunctional role. It still serves a liturgical purpose, having two chapels in its west towers, one Lutheran, the other Orthodox, but the main hall of the cathedral is dedicated to organ concerts. Königsberg Cathedral houses one of the largest organs in Europe. The cathedral also contains a museum dedicated to the life and times of one of Königsberg’s most famous residents, the renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose mausoleum, annexed to the cathedral, is an international place of pilgrimage for Kantian academics and for those who wish to savour and collect the historical experience of Kant’s last resting place. The mausoleum was designed by German architect Friedrich Lahrs and completed in 1924 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the philosopher’s birth. Upon his death, Kant was first interred inside the cathedral, within the ‘Professor’s Vault’. In 1880, his remains were exhumed and re-interred in a neo-Gothic chapel, which was later replaced by the present edifice.
At the time of its destruction towards the end of the Second World War, Kneiphof Island was the perfect example of high-density living, a compact network consisting of densely crowded urban buildings and seemingly narrow streets. The cathedral, which today can be clearly and dramatically seen from several approaches and prospects, was, in its pre-war days, resplendent yet partially enclosed, particularly on the east and north sides, where the Albertina University, into whose possession the cathedral came in 1544, formed an L-shaped ‘wall’ along the edge of the Pregolya River, with the roof, the spire and masts of the partly concealed cathedral rising above the quadrangle of which its presence helped contrive.
Today, the monument stands alone, the vast sweep of its fantailed roof and unmistakeable spired turret quietly reposed in open and sculpted parkland – a reminder of the ghost of Königsberg, a symbol of deliverance from uncompromising total warfare, an icon of endurance and longevity and the city’s most significant landmark, linking, by its pre-war history and postwar reconstruction, the ancient city of Königsberg with modern-day Kaliningrad. It is the poignant story of two different eras, the unlikely bridge between two different cultures, occupying a destined space reserved by Fate and Fortune.
There isn’t in this respect anything else quite like it. Königsberg Cathedral is unique; and, at the risk of sounding vaguely offensive, perhaps it is just as well.
Königsberg Cathedral Organ
The first purpose-built organ was installed in the cathedral shortly after construction was completed in the 1380s. Henceforth, the organ would grow in size, complexity and power. It would also be elaborately embellished, ornately carved, painted and gold plated, a suitable livery for what was destined to become the largest organ in Prussia. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a new organ was constructed. It was huge and being dressed in the grandeur of the Baroque style, with angel figures, fine carving and sumptuous gilding, commanded a prepossessing and inspiring spectacle. Both the decorative exterior and the instrument itself would undergo maintenance, repair and restoration well into the 20th century.
Obliterated in World War II, the organ, like the cathedral in which it had resided, was brought back to life as part of the 1990s’ reconstruction programme. Like its magnificent predecessors, it, too, is Baroque in style and follows the applauded tradition of its 18th-century forebear, which had the reputation of being the largest organ in Europe; the current organ is recognised as one of Europe’s largest organs and the largest organ in Russia.
A second, smaller, choral organ upholds the cathedral’s legacy as a two-organ music venue. Completed in 2006, the smaller organ conveys in its overall shape and appearance elements Art Nouveau in nature as well as conventional Gothic.
Königsberg Cathedral Museum
The southern and northern towers of the cathedral are given over to a museum dedicated to the life and times of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lived most of his entire life in Königsberg and whose remains are interred in a mausoleum adjacent to the cathedral. The displays include a life-size model dressed in Kantian clothes, personal memorabilia and interactive digital technology, allowing the user to fraternise with Kant and learn about his life and lifestyle.
The museum extends across several floors situated at different levels. The staircases are precipitous, so take it easy on your way up! The museum also contains historical documentation, artefacts and exhibits relevant to the Teutonic Order, Kneiphof Island (since renamed Kant Island), the Albertina University and the city of Königsberg. It’s well worth visiting for all the reasons mentioned and specifically to see the large and detailed scale model of Königsberg.
Wallenrodt Library at Königsberg Cathedral
In 1650, Count Martin von Wallenrodt, the Chancellor of Prussia, created the first secular library in Königsberg Cathedral, a unique collection of ancient books and manuscripts. Much of the library’s exclusive contents were lost during the Second World War, and the library itself gutted along with the rest of the building. It was restored to its former glory, and restocked with antiquarian books, coins, banknotes, seals and plaques as part of the cathedral’s reconstruction in the last quarter of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, and now is a key element of the cathedral museum’s experience. The Baroque interior, enriched by the highly ornate carved columns and intricate moldings spanning and surmounting the floor-to-ceiling shelving units, creates a scholarly space which is at once intimate, private and studious; in fact, an interior so well replicated that reconciling the subdued grandeur of the 20th century iteration with its 17th-century antecedent is rendered quite unnecessary.
The Tomb of Immanuel Kant
Kant’s tomb, which is situated at the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral, is a replacement memorial, originally neo-Gothic in style, restyled in 1924 by the respected architect Friedrich Lahrs to mark the 200th anniversary of Kant’s birth.
The mausoleum is designed in a minimalist, neoclassical, open-colonnade form, which, to all intents and purposes, should be quite at odds with the cathedral’s Gothic character, and yet, oddly enough, it is not.
The columned and canopied hall contains a granite sarcophagus, beneath which Kant’s remains are buried.
A bronze wall plaque denotes the duration of Kant’s life from birth to death, and the monument is inscribed with an oft-quoted quote from his work, Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Sculpture Park on Kant Island (formerly Kneiphof Island)
Kongsberg Cathedral is located on what today is known as Kant Island, which was Kneiphof Island, and which some people refer to as Sculpture Park.
Occupying almost the entire space of Kneiphof, 12 hectares, the park functions as an open-air art gallery. It contains numerous sculptures dotted about among its landscape garden, with the accent on both historical and contemporary figures, showcased under the title of The Man and the World.
At the front of the cathedral can be seen a bronze model called the Center of Königsberg 1930, a detailed reconstruction in miniature of the centre of Königsberg as it would have looked before WWII.
At the rear of the cathedral sits a monument in bronze to the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose tomb is also located there. The pedestal which supports the monument is said to be the original.
Other monuments include:
A statue of Duke Albrecht of Prussia, the founder of the University of Königsberg (Albertina), and a memorial plaque to Julius Rupp, a German noted for his progressive views (1809-1884), inset into a granite stone.
The latest addition to the park is a large electronic screen on which Kant welcomes visitors and invites them to take selfies of them and him together. He is a clever Kant, for he then transmits the selfies to visitors’ smartphones or sends them by email. He is also a very friendly Kant, who parts company with his visitors by wishing them well and regaling them before they leave with some of his famous quotes.
Mick Hart’s 2025: a nostalgic review in photographs
30 January 2026 – 2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
As the photographs immediately below illustrate, Kaliningrad has been and is experiencing a real winter this year. Snow fell on cue, a week or so before the New Year celebrations, and its festive debut at this time was very much appreciated. Three weeks into the New Year, however, and like that ‘long time, no see’ distant relative, who, out of the goodness of your foolish heart, you invited to stay for the Yuletide season, snow, ice and formidable temperatures hovering somewhere between minus ten and minus 14 are beginning to overstay their welcome.
With spring and summer still out of sight, one way of looking forward to more hospitable climes is to look backwards. Hiding in the house is, I think, a lot less disagreeable than struggling into heavy boots, thermal coats, hats and gloves and braving the great outdoors. If I wanted to be a snowman, I would never defrost my heart. Moreover, shutting the door on the outside world provides the excuse and opportunity for stepping inside your computer and doing a bit of digital spring cleaning ahead of the leaves and buds returning to the trees.
I don’t know about you, although I’ve heard what others say, but both my smartarse phone and laptop are like pictures at an exhibition after a hurricane has gatecrashed.
In days of old our forebears seemed to have been smitten by the optical difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees; today, in snappy la-la land, the wood has become the photograph and the trees a forest of images forever growing more expansive across the finite landscape of digital storage.
Like you, I can think of better things to do whilst whiling away my time indoors, but computers and digital storage systems, like overburdened, unkempt woodland, need to be attended to, lovingly tidied up and judiciously pruned back.
The estate managers among you will appreciate what I say, when I do say that there’s a lot to be said for ridding oneself of dead wood (not to mention fallen trees), for rolling up one’s sleeves and trousers, and with knotted hanky on your head in lieu of the summer to come, buckling down to some good old-fashioned lopping, chopping and admin work.
In practising what I preach, whilst waiting for the snow to melt, I have sifted, sorted, catalogued, carefully reassigned and refiled chronologically a prodigious number of scattered images; a making-me-smug endeavour, enabling me to extrapolate those which feature in this post; images which, in my opinion, open a retrospective window on the nature of my personal world in 2025.
