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.
25 November 2025 – Kaliningrad in Autumn: Turning over an old leaf
From the earliest time of recollection, autumn has been for me my favourite season. In the days before real climate change, as distinct from the racketeering kind championed by the EU (achieve Net Zero or else!), I remember encountering glorious autumn mornings, especially at Hinwick Lodge.
With the nip of winter already in the air and thin ice glazing the puddles, often, as we emerged bleary-eyed into the early-morning light, we would be greeted by a hazy, glistening mist, hovering as an apparition a few feet from the ground and stretching into the ether to touch a barely visible haloed sun. Trying its very best to do what precedence taught us it would succeed in doing by mid-morning, eventually and at last, the sun would break through the mist’s upper opacity, evaporate the lower density and bathe the broad sweeping riding that runs at the side of Great Haze Wood in a less than powerful but brilliant light. Soon afterwards it would come to settle, pouring more light and warmth on the open ground of the surrounding meadows, reaching out with the awaited promise of a seasonally atmospheric and sensorily singular wonderful day.
Kaliningrad in Autumn: Turning over an old leaf
As with Kaliningrad, which is a tree-rich city, the preponderance of woodland encompassing Hinwick Lodge gave vent to the certainty of much variegated and enchanting autumnal leaf colour from its ash, oak and hazel mix. In Kaliningrad, it is the leaves of the maple tree, relatively large with their three-to-five toothed and jagged pointed lobes, which in autumn change from green to yellow, auburn, red and orange, that contribute most effectively to the city’s colourful seasonal character.
At the time of writing this post, the best part of our Kaliningrad autumn, when the air is at its most crisp and the ground is at its most dry, has tipped its hat and hurried past. The view from my bedroom window is certainly different from what it was just a mere seven days ago. The first thrilling moments of a bright-lit, expressively dry November have fallen back in the queue behind the ever-more typical expectations of damp, rain and lately snow, the initial sprinkle of which, announcing the onset of winter, has itself in recent hours given way to larger flakes falling for longer durations.
It’s time to don those woolly hats that mess your hair up so completely and shake hands once again with one’s thick and welcoming winter gloves. But before I pull on my thermal pants and barricade my body behind my fur-lined snow- and windproof coat, let’s take a trip together and say hello to some of the city’s transformational autumn scenes, including, where we have captured them, landmarks in their autumnal garb.
It may be autumn, but there’s still a lot of floral colour and bright red berries to complement the leaves’ complexion.
Below: Stairway to autumn
This telephone box that isn’t blends nicely with autumnThe neoclassical manor house in Youth Park, KaliningradAmusement rides in Youth Park, Kaliningrad, against an autumnal backdropCafe in autumn: Youth Park, Kaliningrad
Below: Colour coding
Autumn navigation skillsCamouflage for autumnA natural collage of autumn leavesThe old, the new and the naturalWatch the birdieYou can bank on itWrangel Tower, Kaliningrad, autumnAutumn in Kaliningrad as seen through Königsberg embrasure
Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky — I feel a certain intimacy with either one and all of these gentlemen, not solely because I have read and admired their inimitable works, their acknowledged masterpieces, but also from the observation that these noted writers displayed a fondness to lesser and higher degrees for alcoholic beverages. That Tolstoy did not follow suit, at least by the time of 1850, when come his spiritual transformation he renounced the demon drink, could explain the reason why I am not so well acquainted either with his works or with the life of the man himself. As in matters of race and politics, people of a certain persuasion are often drawn to one another, finding comfort and cohesion in shared identities and experience.
Tolstoy Art Café Kaliningrad
Any prejudices that I might entertain towards temperance in general and temperate people in particular were swiftly dispelled, however, upon learning of a café in Kaliningrad bearing the name of Leo Tolstoy. Not thinking to inquire whether the said establishment had outlawed the sale of alcohol in deference to its namesake, I decided, nevertheless, that since Leo’s transformation had caused him to revise and relinquish the unnecessary primordial practice of sinking one’s teeth into flesh, whilst his denunciation of alcohol could be excused as an aberration, his conscious metamorphosis from carnivore to vegetarian proved in this particular that he could not be all that bad a chap, and, even should you not concur on this point, take stock that he wrote a book or two, and that anyone in my opinion who willingly devotes the greater percentage of their little life wrestling with the written word deserves, if nothing else, to have a café named in their honour. It does make you wonder, though, about the literary prowess of McDonald. (I know his brother; he has a farm.) We are all acquainted with the adage ‘never judge a book by its cover’, and McDonald’s, of course, are not real restaurants, but having more junk-food factories named after you than Colonel Sanders implies that Old McDonald’s bruv has to be one hell of a writer. Based on the same criteria, have you ever dined at the JK Rowling?
Tolstoy Art Café Kaliningrad: It’s a Novel Experience
Anyway, burger to thoughts of that nature, let’s first apologise to Leo and then get down to the nitty-gristle: What was it that I found and liked on my maiden voyage to the Tolstoy Café?
I could say, and if I did, I would be perfectly wrong in doing so, that should you not be specifically looking for it, the whereabouts of Tolstoy Art Café would be impossible to miss. Komsomol’skaya Street, which is where the café is located, lies in what was in Königsberg’s time one of the city’s most prominent suburbs. The same rings true today.
Here you will find row upon row of solid, upmarket German flats, punctuated now and again with imposing municipal buildings and villas of a stately nature. Being predominantly residential, the assumption that the Tolstoy Art Café would have no great difficulty in standing out from the crowd is to court an evident misconception. Despite the oversized painted portrait of Tolstoy’s well-known visage, the building occupied by the café, being set back from the road and, during the months of summer, being partially screened by trees, could lead without deliberate scrutiny to passing the image off as the competent endeavor of—and here I am being polite — what some would call a ‘street artist’, or, if it suits your understanding better, the work of a graffiti merchant, who, having taken his paints and spray can, has adorned the wall of a uniform townhouse with a likeness of his favourite writer.
Whether I could have found the café alone, working from directions only, is a metric that cannot be tested. I knew where I was going, as I was being taken there.
Tolstoy Art Café, Kaliningrad: A Literary Retreat
Tolstoy, I am now referring to the man, the ingenious, gifted writer, is not about graffiti, nor about temperance and not liking sausages; Tolstoy is a man of letters. OK, so the letters of which we speak don’t spell “Mine’s a beer” or “Order me up a Double Big Mac”, but they’re definitely of a type that professionally and epically, and to this I will also add lavishly, fill many a page in many a book — think of War and Peace. Thus, that the theme of the Tolstoy Art Café is irrefutably bookish is not the kind of revelation that is going to blow your socks off or knock the stuffing clean away out of your Christmas turkey. There are books at Tolstoy Art Café — indeed books and books and books — but the fact that they are there — and there, and there and everywhere — is only part of the story.
Stacked in blocks and bound in string, which once was the way of doing things when preparing books for shipment, is a nice twee touch of vintage, which the café carries off well. And books to be found where they should be, stood at attention on shelves, lend the place an erudite air. Yet, it is not books in themselves, as appropriate as they are to a café named after a famous writer, that generate true novelty. It is in discovering books where you would least expect to find them and in a capacity and aesthetic arrangement hitherto unexperienced where the known ordinary surpasses itself.
I’ll try you with a clue. Tolstoy was a brilliant writer, an undisputed literary genius. His intellect and imagination seemingly knew no heights. Millions of readers around the world admire and look up to him. In his exploration of human experience and his deep moral and philosophical insights, he stands head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries.
“Tell me something new!” you say. And as your eyes roll upwards in an intended show of exasperation, now you see them where you saw them not, up there on the ceiling.
Books and volumes of them, some presenting their covers, some with opened, fluttering leaves; some pinned to the ceiling, others suspended at different heights by string; not just thrown together but creatively arranged, pre-planned, choreographed, artistically assembled.
The sight of so many books hovering above like words of wisdom placed inconveniently just out of reach is enough to make the dullest fellow want to say, as though he means it, “I do enjoy a good read, you know, though most of it is over my head.”
Whilst this is patently obvious in the room with its halo of books, Tolstoy Art Café is two rooms bookish. The second room has soft seats and books on shelves arranged traditionally, which can be taken down and read at leisure as one would do in a public library.
But don’t book now! I whisper. To get into this furthest room, you must pass beneath an arch of books, as though entering into a sacred chamber where scholarly miracles are performed.
Underneath the arches ...
Meanwhile, in the first room, the one with the books aloft, look for the book entitled ‘Going through an identity crisis’. This refers to the room itself. Exposed brick walls with angled lamps that play with shadows and highlights trend towards industrial chic, but a plethora of retro wall plaques, framed disparate prints and the inclusion of a parlour piano tilt the impression unevenly towards a sense of sitting quietly somewhere in Tolstoy’s living room, unlike any he ever owned but fictitiously convincing enough to urge you to respect his views on abandoning meat and booze: “Just a couple of soda waters and a vegetarian sausage, please.”
Rest assured, however, that the menu is not so Tolstoy-friendly as to predispose you to any such subterfuge. If anything, it is plainly lacking in vegetarian options, as though Mrs Tolstoy is in the kitchen cooking up things she shouldn’t. The meat options may not sit well with the man who created Count Vronsky, but I have it on good authority that they are for the most part tasty dishes, reasonably priced and pluralistic.
Mercifully, the Volstead Act that Tolstoy visited upon himself is not inflicted on the eponymous café’s patrons, thus enabling me to sample, not only sample but also enjoy, a rather moreish wheat fermentation to go with my meatless pizza.
When I am out on the town, I’m not one who watches prices, so I cannot whisper in your lug if the fare at Tolstoy Art Café was underpriced, overpriced or just about the right price {“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom,”—so said Tolstoy himself} — but I am willing to bet my entire collection of vintage luncheon vouchers that if you are looking for somewhere different, which is also comfortable and atmospheric, a place in which to rest your bones, partake of a bite to eat, and drink a commendable coffee or (sshhh!) a beautiful bottle of beer, then, as Anna Karina once said, or was it five chapters in War and Peace, “… one must live and be happy.”
Happiness costs a mere 100 roubles (less than a quid) at Tolstoy Art Café, Kaliningrad
I am old enough to remember a time when ‘Happiness was a cigar called Hamlet”, but today, it’s a place called Tolstoy Art Café where creatives park their arts and others like to make such jokes as, “Do I need to book a table? Don’t judge it by my cover. Turn over a new leaf in your life and open a new café chapter. Bookmark my words, you’ll love it, I’m sure!
30 October 2025 – Kaliningrad Zoopark Now and Then Then and Now
On Kaliningrad’s Prospekt Mira, across the road from the city’s foremost Soviet hotel, a great imposing slab of a place called the Moscow, geometrically flanked by two curvilinear buildings, the one on the left containing the exemplar restaurant Patisson Markt, stands the beckoning entrance to one of Kaliningrad’s more exotic, historic attractions, known today as the Kaliningrad Zoopark.
Kaliningrad has had a zoo for years, even before it was Kaliningrad. The zoo came into being, took shape and became a permanent fixture exactly where it is today when Kaliningrad was Königsberg in the 1890s.
It would have to wait for more than a century, however, before Mick Hart would come along and bless it with his presence.
^ The entrance to Königsberg Zoo. How it was in 1913.
^ The entrance to Kaliningrad Zoopark.How it was in 2025.
Kaliningrad Zoopark 2001
My first visit to Kaliningrad Zoo took place in May 2001. My exact recollection of it is what you might call hazy (those vodkas the night before!), but I noted in my diary that it was an entertaining, atmospheric but rather rundown and whiffy place. To animal and zoo lovers, my appraisal of this valued institution embedded in the archived history of the ancient city of Königsberg may be considered rather unworthy, but you cannot be a pig farmer, as such was my lot in my youth, without becoming a connoisseur of the pongs of the animal kingdom, in much the same way that you cannot work in the media, as I did in later life, and not become familiar with the pong of humankind.
No longer linked with much affection to either end of the animal chain, the higher or the lower, my enjoyment of the zoo was initially inspired by its unique place in the history books, particularly that of its status as one of the few surviving large-scale landmarks not to be completely destroyed by the intense aerial bombardment and vicious urban fighting that took out most of Königsberg towards the end of the Second World War.
In 2001, the year when I crossed the zoo’s threshold for the first time, the main attraction was its resident hippopotamus. The connection was, and is, a historic, romantic and deeply iconic one. It follows the poignant story of Hans the Hippo, one of only four of the hundreds of animal inmates to survive the devastation wrought by the siege of Königsberg and the vicious hand-to-hand combat that took place in the grounds of the zoo itself.