Kaliningrad, January 2025
2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
As you can see, January 2025 in Kaliningrad was not much different than January 2026, except that in 2026 the temperatures have been hovering around minus 8 degrees and minus 14 degrees. It was not quite that cold back in 2025. At least not cold enough to prevent one from indulging in the fully explainable practice of falling backwards into the snow. Something for you to try sometime. And no, that’s not me dressed as a woman.
As spring approached in 2025, we took the opportunity to indulge our philosophical/mythological side by visiting Ponart Brewery’s Creation of the World Exhibition, after which, with no excuse intended, we side-stepped into the Art Depot Bar , which is part and parcel of the Ponart Brewery complex. Here, you can enjoy the historical ambience of one of the brewery’s original beer cellars and have your beer delivered to you in the trucks of a model train.
Back in the UK, my Gothic alter image was inspired by a susceptible reaction to the living and studying conditions in which, I am grateful to say, I entrancingly immersed myself:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …” – Edgar Allan Poe
Such volumes of ‘forgotten lore’ were indeed forthcoming, complete with ink inscriptions, naming the person or persons to whom each book belonged, those who had lived out their mortal sentence in the early 20th, late 19th and even 18th centuries.
It was still officially or unofficially winter, and though not so excessively cold that it could hold a candle to Kaliningrad’s temperatures, the UK’s outrageously high utility costs made, and continue to make, candle-burning the second option to staying in bed until spring – which is not that far away; just a couple of paragraphs down.
The only way to keep warm in Britain in these troubled times is to rail at those wrongly elected who have all but destroyed our homeland, some by incompetence, some by design, but all by disavowal of the suicidal part they have played in orchestrating the migrant invasion.
Into spring we go, where it’s time once again to dust off one’s antiques. In the early 20th century, a celebrated chat-up line, at least on the stage of the music hall, was, “Would you like to come home and see my etchings?” but in the twilight years of one’s spent youth, or in my case misspent youth, “Would you like to come home and help me to polish my antiques?” seems somehow more appropriate, if admittedly rather tawdry when paired with the grace of early spring.
With the buds returning to the trees and it being warm enough to escape the inclement weather of one’s sparsely heated house, it was away we went to conduct business of a sort that I wont bore you with, stopping off on one’s return at the atmospheric Brampton Mill.
At the curiously named ‘The Hill’, a public house in Wollaston, where they serve, I don’t mind saying, a fine and revolving array of ales, the night scene outside the pub was hauntingly English Gothic. Yet, nearby Rushden by night is infinitely more unnerving; come to think of it, not only by night. Take a drive down Rushden High Street (prudently with your doors and windows locked!) and let me know what you think. The theme of Gothicism and antiques persisted as long as spring existed and followed us into the warmth of summer.
Summer (Ah, sun and warmth – sometimes …) saw us set sail in 2025 on a monumental, intriguing and adventurous voyage of discovery to Cornwall and North Devon, calling on the way, and whilst we tarried there, at, among other places, Tintagel, Port Isaac (Portwenn of Doc Martin fame), Boscastle, Padstow, and, following in the footsteps of her much-devoted fans, the Agatha Christie trail; taking in the Art Deco and earlier historic wonders of Burgh Island and then onto Christie’s adored 18th-century summer home, the reclusive-seclusive Greenway House.
2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
Summer in Kaliningrad found me undertaking grossly inadvisable experiments of a selfie kind, as seen here in the photo, which was snapped out front of Kaliningrad’s vast and intricate Baroque fantasy, the multiple entertainment and bar complex, Residence of Kings. Like the historic Blue Anchor in London’s Southwark, bars sufficient there are inside this gargantuan establishment not to venture outside if a ‘pub crawl’ is what you’re after.
On a return trip to the Art Depot Bar (Ponart Brewery), Olga and I went bananas. Let me rephrase that: on this occasion, she elected to join me. We also did a spot of amber dredging along the Baltic beach and shabby-chiced the entrance hall to arty-fart the dacha. Later, we solicited the assistance of real artists to illustrate the outside paint job.
Arguably the best month of the year for me – the glorious and sadly soft transition from extraversion to mellow introspectiveness. Having said that, the famous Königsberg monument depicted below, as captured in September, is not bull-orientated, so you haven’t discovered a worthy joke there. Neither will it assist you should your first name be Bill and your last name Cody. The famous bronze creatures locking horns on Prospekt Mira, opposite the Regional Scientific Library, are, in fact, Bisons, sculpted by August Gaul in 1910 and valued as well as intrinsically for having survived the city’s destruction at the close of World War II.
The chap standing there with an anchor in his hand and pointing at me as if he is trying to tell me something is, as if you didn’t know, the one and only Peter the Great.
Mick ‘the very rarely even close to great’ polishes his tree-hugging skills, which he does in one of the photographs here, to a very grateful tree, which has very little else to do but stand the test of time on a hilltop deep in the North Beds countryside. Staying with the Bedford theme, there’s also a picture above of the state-of-the-art Gothic revivalist De Parry’s Avenue D’Parry’s hotel, framed within the gathering hues of autumn’s transitionary season.
Coincident with the autumn school term, when, presumably, there would be less family convergence on Poland’s Sopot resort, we stole away for a five-day break. This was my second visit to Sopot, in which I discovered architectural gems Art Nouveau in nature and, wouldn’t you just know it, gems of a different but not indifferent kind to a man of my discernment: ‘Bar, Bar, Black Sheep’. For some people it was sea and sand, and how does that expression go, ‘like a kid in a sweet shop’.
This time of year also found Mick Hart giving an impromptu address to Kaliningrad’s lucky ProSchool students.
Late November ushers in, with a defining sublimity that never grows old, the dying shades of verdure, taking a last, impressive bow before, come the final encore, they leave the seasonal stage, handing over the act to winter. There are more deep, dense, poetically invocative and graduated praiseworthy colours in a typical autumnal scene than you and I could shake a stick at, and as November plays itself out, less on high upon the sticks than are woven at ground level into a semblant natural Axminster, the wonderful reams of golden yellows, astonishments of auburns and the artists’ palettes of burnished browns waft us gently away on a seasonal magic carpet into the swan-song realm of Christmas and its boisterous prelude to the end of the year.
What goes around comes around, and here we are, back again in winter.
Kaliningrad’s Svetlogorsk, its premiere Baltic resort, which, in summer, is a hubble bubble of touristic jostling bustle, with streets teeming, beaches embattled and popular bars and restaurants bursting at the seams, is, in the earliest throes of winter, an altogether different, essentially meaning quieter, place; for, as many of you likely know, out-of-season resorts, when experienced as a solitary cloud might enjoy its singular company, are like the recuperative restoration, the danger past in the aftermath, that follows in the wake of a raging distemper akin to flu.
Thank Heaven! the crisis The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last And the fever called “Living” Is conquered at last – Edgar Allan Poe
Aw, come on, Edgar, old mate, I’m with you totally on this kind of sentiment in its relation to mortal existence, but it’s a bit strong in this context, isn’t it!
Excuse him, if you will; he’s rather given over, you know, to lifelong fits of self-indulgence in the addictive vagaries of bleak melancholia. Let’s merely fall back on words and phrases that do to seasides out of season no conventional harm, such as ‘deserted’, ‘quiet’ and ‘reflectively peaceful’.
One thing that covers all seasons, and has been for me for the past 54 years, is the daily writing of a diary. Not content, however, by exhausting the present with thoughts of the past, in 2025, I stepped up the arduous process of scanning in, and thus digitally converting, 40 years of handwritten copy. Bless him, that’s what I say! It keeps him out of mischief – “And not before time!” say those who know him!
Hello Spring: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/fancy-lines-dots-hello-spring-lettering_6992212.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=16&uuid=42aab2a9-9c0f-4fa6-83d7-c57dc3e4d659&query=spring+antique+typographic+image”>Image by freepik</a>
Hello Summer: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/summer-background-design_1084447.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=42&uuid=e75660f9-e7ca-4ad9-b222-fcc3664d6f3d&query=Hello+Summer+antique+typographic+image”>Image by mariia_fr on Freepik</a>
Hello Autumn: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/elegant-hello-autumn-lettering-composition_2659814.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=16&uuid=781c1b5d-05f1-46f2-8e85-c0dbe722dc9d&query=Autumn+antique+typographic+image”>Image by freepik</a>
Hello Winter: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hello-winter-lettering-with-leaves_10612573.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=39&uuid=056e05c8-7285-4de1-b3c5-3cdbeaee5a94&query=Hello+winter+antique+typography”>Image by freepik</a>
Book with glasses: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/top-view-book-flower-glasses_4881633.htm”>Image by freepik</a>
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Primator Double 24
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
23 January 2026 – Primator Double 24 beer – Mick Hart’s Dark Side
I’ve always liked them dark, so it’s been said. And yes, there was a time once when the proof was plain to see, but, in later years, I returned to the light and hoppy, and in the later years of later years learnt what Confucius never said and Confusion had no need to, that there comes a time in everyone’s life when you have to take not what you want but whatever is available.