^ It’s difficult to imagine, and you don’t really want to, that a fierce and deadly battle took place here, in what today is one of the most quiet and tranquil spots in Kaliningrad. This memorial commemorating that struggle reads: “On April 8, 1945, Hero of the Soviet Union, Lapshin, and his rifle platoon launched a surprise attack from two sides of the zoo, taking the bridge, killing 30 Nazis and capturing 185 more. This action decided the outcome of the Battle for the Zoo.”
It is not readily known what happened to his fellow survivors, a deer, a donkey and a badger, but Hans, who was found badly shot up in a ditch, was lovingly nursed back to life by a Russian military paramedic using that cure-all of all cure-alls, vodka, which he administered to the wounded hippo in copious amounts.
^ A hippo, a deer, a donkey and a badger This statue, constructed from metal plates and rods by a team of 15 different artisans belonging to the art group San Donato, commemorates the four that survived the wartime battle at Königsberg Zoo.
Having beaten all the odds, Hans went on to symbolize both life’s fragility and durability, becoming and remaining the zoo’s fabled hero and its number-one attraction until his death in 1950.
Since the passing of Hans, Kaliningrad Zoo has always had a hippo. I tried to unearth the name of the hippo residing at the zoo contemporaneous to my visit in 2001. Unsuccessful in this enterprise, I nevertheless have fond memories, all be they rather distant, of an enormous set of open jaws eagerly catching fish tossed between their gaping hinges from a keeper’s plastic bucket.
History of the Zoo The origins of Kaliningrad Zoo predate my arrival on the scene by something more than a century. Conceptually they occurred in 1895, the year that saw in Königsberg, on the site where the zoo stands today, a German industrial craft exhibition. At the close of this event, it was suggested by the organiser, entrepreneur Herman Claesson, that the wooden pavilions erected for the occasion not be deconstructed but remain where they were in situ and the site that they currently occupied be used in the creation of a zoological garden under the auspices and administration of a group specifically founded for this purpose, which eventually would be known as the Tiergarten Society.
Initially, and throughout the early years of the 20th century, the zoo became a major attraction and flourished in every sense. But this golden age would end abruptly, as did so many other things, with the outbreak of World War I.
Despite reopening when the hostilities ended, in the depression-riddled years that followed, the zoo never fully recovered the popularity it had once enjoyed. The Tiergarten Society, which had successfully founded and run the zoo from the moment of its inception, was dissolved in 1938, and on its dissolution the administration of the zoo and the future that awaited it passed into the hands of the City of Königsberg.
They loved a zoo and a circus in the late 19th century
The latter years of the 19th century witnessed international animal trade on an unprecedented level, supplying zoos and circuses with a source of public entertainment, an educational resource for the scientific community and a lucrative business for entrepreneurs.
When Königsberg Zoo first opened its gates, it offered its awestruck audience the opportunity to come face-to-face with something of the order of 900 different kinds of animals curated from no less than 260 global species. Although figures vary from source to source, estimates of the number of animals held by Kaliningrad Zoo today cite something in the region of 2,300, drawn from as many as 300 species, comprising mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians and invertebrates.
Whilst Königsberg Zoo, based on its animal population, was, at the time of its incorporation, by no means the largest zoo in the world, with 40 acres of land at its disposal, it was no diminutive enterprise. That figure has remained constant, but the increase in its animal populace is matched and superseded by its daily bipedal visitors.
On 11 October 2025, it was announced on a Kaliningrad News* site that the next 956 visitors would take the zoo’s visitor total to an impressive 700,000. The zoo’s director, Svetlana Sokolova, wrote in her Telegram channel that the 700,000th visitor could expect to be a prize winner.
Kaliningrad Zoopark Now and Then Then and Now
Considering the extent to which Kaliningrad itself has evolved over the 25 years that I have known it, it comes as no surprise that in composition and infrastructure the zoo’s improvements are commensurable.
Such development is not solely reflected in the facilities of the animal kingdom but also in the amenities for those people who come to the zoo to be stared at by the animals.
Today’s Kaliningrad Zoopark, as well as showcasing creatures great and small, also presents the perfect habitat in which to unwind and relax. Beyond the city’s hustle and bustle, the secluded grounds of the zoo stand as a parkland haven, a nuanced natural retreat replete with tree- and shrub-lined walkways, quiet meandering paths, quaint historic bridges, green and floral sheltered spaces, and, depending on what time of the year you visit, pumpkins.
^You’ll turn into a … Either a lot of Cinderella coaches or Stingy Jack’s secret stash; whatever the allusion, who could resist a photograph with so many lovely pumpkins — certainly not our Olga.
Kaliningrad Zoo is a family venue, catering for young and old alike. There are plenty of places to picnic in and, if making sandwiches is not your thing, eateries of various kinds. Plus, in the unlikely event that your offspring should get bored, there are swings, slides and other playground distractions that ought to be more than enough to keep the little darlings occupied and prevent them from behaving like grizzling grizzly bears.
On the subject of bears, grizzled or docile, a series of dramatic declivities sloping down to the winding channels that follow the flow of the Pregolya River are an invitation to explore the zoo on foot. They provide the route to the bear enclosures, a rugged quarter of rock and gullies, mined with caves and passages in which, should the fancy take them, the bears can take refuge and hide (bears can be self-conscious too, you know). There are also plateaus at different levels where they can lounge, lie, preen and pose quietly to their bear hearts’ content.
A little further on this descent, at a point where the path zigs left at a zag of 90 degrees, a large compound presents itself for inspection by the curious. It is about the size of a football pitch but asymmetrical by design, and on all but one of its four sides has steep, overhanging cliffs. The side where it is cliffless has, in place of a wall of rock, a natural tree-trunk frame containing a viewing window, presumably made of reinforced glass. It explains itself in an instant. Lying but a few feet away on the other side of the glass is a lazy, lounging lioness. She is staring away from the window, seemingly oblivious to the meaty snacks observing her, but the thing to remember with predators, be they animal or human, is that though the eye of instinct may be closed, it rarely ever sleeps.