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes … you get what you need – Mick Jagger
Choice had no part to play on this auspicious occasion. Primator Double 24 was given to me as a present, and well received it was too.
Some beer drinkers, those who define value in terms of a beer’s strength, will latch onto Double 24 simply because its strength offers a ‘get me pissed quick’ option, whereas slow-session drinkers like myself err on the side of caution when brought face to face with potent ABVs, such as Double 24’s 10.5%.
Sampling for the purpose of critical appraisal is a mitigating factor. “Don’t be such a Nancy boy!” I heard a voice say, followed smartly by one with a Rushden accent: “Goo on, git it down yu!”
I always snub them, you know!
Primator Double 24 beer
Proceeding to uncap the bottle, the beer did not, I noticed, emit a strong, malty, hoppy whiff, which was what I was expecting. And you’d be hard pushed to say why not?
I always say ‘Why not?’ whenever I am offered something as succulent as this. Deeply rich and strong in caramels and malts, with plummy undertones, high notes, low notes, and where did I put my notebook? Who cares? Just keep on drinking. The body was muscular, but the head was wanting. Heads or tails and all that, but if I were a creamy head man, which I am not, I would not drink such beer, present or no present. I’d just tear off into the past, in my William Hartnell TARDIS, and drink Home Ales at the Tally Ho in Bakersfield before it got burnt down.
A Pilsner drinker (somebody’s got to drink the stuff) referred to this beer as “rather chewy”, and he might have a point. Not a very good one, but something just half sharp. Primator Double 24 may be a gob full, but it’s strikingly different and palatable. Biting off more than you can chew could be a worry if you intend to get home on a penny-farthing, but I blamed the slight light headedness felt halfway down the glass on any advance on chronic insomnia.
The very blackness of the beer brought back East London memories of evenings with Verina and potting the black in the middle pocket. I wouldn’t mind drinking this in my black bow tie and nothing else. It’s rich and slick and silky. But hear this! It’s also smooth and rounded; full-bodied, you might say, but then you’re a certified beer enthusiast, and I’m just a person who enjoys drinking beer.
Some of these Ace of Spades beers can, after a few attempts, go down like a four-sided triangle, but Primator 24 Double is 24/7 on the hangover clock – now, watch me get out of this one (I didn’t train Krav Maga 24 years for nothing!), but it will only give you a hangover if you drink too much. Take that!
Primator Double 24 beer
Predator, sorry, Primator Double, when whittled down to taste and quality, is a double six multiplied by 2. I cannot remember drinking anything like this when I was 24, and if I had drunk a lot of it in my younger days, I probably wouldn’t remember it, or anything else.
Sensible drinking, of which there is no such thing, dictates not drinking 24 bottles of 24 Double in one sitting, or else you won’t be sitting but slipping. However, as an occasional beer treat, no one, with the obvious exception of a crusty old teetotaller, would double down on you, as you double up with laughter, for doubling up on Primator 24 Double. It’s double black, and Black Beers Matter!
😊BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Primator Double 24 Brewer: Pivovar Náchod (Primátor a.s.) Where it is brewed: Czech Republic Bottle capacity: 0.5 litre Strength: 10.5% Price: 340-540 roubles (£3.32 / £5.27) Appearance: Dark with a cherry-red hue Aroma: Complex blend of caramel, cherries and chocolate Taste: Rich, prune-cherry sweet and chocolatey Fizz amplitude: 0% Label/Marketing: Subtly vintage-industrial Would you buy it again? I never bought it the first time, but I wouldn’t hesitate buying it again!
Beer rating
The brewer’s website has this to say about Primator Double 24: Special Dark beer: Unique, difficult to classify into one of the beer categories. Extraordinarily strong dark-garnet beer with a distinctly sweet and full taste. Features a malt aroma with dominating tones of caramel, dried plums, chocolate, and a pleasantly subtle bitterness. Website: https://primator.cz/en/produkty/24-2/
Wot other’s say [Comments on Primator Double 24 beer from the internet, unedited] 🤔Sweet and noticable alcohol, but you can feel Czech pilsner taste a bit, which is a really original experience for me. [Comment: The man who was obviously drinking something that was completely not Primator Double 24] 😊 An exceptionally strong beer with a dark garnet color, a pronounced sweetness, and a full-bodied flavor, a malty aroma with dominant notes of caramel, prune, or chocolate, and a pleasant lingering bitterness. [Comment: And so say all of us!] 😘 Best damn beer in the Czech Republic, Primator 24 Double at 10.5%. It is strong, and it is sweet. I love it! Before Pilsner dominated the industry, starting in the early 1800s, all Czech beer was dark. How I wish that was still true. [Comment: Now here’s a man who knows what he’s talking about!]
History is always worth repeating if the bar is good
20 January 2026 – Yeltsin Forma Bars Kaliningrad: Many Happy Returns
No, of course it has nothing to do with birthdays, anniversaries or anything like that, neither mine, the Yeltsin’s nor Forma’s; it’s just what anyone who appreciates good beer and excelsior drinking environments does – they return, time and time again.
I wrote about the Yeltsin Bar and Forma in two posts and have to say that since I commended them, both for their beer and atmosphere, they still remain firm favourites of mine on the Kaliningrad bar circuit.
They, in Kaliningrad, will probably interpret this next phrase as being the opposite of complimentary, but, in the UK, we have an expression for such places: ‘spit and sawdust’. Although in these less earthy and more sophisticated days, be they ever so pseudo, such base terminology as this has likely been replaced by ‘designer-trendy laid-back interior’.
Yeltsin Forma Bars Kaliningrad
Call it as you see it; I’m a stickler when it comes to not liking change. For example, I am not quite sure why the Yeltsin scrubbed off or painted over its best example of ‘street art’ but retained its paint-spattered bog (that’s right, I said paint-spattered), but this anomaly apart, oh, and the loss of the classic jukebox, the Yeltsin in the character of its fundamentals, and may I say essentials, to wit, its rollicking beer selection and the lesson it provides in ‘how to feel like a student again even though you are past it’, render complaints null and void.
Meanwhile, next door, or as close to dammit as possible, Forma has done nothing wrong in my eyes, except, perhaps, to lose some of its furniture, or, if this is not so, to have removed what seems to be missing tables around the room’s perimeter, thus leaving the centre floor wide open.
I know what you are thinking: “What a pedantic old …”
I never got my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat for hiding my observations under a bushel.
There’s no connection whatsoever between that last remark and the one I am about to make, but in the artful world of pretext, I shall now go all transitionary on you – I blame it on those Coro jabs – by mentioning how extraordinary it seemed to be drinking beer in Forma, and very nice beer, too, whilst dining on sweet pizza.
This is a delicacy I can honestly claim to have never sampled before. I’ve got a good memory, sometimes, always where beer is concerned, but an imperfect excuse for one when it comes to remembering food, so I am unable to tell you with any authority whether the sweet pizza we sampled tasted of pear or pineapple, but, albeit an acquired taste, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Yeltsin Forma Bars Kaliningrad
I ventured a couple of beers in Forma, and they were on tip-top forma (I had to say it, didn’t I?), and no less can be said of the Yeltsin’s beer selection. Just look at that roll call of beers chalked on Yeltsin’s blackboard menu.
Enjoy the photos; enjoy the Yeltsin; enjoy Forma; go to both and enjoy the beer.
Below: Forma bar
Forma bar, KaliningradBeer, menu, liqueur and sweet pizzaStrange juke box?
12 January 2026 – Gdansk to Kaliningrad by Bus: Where’s that Bus Stop?
Once upon a time there was a bus stop, and once upon a time, this bus stop was not much different from any other bus stop. People wanting to catch a bus from this stop would make it their destination and, once there, would wait for the bus to arrive and stop, as that’s what bus stops are for.
Then came an event concerning a country not that far away which changed that bus stop overnight. It was still, for all intents and purposes, a place where buses stop, but nobody knew where it was and, even if they did, they had little idea of where the buses that stopped at the stop were going when they had finished stopping.
Ostensibly, this bus stop is just one of many sharing space with other stops at Gdansk’s central bus station, a horrid place by day, yet not so horrid by night, when, thanks to the action of darkness, it fails to offend one’s visual senses, not to mention imagination, to the extent of making you want to dash for cover, which, at the hidden, secret bus stop, there is almost as little of that as there are of other amenities.
The bus station’s information office is the perfect place for concealment. Like members of a certain ideological group, now consigned to history, they declare to a man and a woman that they know nothing, though to the innocent, untrained ear, the collective, official response sounds something very similar to “Don’t blame us, we’re just following orders!”
An attempt to uncover the stop by conducting an all-points bulletin search of the many and numerous bus bays using Shanks’s Pony is an unrevealing exercise that is guaranteed to leave you incredibly more annoyed and infinitely more frustrated than when you first embarked upon it, which is how, having fully exhausted ourselves, we arrive at the point of this post.
Gdansk to Kaliningrad by Bus: Where’s that Bus Stop?
Spoiler: In the unlikely event that you are one of those vaunted mythical heroes who would rather not know in advance that the travel arrangements for your journey are faultlessly prepared and who relishes, nay invites, as many opportunities as there are migrants in the UK to trip yourself up every step of the way, my advice is look away now! Missed it! There goes your bus! For I am, without compunction, about to reveal to you, the patient and tolerant reader, exactly where that Kaliningrad bus stop is; the one that you have been searching for, and on whose bus, when it pulls in, you will embark with satisfaction, and experience more of the same when, with you on board, it then pulls out.
This is what you need to know: The number of that stop is legs 11, or, without resorting to Bingoism, just plain old number eleven; and once again in numerals, memorise this: 11.
Calling all buses and passengers, be on the lookout for a place where buses stop in Gdansk that answers to 11.
Gdansk to Kaliningrad by Bus: Where’s that Bus Stop?
Don’t bother doing the rounds of Gdansk bus station again, or you’ll entice me to return to ‘ Once upon a time, besides, you’ll be doing yourselves no favours by scooting around the bus bay area. Number 11 isn’t there; number 11 is ostracised, pushed away, shunted off, singled out for special treatment, exiled, marginalised, cloaked, sidelined and generally put under wraps. In the best tradition of treasure hunts, bus stop number 11 is concealed at the side of the building.
The building to which I refer is that curious, old, crumbling, neglected, sad-sack sort of a place that goes by the name of Główny Bus Station. Sounds a bit like ‘Clowny’, doesn’t it? The building and its park look as though they were knocked up sometime in the 1960s during the concrete height of the Soviet era when that material was considered king and have sat there ever since, basking in the most glorious state of under-maintenance and slow decay. I quite like it for what it is, decaying, but just because I’m strange does not mean that you have to be too.
Come on, Gdansk administration, that’s a beautiful town you’ve got there; for gawd’s sake, do something about that urban eyesore bus bunker, preferably with the belated assistance of a large and heavy hammer. There’s got to be more to a building’s life than functioning for the purpose of spoiling the gateway to a wonderful city and obscuring for those in transit the whereabouts of the Kaliningrad bus stop.
A few months ago, it may possibly be more, for time has that unusual propensity to continually keep on moving, just to make finding the Kaliningrad bus stop that little more problematic, along comes some Herbert Kowalski and decides that he will revert the Soviet name of ‘Kaliningrad’ to its unpronounceable Polish ancestry, and so overnight Kaliningrad is hereon in referred to, if only in Polish circles, by the substitute name of ‘Królewiec. And it is this, for most of us, shocking tongue-twister which, for several months at least, gained something of a prominence in Gdansk’s bus-blighting city, with people when you asked them not knowing of Kaliningrad, even though it can be traced on every map in the world.
If they, the privatised companies that took over from British Rail, chose to refer to London as ‘Londinistan’, no one would blink an eyelid, for such a change would be self-explanatory, but going ancient with the name Kaliningrad, and bypassing Königsberg on the way, well, what a to do, I must say!
You know, it’s difficult enough should you arrive at the central bus station by way of the pedestrian underpass, for, as with the café that is no longer there, another useful facility that no longer serves its purpose is the lift. Thus, having climbed the North Face of the Eiger to reach the level where the bus departs, lugging with you your travel bags and later needing a truss (that’s not Liz Truss, by the way), the last thing you will want to do is run hither and thither around the bus park playing find the Kaliningrad bus stop. Suffice it to say then that magic number 11, being the stop which you are looking for, stands at the side of the building exactly where the bus bays aren’t.
You may be jumping to the conclusion that having found the stop, your worries have come to an end, and that you are home and dry. But sadly not, my friends; I cringe in telling you, there is more.
Generally speaking (and why not?), 90% of the buses leaving Gdansk for Kaliningrad come to rest at stop 11, but – and mark this if you will! – there is yet a 10% chance they won’t. Sometimes, for reasons inexplicable, they pull up at a stop outside the park on the side of the road. Not everyone is apprised of this, but standing at stop 11, if a bus rolls up across the way, its presence there is visible.
An occurrence of this nature is not liable to excite in the huddle of waiting passengers, who have already asked each other several times at least, “Is this the stop for Kaliningrad?”, an awareness of the possibility that the bus sitting diagonally opposite may, in fact, be their bus. Any sighting of a nearby bus should be treated with suspicion, immediately eliciting a “Could that be the Kaliningrad bus?” inquiry. And should this situation come to pass, my sincere advice to you is to cease asking the question among yourselves and toddle across the road as sharpish as you like, which is the same as saying with some alacrity, to put the question to the indifferent bus driver, who, whilst having obviously spotted you loitering at stop number 11, is not the sort of man who would quit his cab to tell you anything, forsooth seeming well determined to drive off with a bus as empty as the one in which he left the depot that morning. There is a phrase that is often used by inveterate, seasoned bus travellers, and that is ‘catch the bus’, which is better done, I’m sure you’ll agree, before its wheels start rolling.
A footnote to these proceedings is that the Gdansk bus bunker does possess one important, nay essential, facility, and that is a public toalety. Access to this delightful place is obtained by going around the bend; that is, the bend at the side of the crummy old building – left if you’ve got your back to it, and right should you find yourself facing it. Whatever you want to do in that toilet, it will cost you no less than 5 zloty, so be prepared and have it in hand!
Travellers not yet acquainted with Gdansk’s best-kept bussing secret, the whereabouts of stop 11, might discover some usefulness in consulting the photos below, which, I sincerely hope, will greatly assist them in their quest to catch that bus on time.
Travellers, please take succour from this aggravating pith: nothing in life is not without effort.
8 January 2026 – Art Village Vitland: beautiful beachfront on the Baltic
I was no stranger to this track; to call it a road would be too complimentary. I had walked it once before, but, on the last occasion of doing so, the going had been dry underfoot, dry and extremely dusty. Then the woodland to one side and the open, tangled ground to the other had been at their most verdant, densely leaved and vegetated under a sun-crowned clear blue sky.
Contrast that idyll with the scene that lay before us today: mud, potholes filled with water, the trees on either side stripped naked of their leaves, the woodland bed soaked and sodden, the air rich and pungent with vegetative decomposition, hanging as thick and heavy in one’s inquisitive nostrils as the accumulating droplets of damp clinging to one’s clothes. This was the natural world in its post-autumnal shift. A long, damp, desolate, barren lane, delivering us inexorably into winter’s clutches, or, dear reader, as those delicate poets amongst you might be inclined to say, for the sake of reviving a well-known phrase, into winter’s cold embrace.
The last time we had travelled this route, we had no strict idea where it would come out at, and thus we ended up somewhere else entirely; exactly in that not unfamiliar place, to wit, where everyone it seems, at one stage in their life or another, ends up inadvertently, and where some, as the story goes, end up not impermanently. You’ve probably been there yourself and hopefully returned: it’s called the ‘Middle of Nowhere’.
Today, however, with precedent as our guide, memory as our compass and others to consult with, there was little danger of that. It might have felt like the road to Nowhere, but it was, in fact, none other than the beaten track to Vitland.
Art Village Vitland
It was not yet fully past the middle hour of noon, but visibility, such as it was, and enclosed as we were by trees, was already turning mind and matter into a deeper and darker shade of grey.
A gaunt, tall and wooden monumental cross, unseen but pointed out to me, rising from an eminence, then suddenly turning eerily visible through a twilight web of branches, followed me down the slope, not the metaphorical one down which I have been sliding since the beginning of being trapped in this life, but a less-kind-on-the-soles variety, not the metaphorical souls which were soaring piously heavenwards in acknowledgement of this cross, but the ones that were having difficulty coping with the squishy leaves impairing traction beneath my boots.
The cross, I was told, I think by someone, was a monument to the martyred Adalbert, who long ago had journeyed to these pagan lands to convert whom he later discovered the hard way were an obstinate tribe of people, much the better to be left alone than lectured on Christianity. A delusion which might have turned out well had the subjects of his plan been desirous of such enlightenment, only, as bad luck had it, as it often does when callings of this type usurp the restraining influence of prudent commonsense, they were, unfortunately, anything but; and rather than be converted, they bumped him off instead. Such is the occupational hazard of devoting yourself to missionary zeal.