It is quite a walk, this walk to the base of the valley, but once you’ve hit rock bottom, there is space enough to catch one’s breath on any one of the Zoopark’s little curved bridges. Here, you can rest for a while, and gazing into the trickling water, ask yourself the question, because it is so tranquil, did a desperate, violent struggle for life, a dreadful and bloody war, really take place where I am standing? The answer seems to ricochet across the time that’s spent, tearing a piece of complacency from your tiny moment of living consciousness, making life all at once both undeniably precious and, should you dwell too deeply on it, undeniably senseless.
Now that you are where you are, all you need to do is climb back up to where you were. With 40 acres to traverse, the way to spare your legs is to hop aboard the zoo park’s train. This little colourful engine, with its open-sided flatbed platform, doesn’t rely on tracks for navigation. It trundles along on a nice set of wheels, effortlessly transporting effort-avoiding paying passengers around the park from A to B and to almost every other letter in the Zoopark’s personal alphabet.
The Kaliningrad Zoo, the one that I knew back in 2001, is not the zoo that I know today. On reprising my visit last autumn, in September of 2024, I was, I admit, quite frankly surprised by the extent to which I enjoyed the experience, both the animal exhibits and the off-the-beaten-track sojourn in the idyllic parkland gardens. However, had Hans the hippo’s ghost been present, I am sure he would have been less than amused by the greeting proffered by his modern successor. It really was a case of “Do you think my bum looks big in this Zoo?”
^I genuinely believe that they are trying to tell us something? I wasn’t sure if I had missed the notice on the way into the zoo which explained that today was a special themed event run by the animals entitled ‘Turn the other cheek’, or whether their unified display of wildly, and sometimes widely, differing sized posteriors was a planned act of concerted cheekiness. My first prize goes to the cuddly bears; my second to the bare-arsed cheek with which we were presented. As the zoo is billed as a family experience, please feel free to ignore this remark.
^Are you looking at me?!
Tanked upWhat a whopper!Small frySmaller frySwimming zebras
^Something fishy going on Some fish can be quite frightening, can’t they? There are so many fishermen in Kaliningrad, I was rather surprised on entering the aquarium that there weren’t some in here dangling their rods.
^ Refreshments Kaliningrad Zoopark is not a refreshment-free zone. Unless you have eaten alreday in Patisson Markt, you will find no excuse not to take some sort of refreshment during your stay in the park. I like the way in which the zoo’s serveries, such as the one shown here, echo the distinctive architectural style that once was Königsberg’s signature.
Gorgeous Gothic finialsGreen and peacefulNo time like the pastNothing quite like a park benchLeafy vistasThe Kaliningrad Zoopark ticket officeNow …… and then
^Last two photographs If your Russian is not as rusty as mine, and your eyesight younger, you may be able to make out from the photographed information board what exactly this building, reconstructed as a faithful replica to its lost 19th century origina,l was. You can’t? Well, take a look at the pictures. The original was constructed in 1903.
^ It’s green and it’s woody No prizes for guessing why Kaliningrad Zoo is called Kaliningrad Zoopark. It’s green; it’s woody. There are lots of benches on which to sit and lots of trees to sit next to and under and lots of shrubs to admire. Kaliningrad Zoopark sits where it does; a quiet, natural, leisurely retreat in the middle of a modern city teeming with life and traffic. The zoo takes you off the streets and keeps you out of mischief.
Revised 25 August 2025 | First published 14 October 2024 ~ Telegraph in Svetlogorsk Good Coffee Unique Art
Contrary to received wisdom, it is not always necessary or indeed advisable for travellers to stick to the beaten track. Verily, by doing so the chances of missing out on some hidden cultural gem or other, or hitherto unencountered esoteric and unusual experience, are magnified manifold.
Indubitably, there are some parts of the world, some sinister and dubious places, where keeping to the beaten track is less a question for tourism than an action guided by common sense in the interests of survival.
Take London, for example, that patchwork quilt of small towns wherein no boundaries lie. One minute, you, the traveller, can almost believe what the travel guides tell you, that London is, indeed, one of the world’s most civilised cities; the next, having strayed from the beaten track, that you are up S*it Creek without a paddle in, what to all intents and purposes, is the Black Hole of Calcutta. Is it Africa or Pakistan? There’s no point leaving the beaten track to be beaten in your tracks. Best to beat a hasty retreat.
Enrichments of this nature do not apply, thank goodness, to a small, secluded backstreet in the seaside town of Svetlogorsk on Russia’s Baltic Coast. Not officially known as ‘Off the Beaten Track’, Street Ostrovskogo (‘Off the Beaten Track’ is easier to say) is a quaint, leafy, meandering avenue that wends its way from Street Oktyabr’skaya (if you find it easier, ‘Off the Beaten Track’ will do).
In Svetlogorsk, the streets run off from a large, open public space in the centre of the town, which, during clement months, overflows with tourists eagerly taking advantage of the outside drinking and eating areas. One of the streets that travels from this lively, bustling hub is Ulitsa Oktyabr’skaya. It is the street you will need to walk to get you to the Telegraph café.
The route is a rewarding one. It takes you past a Svetlogorsk landmark, the 1908 Art Nouveau water tower, past the town’s pretty Larch Park with its copy of Hermann Brachert’s ‘Water Carrier’ sculpture ~ the original is in the Brachert Museum ~ past my favourite and recently renovated neo-Gothic/Art Nouveau house and onto the Hartman Hotel.
To say that you cannot miss Ulitsa Ostrovskogo would be a silly thing to say, because if your sense of direction is anything like mine … Sorry? Oh, it isn’t. Well then just look for a clothes shop on your right. You won’t be able to miss it, because your sense of direction is better than mine and also because in the summer months some of its garments are hung outside in order to make the shop more visible, and besides it is located within one of those charming old German edifices that have at their gable end an all-in-one veranda-balcony glazed and enclosed in wood. This then is the junction at which you turn for Telegraph. This is the end of the beaten track.
Halfway along this quiet backwater, at the point where streets meet chevron-fashion, stand a permanent cluster of market stalls. You didn’t miss the turning, so there’s no earthly reason you should miss these either, especially those with roofs, which give them the quaint appearance of modest garden summer houses. Here, artisans working in various materials, from leather and ceramics to metalware, together with artists of paint and palette, regularly gather to sell their goods. The range and novelty of their handmade products really are surprising and the quality of them consistently high.