The morbid imp within me wanted to steer me into the trees and capture this cross on film – taking photographs is an inveterate habit that few can resist these days, and who am I to buck the trend – but as the light grew darker and the air considerably colder, owing, I convinced myself, to our nearing proximity to the sea, I meekly followed the others down, leaving the immortalised Adalbert to his eternal ruminations upon what in life is worth it and what on reflection is not.
A settlement of some considerable age
We were now approaching the ancient settlement, Vitland, escorted by its past but arriving at our destination as it is today. Landmarks, artistic ones, to which in an earlier time I had been graciously introduced, loomed larger than life in my memory. There again was the metal man conceived in his iteration from a carefully welded choreography of tubes, struts, plates, nuts, bolts, a number of other interesting things and a veritable maze of wires; the striking-a-pose arrangement of otherwise everyday wooden pallets; and the thrusting-upwards panpipes, for this is what I fancied them for, assembled from prodigious sheets of corrugated metal. And rest assured, it would not have been right had there not been a giant fish….
In any artistic environment, especially those by the sea, there’s always a painted fish – have you ever not noticed this? And so as not to disappoint, there it was alright, together with other colourful hieroglyphs, painted on the roughly hewn and unashamedly handmade fence. Through this delightful fretwork of wood knocked up from spliced branches and panels borrowed from various sources, a blazing fire burnt, and over it the smoke was rising, and on its other side the hummocky knolls and dells that comprise the Vitland café’s garden welcomed me from memory with the sight of the various wooden structures built into its contours, a novel collection of venues in which to eat and drink, to sit and smoke and barbecue, and dotted here and there and it seemed almost everywhere, for you never knew where one might be, yet more artistic symbols, which, when viewed in their entirety, converted this patch of grassy wilderness into a veritable home from home for the commune-minded boho set.
Like people whom you haven’t seen for as long as you remember but whose impressions you are likely never to forget, nothing was less familiar to me; but the devil, as they say, was in the detail, which, over the passage of our estrangement, had grown remarkably worn, taken on an aged appearance and was, for there simply is no kinder way to put it, succumbing to gentle decay. I felt a twinge of rheumatism emanate from my hip and was, by a mutual sympathy, consoled. It takes its shape from the march of time, and nothing, my friend, not even Botox, or anyone, be they so thought of by themselves and others as so powerful, has the will or the means to stop it.
Unlike the good St Adalbert, I had no need to prevent myself from converting anybody or anything. I respect Vitland for what it is and what it always will be: a genuine piece of Prussian history, which could have fared far worse in these overbuilt times of ours had it not been rescued from a fate worse than concrete when someone with taste and conservative vision decreed that it should become a unique and earthy retreat for the cohabitation of art and nature.
Bringing the two together within a sea-beach and rustic sequestered environment has turned the one-time ancient settlement into a rare fusion of space in which to exhibit art and to offer to the discerning guest a no-frills, honest-to-goodness blend of accommodation.
Accomodation at Art Village Vitland
Vitland’s guests are offered a choice of unpretentious hostel-style lodging in the main building’s loft rooms or a chance to stay glamping-style in wooden-constructed standalone units. I have seen the latter described as ‘bungalows’ and elevated as ‘guest houses’, but those descriptions are way off mark; they put me erroneously in mind of places of a quite different type, such as Auntie Mable’s house in Wigan and Mrs Musson’s Sandy Lodge at Wells-not-near-the-Sea, both of which in the strictest sense don’t fit the Vitland experience. I shy away from referring to Vitland’s ancillary lodgings as provision made in wooden huts, as it might evoke unhappy memories of that hard-to-explain and much-gossiped-of time when the wife, having locked you out, left you with little choice but to sleep in yonder allotment shed; so in search of a suitable substitute, I will christen these small wooden structures ‘chalets’.
Knowing what I’m talking about comes from having stayed in one. I entertain no delusions of tackling them in winter; such an endeavour as bold as that is the prerogative of constitutions considerably more adventurous and of greater durability than anything I own, but my summer sabbatical spent at Vitland some four years or more ago was memorably marked by a three-night stopover in one of these wooden units. The one we hired was fully equipped. It was wanting in no facilities. And as small as it was inside (it certainly wasn’t a TARDIS), nevertheless it was quaint and cosy.
The chalet slept two in virtual comfort: one, that is, at ground level, and the other, that being me, up a ladder and in the loft. On any other occasion, such as sedated by several beers, it might have been a case of out of sight, out of mind, but with the ambient outside temperature simmering not much far below a corking 30 degrees, inside our wooden abode, one of us was baking whilst the other one was basting. Being well skilled in the art and science of getting out of bed, certainly more than remaining within it, I was not surprised at all that I ended up at 4am perched on the chalet’s veranda, enjoying the thrill of the morning breeze whilst listening to the amazing sound of the sea crashing home on the shore.
Vitland’s principal hub, its rather more substantial building, is what traditionalists are likely to expect. Homely and inviting, it multifunctions perfectly as a café, restaurant, bar and sometime art exhibition space, and the rentable rooms above are all that the heart could desire.
Meanwhile at ground level, the eating, drinking and lounging area has a welcoming, laid-back vibe and, in line with the outside seating space, is decorated beachcomber fashion; for example, by hosting items and scenes nautical and marine in nature, with the wall at the back of the first raised deck draped with a sizeable fishing net, caught in which are colourful fish, humanely and strictly facsimile.
The second outside seating deck extending from the building offers an elevated view across a gorgeous stretch of golden sand into the foaming sea. At the furthermost end of this platform stands a convenient set of steps where you can descend yourself to the seashore or sit, as the mood so takes you, with a beer and a bite to eat whilst the mermaids sway seductively past en route to or returning from that sandy stuff on which, abetted by the laws of summer, they are pleased to set out their feminine stalls or emerging from that watery thing in which they swim and frolick, then glisten in the sunbeams.
Though naturally busier in summer than it is in winter, Vitland’s remote location makes it the perfect leisure alternative to the other hustle and bustle resorts. The beach is amber territory, the surrounding countryside is rustic-wild, the area is rich in history, and the aura is mystically tranquil. Vitland is a thoughtful place and is so during summer when it is occupied by more people and remains so in the winter when visitors grow less. It makes you put your thinking cap on when the sun is shining and leave it where it is when the snow is falling. I wouldn’t say Vitland can be lonely, no, I wouldn’t want to say that, but whatever it is that dwells there is a firm believer in personal solitude and a patron to all its excesses.
On the day of our most recent visit, I could not determine whether the irresistible feel of Vitland, its entrancing and enchanting essence, borrowed from The Shining’s least disturbing scenes, yet from its most evocative, or was rooted within a line or two I had read in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. A proposed compromise could possibly be that the spell was a subtle coalescence of both confluent influences, with some magic dust thrown secretly in by a hyperactive imagination.
Those of you who are susceptible to what is commonly known as ‘energies’, those invisible peronalities demarking one place from the next, will understand instinctively what it is that Vitland does within minutes of your arrival there.
Within minutes of our arrival there, Mr Chileekin’s group, among whose lucky number I was one, was treated to an exhibition by the accomplished metal sculptor Alexsander Braga. I am tempted to say that overall I detected in his work the influence of steampunk, but in the likely event that my eye, as unaccomplished as it is, coupled with a marked lack of knowledge in such a specialist genre, should cause the artist to take exception, I will moderate my initial comment and rewrite it so that it reads ‘generates a steampunk interest’.
As with almost any art form, it is easy to overlook the complex interaction that exists between creator and creation. In order to appreciate if only the obvious intricacy of any metal sculpture, one is called upon to recognise the fine-line marriage between the inspirational impulse and the practical-technical skills required to bring the concept to fruition. It is not enough to think it through; the artist has to do it. He has to have in his possession knowledge, as well as a firm working grasp, of the processes involved and practical skills required in every applicable aspect, including cutting, shaping, fitting and the finishing in metal, of which there are many and various.
As an individual who realised at quite an early age that he was completely bereft of such talents and who chose to take a cookery course in place of doing metalwork when steered in that direction whilst he was at school and who received a clonk around the ear with a heavy metal saucepan from a hysteria-prone young lady teacher for cooking up something facetious, the extent of my appreciation for the properties of metal probably runs much deeper than the average man who works in a scrapyard and routinely feels the need to shout, “There’s a lot of metal here!”
There was not a lot of metal at the Vitland art exhibition, but what there was, was heavy man! I marvelled at the ‘Catherine wheel’ that symbolised the force of life, the public mask so universally worn and the sailing ship called Königsberg, but in the end, hands down, it was the mannequin that won me over, the symbolisation of female anger (I never asked if she once taught cookery or owned a heavy saucepan) which, at the risk of becoming fashionable by dint of alleged misogyny, pressed every button on my sniggering keyboard.