The location of these stalls could not be better placed, since a little further on the left-hand side, you have reached your destination ~ Svetlogorsk’s former telegraph building, resurrected in recent years as an outlet for arts and crafts and as a coffee shop and art gallery.
Telegraph in Svetlogorsk
In addition to selling coffee of various kinds~ and very good they are too! ~ Telegraph deals in assorted teas, other delicious drinks, a seductive range of desserts, irresistible homemade cakes and the sort of pastries you’ll want to leave home for. It is also a cornucopia of distinctive handcrafted wares, including vintage and designer clothes, prints, postcards, vinyl records, decorative items for the home, and original works from local artists.
IIts comfy settee and low-slung armchairs, into which one’s body readily sinks, plus the light and airy but cozy ambience, make for a very pleasant environment in which to relax, unwind and shop. If you cannot find a gift in Telegraph, something special to treat yourself with or a Baltic souvenir, then there’s definitely something wrong with you.
An introduction to two of Telegraph’s artists
https://vk.com/album55604070_101203993 Lilya Bogatko works in the field of applied arts, designing and decorating ceramic goods with stylised naturalistic images. She prefers to work in monochrome, consigning her line-drawn black motifs to high opacity white grounds on tableware and ornaments. Her distinctive illustrations, many of which have a gentle charm that could grace a children’s storybook, possess an ethereal quality. Indeed, a fair proportion of her subjects, be they man or beast, float above the earth; they take to the air with wings. When her subjects are not animals, real or mythological, or people literally raised to a higher level of spirituality ~ have wings will fly ~ her stock-in-trade motifs are replications of Kaliningrad landmarks, such as the now defunct and liquidated former House of Soviets, the refurbished Zalivino lighthouse overlooking the Curonian Lagoon and Königsberg Cathedral.
Based in St Petersburg, Lilya is a regular visitor to Kaliningrad and the Kaliningrad region, from which she derives inspiration and consolidates her sales outlets.
https://vk.com/album-30057230_195486413 Pavel Timofeev has an arts and crafts workshop at Telegraph in Svetlogorsk, where he produces, among other things, leather purses and wallets, men’s and women’s leather bracelets with inscriptions on request, ornamented key rings and a range of fashion jewellery.
His speciality is selling watches with watch-face customisation. The face design can be made to order, with the option of a leather strap in traditional classic or novel styles. The straps can also be personalised.
For examples of Pavel’s watches, please refer to the carousel that appears below this profile:
The room opposite Telegraph’s ‘sitting room’ is its designated art gallery, a well-lit exhibition space with enough wall and floor capacity to showcase umpteen works of local artists. On the occasion of my visit, the art form most conspicuous was assemblages ~ 3D compositions created by taking disparate pieces of whatever it is the artist has scavenged and then arranging or assembling them on a backboard of some description so that the configuration that ensues presents itself as a pictorial image or, from impressions of the whole or its parts, invites interpretation.
Victor Ryabinin, our artist friend from Königsberg, was the man who introduced me to assemblages. His interest in the potential of this technique as a medium for symbolism had him unearthing whatever he could from the remains of Königsberg’s past and putting the pieces together so as to excite in the observer a quest to uncover meaning, either the artist’s or their own.
Since Victor was profoundly immersed in and also deeply disturbed by the eradication of Königsberg, the assemblages that he built from the remnants of destruction often convey a personal sense of irredeemable loss, an inescapable sadness, a wistful but unrequited need for a less tragic end to the city which he dearly loved and in which he loved to live. Victor travelled outside of Königsberg more often and also further than its famous philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he possibly left it less than Kant or anyone else for that matter.
By contrast, the assemblages gathered together under Telegraph’s roof evinced none of this solemnity. They danced a confident riot of bright, effusive colours, orchestrating lively, often comic, images and energising expressive shapes, some fondly reminiscent of the enchanting kind of illustrations that adorned the pages of story books beloved of old-time children, others cleverly more obtuse or playfully cryptographic.
In vivacity of colour and their three-dimensional character, the assemblages reminded me of the kind of shop-front sign boards popular in the Edwardian era, and there was much at work in their composition to insinuate a vintage charm. But the incorporation of parts taken from obsolete engines, metal handles, steel rivets, goggles and the like, plus paraphernalia of various kinds possessing mechanical provenance and rigged to suggest articulation, disclosed a contemporary steampunk influence. Intriguing, all bewitching and also fun to boot, take any one of these assemblages, hang them in your abode and if until now you have felt that your home lacked a conversation piece, trust me when I tell you that this omission will be rectified.
In the Svetlogorsk we know today, cafes, bars, restaurants and places of interest to view and visit exist in appreciable numbers, but every once in a while, one stands out in the crowd: Telegraph is that one.
It may have exchanged its wires and needles for coffee and for art, but the function of the historic building as a centre of communication lives on in its role as a meeting place, and the message that it telegraphs couldn’t be more accommodating: Sit a while, relax, enjoy a beverage and a piece of cake and let your sensibilities flow with the positive vibes that emanate from all that you see and all that you feel around you and from what can be bought and taken home, because the chances are that whatever it is that tickles your fancy in Telegraph, you will never find another like it; the chances are it will be unique.
After browsing, binging, basking and borrowing (borrowing from your friends to pay for the coffee and art, “I’ll see you alright, later …”), especially on those days when the craft-sellers’ stalls are active, in finally heading off for home, you will say to yourself with satisfaction, what an enjoyable day I have had. I am so pleased I read Mick Hart’s blog and was urged by him to get up off of my … ah, to get off of the beaten track.
Telegraph ~ social and cultural space of Svetlogorsk.
Telegraph is a public and cultural space (a centre of urban communities), created by city residents for city residents.
We do not have a director, but we have a working group. We are a community of participants with common goals and values.
Telegraph is located on Ostrovskogo Street in house No. 3 (next to the Post Office).
There are four spaces here:
– a coffee shop (here you can try aromatic fresh coffee) – a living room with an exhibition of works by craftsmen (you can buy local handmade souvenirs) – a gallery (local artists hold exhibitions here) – workshops (pottery and carpentry) – a terrace and a lawn with the longest bench in the city.
Our space regularly hosts meetings of various communities. Any participant can propose an idea for their own project and find like-minded people who will provide the necessary support.
Telegraph exists outside of politics, outside of religion. We are open to new acquaintances/initiatives.
The Telegraph project team deals with city projects and development issues.
Co-working ‘Thoughts’ (Aptechnaya, 10); keys from the barista in the coffee shop; additional conditions by phone +79114839050
How to get from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk
18 August 2025 – From Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk
One of the things that I like about being in Kaliningrad is that it is not far away from the Baltic coast. The main resorts, Zelenogradsk (in German times: Cranz) is approximately 35km (22 miles), a 30-minute drive away, and Svetlogorsk (in German times: Rauschen) is 40km (25 miles), which takes about 40 minutes to drive.
Modern roads and upgraded transport links have improved travel to the Baltic coast no end since the good old days, when all there was in the way of major travel infrastructure was a couple of pre-war German roads with more than their fair share of potholes.
The problem is that whilst the region’s ever-developing tourism infrastructure is fuelling dramatic growth, the good news for the region’s economy is not always good for local travel, as there are days in the height of summer when vehicular demand for the Baltic coast can severely test one’s travelling patience.
Kaliningrad’s tourism record reads like a year-on-year success story, particularly with the impetus it received from restricted overseas travel during the coronavirus era and a continuation of that trend due to evolving geopolitics.
Domestic travel to the Kaliningrad exclave from Russia’s capital city, Moscow, and from other territories inside ‘Big Russia’ appears to have multiplied 10-fold over the past five years. To get a handle on this, you would need to review the statistics, which, with a grade 9 CSE in math, I am disqualified from doing. What does add up, however, is that whichever mode of transport you plan on using to get you from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk or Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk, be it private car, taxi, bus or train, during the height of the tourist season, it pays to avoid peak-time travel.
Here’s some handy information to help you on your way:
Distance from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and to Svetlogorsk by road
Significant disparity on the internet exists regarding the distance between Kaliningrad and Zelenogradsk. I don’t know why it does it, but the distance keeps on changing. Sometimes it is 40km (25 miles), sometimes 34km (21 miles) and sometimes 20km (12.5 miles). It just keeps getting closer or moving further away depending on who you would like to believe. Why not, then, believe me? Thirty-five kilometres (22 miles) seems to be where it’s usually at.
The time it takes to travel from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk by private vehicle or by taxi is another debatable issue. Some internet sites say 20 minutes; others, 40 minutes. I would hazard a guess that with a good backwind and favourable traffic fluidity, the journey should take no more than 30 minutes.
The distance between Kaliningrad and Svetlogorsk has a rather less shaky consensus. It appears to hold steady at 40km (25 miles), giving an average time to drive it of 40 minutes.
Taxi from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk General rule of thumb: beware of travel and trip advisor websites that purposefully conceal the dates on which they publish content. Case in point: A reasonably well-known travel website, which precludes publication dates, claims that a taxi from Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk will cost you 600 roubles. To get there at that price, you will first need to take a time machine to a point in the distant past when things were a whole lot cheaper.
The average taxi fare from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk is 700-1000 roubles (£6.45-£9.20), with the lower end of the tariff being the least likely of the available options.
The average taxi fare from Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk is 1000-2000 roubles (£9.20-£18.40).
Taxi Services: Whether you use an app, call the cab office, or hail a cab on the street, Kaliningrad is no different from any other city in the world: always agree on the fare before entering the vehicle. The majority, if not all, of Kaliningrad taxis are now meter-based, so if you take one off the street, the driver may just point to the meter when you ask the important question, “How much will it cost?” Whether you accept this answer will depend on how trusting you are and how well you cope with suspense.I, for one, am rather fond of a ballpark figure/estimate.
Buses from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk
The city’s main bus terminal is a short walk away from Kaliningrad’s Southern Railway Station (Kaliningrad-South) (Kaliningrad-Yuzhny).
It takes approximately one hour by bus from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and from Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk, about one hour and 15 minutes.
The bus fare to Zelenogradsk is approximately 100 roubles (90p)
The bus fare to Svetlogorsk is approximately 155 roubles (£1.43)
Buses to Zelenogradsk and to Svetlogorsk leave Kaliningrad Bus Terminal approximately every 20 minutes.
If you are catching the bus from the main bus terminal, you must purchase your ticket at the terminal itself. Automated gates are now in operation, and you will need to have your ticket at hand for scanning validation.
Buses to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk also leave from a stop opposite Kaliningrad’s Northern Railway Station (Kaliningrad-North) (Severny Vokzal) on Soviet Avenue (Sovetsky Prospekt). If you are not working to your own strict timetable, you can wander down to this stop, check the destinations of each bus as they dock, select the one you want, hop aboard and buy your ticket.
The last bus from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk leaves at 21:30.
The last bus from Zelenogradsk to Kaliningrad leaves at 21:30.
The last bus from Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk leaves at 22:30.
The last bus from Svetlogorsk to Kaliningrad leaves at 22:30.
The line number of the bus to Zelenogradsk is 141 and to Svetlogorsk 118.
Train from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk The journey by train from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk takes approximately 35-45 minutes, and from Kaliningrad to Svetlogorsk, about 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Trains depart from Kaliningrad’s Southern Railway Station (Kaliningrad-South) (Kaliningrad-Yuzhny) multiple times per day.
Stops on the way are displayed visually on a screen in each carriage and delivered audibly by an automated voice, which is conveniently broadcast both in Russian and in English. When travelling by train to Svetlogorsk, please be aware that the final destination is Svetlogorsk-2, so don’t alight at Svetlogorsk-1 unless this is the stop you are aiming for.
The train fare to Zelenogradsk-Noviy Station is approximately 100 roubles (92p)
The train fare to Svetlogorsk 2 Station is approximately 125 roubles (£1.15)
So, there you have it. Whether you drive it, bus it, go by taxi or take a train, Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk are right on Kaliningrad’s doorstep. Follow my advice, and I guarantee you’ll know you’ve arrived when you finally get there.
If it’s highly recommended by Mick Hart, you know it must be good!
9 April 2025 ~ Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?
As a follow-up to my series of posts ‘How to get from Kaliningrad to the UK and vice versa’, I bring you Hotels by the Airport!
Having been held up at the Polish border more times than Dick Turpin held up the overland stage, I decided that a good contingency plan when travelling to the UK from Kaliningrad would be to bed down for the night in Gdansk and then proceed to the airport the next day. “But,” said a relative, “as your flight to the UK requires you to get out of bed at the godforsaken hour of 3am, why not stay at a hotel close to the airport itself?” “Hmm,” I said, “I’m not sure about that.” And then she said, some have bars, and suddenly I couldn’t be surer.