Sounding like Corporal Jones convulsed by a fit of “They don’t like it up them!”, the artist divulged to me that on acquaintance with his sculpture and its underlying meaning, there were women who became incensed not by the concept itself but rather by one aspect of the mannequin’s composition, which was its intimidating trumpet mouth. I was intrigued at this divulgence, for as objective as I was trying to be, the more I looked at this woman, the more the conviction grew in me that I had met her somewhere along the way; but then, along the way, you come across so many of them, don’t you? Quite unable to make up my mind about this female Plethora, I came away from staring at her with a second-best exultation, that of how much more disturbing her anger would have been had the master in metal who made her equipped her with two arms and hands and a pair of heavy saucepans. They say if you can’t stand the heat, it is best to keep out of the kitchen, and the kitchen is the woman’s place. Thus, if your problem is keeping out of it, you’ll just have to learn how to duck.
The heat in Vitland café met with no complaints, but on the outside the cold was taking hold, so I was not particularly peeved when someone interrupted the walk that we had been seriously contemplating, but which now would never take us along the spirited-windy seafront, by suggesting the time had come to make our way to Vitland’s main exhibition room. This apartment lies upstairs and is at the front of the building, but because of the lay of the land, with its different gradient levels, access to the room is via a short flight of steps located on the higher ground at the back of the building.
Vitalnd Art Village – a unique experience
On our way to the hall of pictures, I was reacquainted with further examples of Vitland’s garden sculptures, most of which I had shaken metaphorical hands with four or possibly five summers hence. Contiguous to this welcome went dramatically sailing past us, like a whisky-fuelled Hogmanay haggis, one of the biggest and fattest tabby cats seen this side of Wonderland. There consistently comes a time at Vitland when you forget which side of Wonderland your feet have decided they belong.
The exhibition laid before us featured a quite considerable canon of paintings by artist Alexsander Pasichniy, who has also written, illustrated and produced two children’s books and does a fine line in portraits of the German writer Hoffmann as he appeared in his younger years. The metal man, Braga by name, had not been a bragger by nature, and here we had yet another example of modesty becoming one, but when he unfairly denounced himself as not a professional artist, I couldn’t help remarking that “If this [your art] is not professional, then show me art that is!”
Would it be too pretentious of us, or judged as such by others, if, at what I consider to be a relevant juncture most opportune, we were to pause together and in that space consider how we relate to art and the value, or not as the case may be, that we accredit to it given the all-displacing digital world in which we have to live and which, in turn, lives in us?
We live today in an imagistic age, a period plastered in images. Thanks to the digital matrix in which we wallow and flounder – our smartphones, laptops, the omniscient Google and our slavish devotion to social media – we have the motive, means and opportunity to Blitzkrieg each and every facet of our post-Kodak daily existence with any image that takes our fancy. This explosion of the visual icon has the same effect on value as asking for a glass of water and getting a bucket of water thrown over you. Our eyes and our senses are soaked with imagery.
Outside of exclusive art-world circles, that self-imploding waltz occupied by cryptic critics and crusty connoisseurs, original works of art, those produced by the artist’s hand, are losing their authenticity to an authenticating culture founded on mass mediocrity. Our minds are sodden, sponge-like, with an overkill of imagery fed to us by a digital powerhouse that eschews the virtue of quality and espouses the glut of quantity.
The value of a genuine, that is, first-hand, work of art does not derive exclusively from the features of its composition, despite this being the principal force by which our inclinations are attracted to it. Intrinsically and essentially, other magnetic forces are at work behind the scenes acting upon our stolen sentiments, and these are those that cannot in any shape or form be forged or framed or fabricated, digitally or otherwise. They are so imperviously set in stone as to exist without fear of contradiction outside of the excluding scope of the critic and the connoisseur, for they are, indeed they are, the when and where and why and the ultimately by whom, and these things are immutable. There is nothing in the digital world that can replace the artist’s brush as it moves across the canvas at a given, single, specific and never-to-be-repeated moment, for it is what it is and when.
You now can see for yourselves that this is one of the joys of Vitland. It is without equivocation a thought-provoking place. In the sun at its most beautiful; in the eclipse of the sun, at its most introspective. It is natural, attractive, down to earth, a retreat into one’s own sanctuary; here you can escape for a while from the penny arcade of life.
It is also, and most essentially, the perfect marriage of art and nature, an intertwining timeless ceremony which never can grow old and where history can never repeat itself, purely because it has no need to do so. Some things, you can tell, have never not always been there, and once you have been to Vitland, you can tell that the same applies to you.
The Main Thing
Art Village Vitland Калининградское ш 43, Baltiysk Kaliningrad Oblast 238510
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Evening in Bruges
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
15 December 2025 – Evening in Bruges beer
Would you trust a man with a clip-on black beard, wearing a dark bowler hat with a cherry stuck on top? Oh, you would. Well, actually, I did too, or else I wouldn’t have sampled this beer with him as its trademark.
Do you know, I’ve drunk some strange-named beers in my time, including Watney’s Party Seven, beer products which end in the word ‘Best’, when clearly they aren’t, or if they are, God help us, and a nice little number which you couldn’t take home to the vicar called Bollock Twanger, but I’ve got to hand it to the Belarus brewery, Lidskoe Pivo, beer names don’t come more Gregory Peck or Cary Grant than an Evening in Bruges. It sounds a lot better than a wet weekend in Scunthorpe.
Although I had a friend at school who went by the nickname ‘Cherry’, on account of his having a larger and more bulbous nose than the American actor Karl Malden, I am never going to Bruges in the evening or at any other time of the day if men with bigger ones than mine – beards – are going to run around looking fruity with cherries in their bowler hats. It’s bad enough in the UK, come every election, when imbeciles wear Labour rosettes and on no-pride days when the streets are infested with scantily clad, suspect, rainbow-flag wearers with extremely tight or no pants. They might not be any relation to the Bee Gees; thus, their pants may not enable them to sing those very high notes, but they’re typically in the same club as those who change their avatars when they are told to do so.
“We know you are there! Come out from behind that nose with your trousers up!” That’s the sort of thing we would cry at Cherry when we were at school. Yes, we actually were at school sometimes! Not often, but it occasionally happened. Who was that who said it shows?
I didn’t shout any such thing at this cherry-flavoured bottle of beer, not because I am more mature than I was when I obviously wasn’t, or could be accused of growing up, but because I was sitting there on my Jack Jones, sat there in the attic, not forgetting Ginger the cat, but he considers me stark-raving human anyway, whilst anywhere else I might have succumbed, it did not seem appropriate, so what you could say, if you cared to, is that I deferred to my better judgement. Hah! You didn’t know I had one of those, did you!
I am not one – no, indeed, I am not – who generally, or whilst being any other rank, goes bananas over fruit beers. To paraphrase that in beer-speak, I am not an additives or adjunct man. But, occasionally, when I’m less myself than usual, pretending, for example, that I’m the famous Simon Templar, I steal across the threshold of caution to acquaint myself with something that could even be outrageously new, although adventures of this nature are by virtue of discretion mainly confined in my later years to beer.
So, Cherry he was; and cherry it is.
Rather pleased with myself that someone else had bought this beer for me, so I didn’t have to pay for it, I nevertheless took off the top in a less than cavalier fashion, and moving my nostrils gingerly (Sorry, Ginger, ‘meow’), as though they had become instruments for taking out a bomb fuse, I lowered them rather gently in order to sample the scent within. And, you’ll never guess what it smelt of – it smelt this beer of cherries!
Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?
I don’t believe that I am violating any brewery secrets by revealing that the reason why an Evening in Armston, sorry, I meant to say Evening in Bruges, releases a cherry bouquet is because it contains real cherry juice, which is good, because it would be a poor look-out and no mistake if a bottled beer with a man on its label holding a cherry in his John Steed bowler was found to be full of apple pips.
Was it strong? Was Charles Atlas? He must be. He’s flying around in space at the moment pretending to be an alien spacecraft disguised as a boring comet?
Back here on planet Earth (where we are all so glad to be), let out like the genie from its bottle, the cherry aroma lingered, and the flavour was strong enough to make me say involuntarily, “This beer I am drinking tastes of cherries.” And who could argue with that!
The cherry taste is flavoursome but also rather sweet.
It isn’t tart, for if it was, it would then be cherry tart. And it wasn’t, and it isn’t.
Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?
I am not entirely sure whether the grain dilutes the cherry or vice versa, but one or the other waves the white flag and surrenders to the one that doesn’t. I suppose I’m trying to say, using a cack-handed beer-connoisseur impressive and smug type of lingo, that the two components are balanced, or I simply could be saying, purely on a subconscious level, that the taste of an Evening in Bruges is like playing a game of baseball with one or two bases missing.