A search on Google under ‘Gdansk Airport Hotels’ quickly rummaged out a handful of places that were too expensive to contemplate. Paying over the odds for a room is OK when sliding beneath the sheets with a delectable bit of totty, but just for the sake of crashing out, it simply isn’t worth it.
Besides, I did not need to stay at the Hilton just to impress everybody, all I had to do was lie. And, of course, it works out cheaper!
The out-of-season price for a bed at Gdansk Airport Hampton by Hilton was, at the time of booking, £117 a night; the Hi Hotel Gdańsk Airport Lotnisko was £64 a night; not bad as hotel tariffs go in this extortionate era. But, unless I am much mistaken, this hotel is one of those self-service jobs, meaning it does not have a reception desk, or, even if it does, the desk is unmanned, unwomaned and everything else in between, which we will not dwell upon here, because we do not wish to propagate woke. I imagine, without validation, that it must be one of those impersonal places where access is determined solely by an electronic code, with not a human or anything vaguely like one neither in sight nor on site. For me, this proposition was out of the question, as you will understand better if you read my post Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
That left but one more option, a hotel near the airport, which, as luck would have it, the travelling relative I spoke of earlier stayed at on her outward journey after visiting us in Kaliningrad. “It’s comfortable,” she said. “It’s very close to the airport, and it has a bar.”
Sleep and Fly
The sixty quid price tag for a one-night stand, sorry, for a one-night stay, at the hotel she referred to is a lot easier on the pocket than the £100+ at the Hitler ~ Hilton ~ almost half the tariff in fact. Being almost twice the price, perhaps if you booked at the Hilter, they would allow you to stay there twice in one night. This complication appealed to me, ‘stay one night get the same night free’, but the deal breaker with Sleep and Fly was the name of this hotel. Perhaps if they have a step ladder, I could cross the word ‘Sleep’ out or change the name of the hotel slightly to one that suited my lifestyle, viz ‘No Sleep Then Fly’. As long as it did not prove to be ‘No Sleep No Fly’, there would be nothing for me to worry about, a most unlikely scenario as I have a knack of finding something, however elusive it may be.
Hmm, Sleep and Fly? I mused. I liked the name a lot. It was perfect for an insomniac.
^Journey starts: Kaliningrad Central Bus Station^
The fact that on the occasion of my leaving Kaliningrad recently we passed through both the Russian and Polish borders without let or hinderance, whilst mildly ironic in and of itself, since the time before and the time before that, we had been kicking our heels for hours, did not in any way invalidate my decision to split the journey across two days. On the past two travelling occasions, the long inevitable interval between arriving at the airport and the flight, which is a painful seven hours, was extended by delays from seven hours to 10 hours and to 15 hours respectively, which rather takes the Wizz out of flying with Wizz Air. Never mind editing ‘Sleep and Fly’, how about adding an ’S’ to ‘Wizz’!
In the unlikely event that the flight is delayed the morning after the night before, having stayed at the airport hotel, at least the disruption will occur when most who sleep are rested, and with any luck you might still get home when the buses and trains are running during daylight hours.
Apart from these considerations and the precautions they invoke, if the truth be known, I was looking forward to the novel experience of staying close to the airport and strolling at my leisure to the terminal in the morning.
Ice Cold in Gdansk
As there had been no holdups on our journey through border control, the bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk rolled up at the airport at the time advertised.
On alighting from the bus, I was glad, mighty glad that I had worn my thermal-lined Russian coat. It was cold, mighty cold, and there was a nasty, razor-sharp, fingers-freezing gusting wind whipping across the hillock on which Gdansk Airport proudly perches. I tell you, without a word of a lie, it was enough to blow a moustache right off, even a big important one such as that belonging to Lech Walesa.
Now, either the directions given to me by word of toe on how to get to Sleep and Flies had not been given correctly or my interpretation of them had not been up to snuff, as, after wandering up and down a little, I ended up where no one wants to be, somewhere in no-genders land, stuck beneath the pillar of a large concrete flyover, just me, a suspicious rucksack and, crammed inside two cars, a herd of Polish security men, none of whom, by the way, took a blind bit of notice of me, even though my frozen fingers resembled glowing red sticks of dynamite. (‘Ere, whoever said that dynamite is red?” “La de la, de da, de la ~ Shut up!”)
^Gdansk Airport on a cold evening: In there somewhere is my motel^
A half-glass-empty man at best, I had already convinced myself that I would never find my hotel and would be forced to spend the night inside the airport terminal, before it up and occurred to me that airports have information desks, where you can get answers to rareified questions like does my hotel exist? Gdansk has an excellent desk, behind which a young man sits with a beard as silly as mine.
Fortunately, not only could this bewhiskered fellow converse quite well in English, but he was multilingual enough to understand the language of chattering teeth. His assistance was par excellence. No sooner had I mentioned Sleep and Fly than he said, “What?” I suppose he could hardly hear me above the sound of my knocking knees. “Sleeep and F-f-flies” I said, and he leaned over the counter a mite to see if they were undone. As they weren’t, thank heavens (think icicles, but large ones), it dawned on him, like tomorrow morning, that here was a silly old fart of an Englishman without a hapeth of directional sense who was having the utmost difficulty in telling his Sleep and Fly from his elbow.
Quickly, he whipped out a folder ~ his beard was larger than mine ~ and proceeded to show me patiently, on the nicest map imaginable, something on a street in Naples, and then, swiftly finding the right page, but showing it not to the quite right person, Captain Horatio Compassless, he said, like Studebaker Hoch, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. Shucks, no he didn’t say that at all, that’s what Macron tells the migrants as he waves them on to Dover. No, what the young man said was, to get to the end of the rainbow, I would need to follow the long blue line. And sure enough, there in his folder was this long blue line.
Leaning over his desk, as he might a castle parapet, he pointed at the ground. We had already done the one about flies, so I wondered what he was getting at, and then I saw it for myself. I was actually standing on top of it! The blue line was beneath my feet. This young man didn’t lie. How could he with that beard! I thanked him for putting up with me, pointed myself in the right direction, that certainly made a change, and was off like a shot from a peashooter.
(In case you didn’t get it, by coincidence, or through someone using their brains, the blue line was right beneath me as I stood at the information desk.)
Being the sort of man whose glass is always more than empty when it’s someone’s turn to fill it up, I was already of the conviction that the blue line would peter out before I got to where I was going, and cuh, huh, would you believe it, if I hadn’t been right, I’d be wrong. However, all was not entirely lost and neither, I am relieved to say, was I.
Before leaving home I had taken the wise precaution of memorising what the hotel looked like from a photo on its website. Now you might say, why bother? Why not use your smartphone and look it up on Google? Ah, now then, now then, now … that’s because you’ve got a smartphone, and I’ve got a phone that is not so smart, at least not as smart as I’d like it to be. My Russian Tele-2 sim card doesn’t function in Gdansk. You might say, that’s understandable, but neither does O2. Thus, whenever I switch on roaming, I am free to roam wherever I want without knowing where I’m going, since every time I visit Gdansk, I can never ever ever, and never ever ever get an internet connection. (Take out a two-year rolling contract, which O2 continually steers you toward, you will be able to roam as you’ve never roamed before! But I don’t want their two-year contract!)
Anyway, on this cold and bitter evening, all was saved by my impeccable memory. I was standing on a small eminence at the side of a little round roundabout about to give up the ghost and sit in the airport terminal when, lo and behold, there it was ~ the On-The-Fly Hotel!
From a distance, and the closer I came even more so, the little hotel, which is deceptively large ~ larger on the inside than it appears to be on the out (fingers crossed it will be William Hartnell and not a regenerate blackman wearing a fixed silly smirk), the warmer and more inviting it became. With my teeth knocking and my knees chattering, I hoped it was not a mirage. (“You get those in warm places, don’t you? Such as in deserts and the like.” “Be quiet and just clear off!”)
But it looked warm, and it was warm. Thank heavens, this was not England, where the only places that are warm are centrally heated migrant hotels. The rest of us simply cannot afford to switch the heating on. If ever I finish my time machine, I will guarantee Napoleon wins. Only then perhaps will the historically beaten, Macron-bound BREXITed French cease offloading their migrant surplus onto an ECHR-compromised Britain.
My hands were so cold, seriously, that I had begun to get the hots. But then who wouldn’t, I ask you, exposed, in a manner of speaking, to a gorgeous young lady like that. She stood behind the reception desk as though she was a blowlamp, her comely presence alone enough to thaw an iceberg. On the 14th of April 1912, had they stood her on the bows of the ship she could have averted a tragedy.
Seriously though, how nice it was, especially on a night like this, to book in face to face and not be forced to place one’s trust in a series of memorised digits.
Sleep and Fly Gdansk
Going back to my booking experience, whilst perusing Sleep and Fly’s website, I noted that the room of my choice had in several different places ‘small’ written next to it, leaving me in no doubt that the room I had booked would not be large, but was I prepared for titchy?
I did not take photos of the bedroom since for one thing my mitts had not recovered from the icy Polish air, and there was insufficient elbow room by which to angle my camera, and even if there had been, my phone, the non-connection type, most likely was not equipped with a suitable lens which could function adequately in a diminutive space like this. Funny thing, however, was that the room containing the shower and bog was almost as big as the bedroom.
Now let me stop right there. Yes, it’s true, the room was small: but it was clean; it was warm; it was snug. The bed, I would find out later, lacked no conceivable comfort and, crucially for one like me, whose slumbers can be broken by the fluttering of a moth’s wing, peace and serenity reigned, which, to a man like you, means quiet. To put it rather more succinctly, for the one evening I needed to be there, it fitted the bill like a bobby’s hat.
Though Sleep and Fly had a bar of its own, making it Sleep, Drink and Fly, I wanted the experience, the very surreal experience, of sitting late at night within the airport’s cavernous interior whilst sipping thoughtfully on a pint of beer.
Never known to be keen on flying (understatement) but reformed partly by my age (I recall the words of the swing song, “Too old to die young now …’), I always find the word ‘terminal’ when used in conjunction with scareports somehow grimly amusing. Sleep and Fly for tomorrow we …, now whatever rhymes with ‘fly’, ah, obviously, its ‘sigh’, which is exactly what I did.
I was standing at the reception desk, before the attractive young lady, whom I believe I might have mentioned earlier, asking if she would be so kind as to give me an early morning call, when it dawned on me (dawn being rather too close for comfort) that there was no phone in my motel room, so how could she possibly ring me? Don’t be so silly, Silly, they would ring you on your smartarsephone, which, of course, Old Silly, though it may sound silly, would not be able to make a sound as my phone had no connection. When I tried to explain the glitch, Beauty incarnate, the young receptionist, clearly did not understand me ~ but then whoever does? ~ and took my number anyway.
I consoled myself with the fact that the degree I had awarded myself in The Use of Mobile Phones that Refuse to Connect in Gdansk had taught me how to set the alarm. My wife is fond of over-stating that “Michael has a problem to every solution.” Not this time it would seem. Sleep and Fly it would be.
Despite the cold, I plucked up courage and walked to the bar in the airport terminal, where I drank a pint of ice-cold beer whilst lapping up the peculiarity. There must have been about 40 people scattered around the gargantuan space, but they and the sounds they emitted appeared to me as if in a dream, like phenomena and apparitions swallowed whole in Jonah’s Whale.
The near psychedelic contrast between drinking in the airport terminal and the next stop Sleep and Fly had shades of the Twilight Zone about it. The stark difference in spatial parameters made me feel like Lemuel Gulliver, who had nothing much to boast about whilst he was in Brobdingnag, but when he got to Lilliput was naturally having it large.
My relative, the one who had stayed at Sleep and Fly the week before I travelled and had apprised me of its amenities, had reported to me then that the motel had a bar but that there was nobody in it. There was only me on this occasion, but that was fine with me, because if nobody else enjoys your company, you can always pretend to enjoy it yourself. Besides, what can be better than loneliness when you have no choice but to be on your own.
Since I was their only customer, and the young receptionist had nothing much else to do but double as a bar person, I bestowed the honour upon her of serving me a second beer and then, looking at the time, as midnight was fast approaching, I thought I had better go to bed. I only had three hours to kill, or, if I could not sleep, which I generally can’t, the case would be vice versa. Each Dawn I Die. That’s a very good film, almost as good as The