My defining take on this beer is that it is a pleasant enough novelty brew with an eye-arresting label, but that it has neither the taste nor alcohol strength to firmly polish your cherries or blow them off the tree. However, with a strength of 4.4%, it should not give you the pip, or should you be the pernickety type, please feel free to change that remark to it should not get you stoned; that’s quite enough for me – 4.4%, I mean. However, there are those who move in more lordly circles than the ones I casually spin in, who hold fast to the conviction that if fruit juice is to be added to hops, then the end-resulting beverage is in need of greater strength and density.
Shrug! Shrug! And lastly, Pofik!
It could be worse, I suppose. I would rather an Evening in Bruges, cherry or no cherry, than losing it in Bedford’s Brewpoint drinking pints of Charlie at six or seven quid a pop. In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I believe that if push came to shove, I would rather drink a pint of pop than Charlie’s!………
Life may never be a bowl of cherries, but it can be what you make it: all you need is an Evening in Bruges.
😊BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Evening in Bruges Brewer: Lidskoe Pivo (Lidskoe Beer) Where it is brewed: Belarus Bottle capacity: 0.5 litre Strength: 4.4% Price: 130 roubles (£1.20) Appearance: Dark with a reddish hue Aroma: Cherry Taste: Cherry Fizz amplitude: 3% Label/Marketing: A man with a large cherry in his hat Would you buy it again? Never say never
Beer rating
The brewer’s website has this to say about Evening in Bruges: It is the first beer in the Kalekciya Maistra product line, which has been available since 2014. It is a dark beer with a subtle cherry hue and distinctive flavour. The beer has a nice smooth taste with rich cherry tones complemented by a caramel sweetness and a slight hop bitterness. Website: https://lidskae.by/en/
Wot other’s say [Comments on an Evening in Bruges beer from the internet, unedited] 🤔🤔There aren’t many people out there saying much about this beer at present, possibly because it is still waiting to be discovered, sampled and reviewed, but this is what Mr Artificial Intelligence has to say: 😉It’s a dark beer from Lidskoe, likely styled to taste good in a Belgian-themed setting, rather than being authentically Belgian. [Comment: So, presumably, according to Arseofficial Intelligence, you must only drink it after a vist from the Belgian film-set designers.]
A competition for those too young to know much: who are these people?: *Gregory Peck *Cary Grant *Karl Malden *Ginger the cat *The Bees Knees (clue: tight pants) *John Steed *Charles Atlas *Charlie Wells and what about Arthur J. Pye?*******
👉Name the films and TV programmes in which they starred and their favourite beer.
👌First prize for the correct answer, an Evening in Hemington
8 December 2025 – Christmas past: roundup of Xmas and New Year posts
Rolling back the years to revisit comments and observations on Christmases past, looking back particularly on those coronavirus specials, no matter how grim we may feel about the world today and the game of blind man’s bluff it keeps on playing, as trust in the future wanes, almost universally, it’s enough to make you sing, “These are the good old days.”
Christmas past: a roundup of Xmas and New Year posts
👉Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize Published: 10 January 2023 As the Baltic resorts of the Kaliningrad region prove ever more popular with each passing year, why not do something outrageously unconventional and visit the same in the winter months? I am not suggesting you strip off and get down on the beach, although there are some that will and do, but at least with a hat and scarf on, you can enjoy what in England would be described euphemistically as the ‘bracing winter weather’. A time of unparalleled excellence to pay a visit to Zelenogradsk is in the lead-up to, or just after, the New Year celebrations. At this time of the year, the seaside town is inhabited with more festive decorations than crowds of people in the summer months, and the visual beauty bestowed by these imaginative seasonal displays and the concomitant atmosphere they kindle add an extra sparkle of magic to an already magical destination. Here’s a runback to Zelenogradsk 2023 in all its Christmas and New Year glory.
👉Christmas in Gdansk Updated: 11 February 2022 | First published: 5 October 2019 This post, which was first published in October 2019, was, even then, retrospective, as it relates to my inaugural trip to Kaliningrad, Russia, in the winter of 2000. We entered Russia via Gdansk and spent Christmas and Boxing Day in Poland. This was Poland pre-EU. Gdansk was a rather different place than it is today.
👉Christmas in the Land of Vax Published: 3 January 2022 It’s Christmas 2021. The world has experienced two years of what by now has become a suspicious and widely discredited lunacy. In the UK, the socio-political and cultural landscape is ravaged, splintered by misinformation and disinformation (no change there then!), a situation exacerbated by poor executive management, media hype, dissimulation and social media-spread confusion. The country is split, yet again, into two opposing camps, broadly demarcated along an ideological faultline, with pro-vaxing liberals one side and anti-vaxing patriots on the other. Don’t read this post without your mask. Baaaaa ….
👉How to deal with a vaccinated liberal family member at Christmas Published 23 December 2021 Coronavirus. The UK media and the dictatorial liberal left have never had it so good. Among other intelligence-bending articles, a self-help guide emerges for liberals presumably agonising over how to react politely, although I’ve never met a polite liberal yet, to recalcitrant, heretic family members who refuse to kowtow obsequiously to vax-or-else hysteria. This post is my flip side to that deliriously daft dilemma.
👉Don’t let that man spoil your vaccinated Christmas! Published: 22 December 2021 As you can see, to vax, not to vax or to be dragged kicking and screaming by men in white coats and forced to vax were popular topics in their UK day (December 2021). The British government and the British media were yet to exploit Ukraine. Masking and vaxing had become the testing ground for a new hysteria yet to be deployed. It was the country’s political hot potato, destined to be dropped, however, suddenly and cynically, as soon as Ukraine hit the headlines. Immediately, Britons were urged, both to a man and a transvestite, to forget about their masks and change their social media avatars to the colours of their government’s underpants. Or have I got that wrong?
👉Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree Published: 24 December 2020 Removing my mythical mask and the anti-vaxing section of metal drainpipe I’d fitted over my upper arm, here I take a break from worrying about not worrying about the coronavirus scare, at least not worrying as much as I’m told I ought, and return to the simple, traditional pleasures of Zelenogradsk at Christmas time: its streets bedecked with decorations and also its bars as well.
👉Coronavirus & The Ghosts of Christmas Past Published: 23 December 2020 There’s nothing like a national/international crisis, especially at Christmas, to bring out the nostalgia in us. Here’s me, in the midst of coronavirus, harking back to simpler, happier times. The pandemic may now have gone – for the moment – but unless you were born too late and have therefore been placed on a diet of whatever it is they choose to feed you, it is unmistakably evident that Simpler and Happier packed their bags ahead of coronavirus and took refuge in the hinterlands of a perceived less treacherous yesterday, leaving behind a growing conviction that the UK state can no longer be trusted.
Beautiful Russian Christmas Cards from Kaliningrad
👉Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas Published: 17 November 2020 ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse’ – as cheesy as it sounds, they’d all been trapped by lockdown.
Once you understand Ded Moroz (Дед Моро́з) and yolka (елка), you’re halfway there
4 December 2025 – Celebrating New Year in Russia: Different but Familiar
They do things slightly differently in Russia at Christmas, or rather, they do things the same but at different times and with different names.
In Russia, Christmas falls on the 7th of January, not the 25th of December; New Year is acknowledged on the 14th of January, not the 1st of January; and New Year’s Day is the 1st of January. Hold hard! I thought you just said that New Year in Russia takes place on the 14th of January? Well spotted, that man! The reasons for this ambiguity are twofold: firstly, the Russian Orthodox Church uses the older Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar, the older being 14 days behind; and secondly, during the Soviet period, religious festive holidays were purposefully deposed in favour of secularity. Hence, in Russia, nothing remotely festive-like happens on the 25th of December, apart from me using it as an excuse to raise a glass or two; but, as in the UK and elsewhere, the 1st of January takes centre holiday stage.
In short, both Orthodox Christmas and Orthodox New Year continue to be observed and revered religiously, but Russia’s major and most popular public holiday takes place, as it does in the rest of the world, on January the 1st.
Celebrating New Year in Russia: Different but Familiar
Though Christmas, in the sense that we know it in the West, is conspicuously absent from the Russian yuletide agenda, certain Christmas traditions, such as decorated pine trees and Father Christmas, the bringer of gifts, have been carried over to the New Year festivities, the only difference being that Christmas trees are called ‘New Year’s trees’ and Father Christmas ‘Father Frost’.
The lead-up to the Russian New Year differs little from the UK, with one exception, which is that in Russia the New Year starts 11 consecutive times. Twelve midnight New Year’s Eve happens in Russia according to the time zone relevant to each region. Yes, Russia really is that huge.
In winter, for example, Moscow is three hours in front of the UK and Kaliningrad two hours. Such differentials used to play havoc with our Russian-themed UK New Year’s parties. We had no other option but to bring the New Year in three times in a row, viz., three countdowns to midnight and three choruses of ‘Happy New Year’, followed by three champagne New Year toasts. What else could we do?
Celebrating New Year in Russia: Different but Familiar
Russia’s New Year’s Eve follows a universal template, but as it is the most significant event on the country’s holiday calendar, you will be harder pushed than in the UK to find a place in which to celebrate unless you book really early. In my experience, bars, restaurants, hotels and the like, especially those offering New Year’s entertainment, can be fully booked by November or even, in some cases, fully rebooked from the previous year.
A ghostly scene. The Hotel Rus in Svetlogorsk awaits its New Year party guests, whom now will never come.
Organised New Year parties, ie those which come with a ticket price, are not everybody’s cup of tea or bottle of vodka. The emphasis of the entertainment is not so often spectatorial as it is participatory. An exuberant master of ceremonies, with little respect for the introverted, will enthusiastically fulfil the remit for which they are being paid by getting you up on your feet and making you participate in all manner of dotty games and bizarre forms of amusement. Even small stay-at-home gatherings carry with them no guarantee that they will be impresario-free. Thus, my advice, before you go, is to brush up on your dancing techniques, and if you have any acting skills, dust these down as well. Beer and vodka aforethought are a credible solution.
Wherever you are, be it at a slick entertainment venue or in someone’s private house, the ubiquitous television is sure to play a part. In this respect, the line-up is not so different from what you would expect to find on New Year’s Eve in the UK.
Get ready for an evening of star-spangled party-style shows, a celebrity bonanza. These rumbustious, glossy, champagne-soaked events, where the in crowd get to strut their stuff or merely dazzle the camera with their august presence and famous faces, only differ from their British counterparts insofar as they surpass them. Russian New Year TV shows have never been the same for me since Kabzon left this mortal coil, but these programmes seem to become each year a little more St Petersburg to Britain’s Peterborough city centre; they have a higher buttercream-cake ratio compared to Britain’s poor iced bun.
The New Year’s Eve ritual of counting down the hours, then the minutes and seconds to midnight is no less universal. On the much-anticipated knell of twelve, up goes the mandatory chorus, ‘Happy New Year!’, glasses chink, and it’s down the hatch.
One aspect of the New Year ritual, which thankfully we are spared in Russia, is that we are not disposed to suffer men parading in tartan skirts garbed in silly long socks, not long enough, however, to conceal their knobbly knees, whilst blowing up a barbaric device which looks and sounds like a tortured cat.
The New Year cometh
Midnight strikes, revellers shout, the Kremlin clock appears large upon the nation’s screens, the skies both near and far blister and flash with fireworks, the president makes his New Year’s address, the national anthem plays – a spirit-lifting anthem – and then it’s back to doing what Gaviscon and the gleeful makers of paracetamol would probably willingly sponsor us for should we ever forget how to DIY.
Some things, it seems, are different, and others never change no matter where in the world you find yourself over the festive season.
28 November 2025 – Zötler Bier Kaliningrad: Buy One and Get One Free!
There is a place in New Orleans, but I bet you can’t buy one beer there and get one free, whereas, in Kaliningrad there is, and you can.
Not that the prospect of two beers for the price of one is any inducement, but where, hypothetically speaking, would one find this establishment if one wanted to spectate this phenomenal practice? More to the point, what is this place called?
I am itching to write ‘Zotler Beer’, but the actual name of the beer restaurant, which, when spelt Germanely using an umlaut (ö), not to be confused with an omelette, is Zötler Bier, and just to confuse you more, there are two of them in Kaliningrad: one in the centre on Leninsky Avenue and the other somewhere else, in another part of the city, on Gorky Street to be exact.
This review concerns the Gorky Street establishment. I would like to say that it is tucked away, as the expression ‘tucked away’ is such a nice one, isn’t it? But as Gorky Street is a fairly busy thoroughfare, a more accurate description would be that it’s off the predictable tourist route.
Allowing for the fact that my three visits to this establishment have been lunchtime and early-evening encounters, on all three occasions Bavaria in Gorky Street has been a lot quieter and more sedate than its city-centre counterpart. So, if you want the same, or similar, and would rather have it quieter, Gorky Street is the place for you.
Zötler Bier Kaliningrad
Zötler Bier Restaurant, both of them, in fact, are often described by trip advising and restaurant review sites as ‘offering an authentic German atmosphere’; this description is not entirely true. What you get at both branches is a themed Bavarian fantasy that owes its quintessential German impression to the caricatured Bavarian interior and the presence of often comely waitresses dressed like German Heidis. I say, chaps, we are not about to argue with that, are we!
An olde-world décor is echoed in both Zötler Bier establishments, with retro half-timbered wall fretwork, replica metal advertising plaques, shelf-displayed and wall-mounted curios and framed prints of various kinds. The dark-wood veneering of the 1980s/1990s has primarily been eschewed in Zötler in preference for a light pine or beechwood, and the salient gimmick, which is Zötler’s branding icon, is the prevalent inclusion of semi-private booth seating created in the image of giant beer barrels. The visual impact that these seats have leaves a lasting impression. I am not suggesting that you climb into them from the top; their design is cross-sectional, each with a panel cutaway, making it easier to get into them than a Watney’s Party Seven.
From any angle, they look like giant, wooden fairground waltzers, the essential difference being that their only motion in Zötler is when you might have had one too many, which, of course, being something I’ve never experienced, I rely on you tell me about.
Pretending that you are sitting inside a giant beer barrel is as good a reason as any I can think of for going to a particular bar, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of all reasons. For example, meat eaters, of which I am not one, are lured to Zötler by its reputation for such Bavarian-billed dishes as fragrant pork knuckle with real stewed German cabbage and delicious sausages. The sausages are big, long, curling German ones. I cannot comment on the pork knuckle, as I haven’t caught sight of it personally. I saw a lot of knuckle in Rushden pubs, but they were usually attached to the end of very large tattooed hands and arms, some of which came flying in my direction even though I am vegetarian. “You wouldn’t hit a vegetarian who would rather be drinking out of glasses than wearing them, would you?” Pass the Band-Aid.
Once upon a time, there was an advertising slogan in the UK that went something like, “I’m only here for the beer!” According to Zötler’s website, the family-owned Zötler Brewery has been providing PAs like me (PA, as you know, being an initialism for a Perfectionist Ale drinker) with mighty fine beers since 1447 – that’s a long time, and I don’t mean since just gone a quarter to three.
Unlike Coca-Cola, there is no myth surrounding Zötler’s secret to brewing beers of a superior quality. This might be because Zötler’s ‘Three secrets of excellent beer’ is hardly a secret, although they publicise it as such.
The first secret that isn’t is pasteurisation, and that secret is no pasteurisation! “After the foam is poured into barrels and bottles, it should get into the consumer’s glass as soon as possible.”
I’m certainly with them on that one!
Secret number 2: “Shivers of our own production.” That’s not ‘shivers’ in the sense of what runs through one like a lightning conductor in full conduction mode when, having signed off a publication, you notice after the fact that the name of the sponsor is spelt incorrectly. (Don’t worry about it; it’s a publishing thing.) Zötler goes on to clarify, “In order for the product to be of the highest quality, manufacturers use shivers of their own production, which are applied only once. In comparison, many breweries use the same yeast 10 to 15 times.”
We’re really talking freshness here!
Secret number 3: “The purest alpine water.” This is not the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to hear. Elaboration: “The production is located at the foot of Mount Grünten, one of the most famous mountains in the Bavarian Alps. Locals attribute magical charm to the Alps and life-giving properties to the water.”
Do you know, I’m rather pleased to hear that, for it brings me round quite nicely to my opening paragraph, in which I state, somewhat glibly you might opine, that I have discovered somewhere where when you buy one beer, you get one free. Sounds too good to be true? Well, fact is sometimes better than fiction, and truth is often more true than a lie. At Zötler in good old Gorky Street, Kaliningrad, Wednesday, all day, is promotional Wednesday: for each beer you buy, you get another one free. All that extra life-giving water free!
I am notoriously poor at maths, which possibly explains why when I ordered four pints (half-litres to be precise) of Zötler’s non-filtered beer, at the end of the evening and the next day, as odd as it sounds, I had the distinct feeling of having consumed double that amount. I cannot attribute it to the pork knuckles or to overdoing it with a large German sausage, as I only had a baked potato. Would it make me a local if I attributed the experience of drinking and seeing double to the magical charm of the Alps and the life-giving properties of their special water?
Good beer. Good grub. Great Bavarian ladies. And all to be enjoyed whilst sitting inside a beer barrel!
Zötler Bier (Beer) Restaurants. Frequentable at any time, and on Wednesdays you drink in stereo.
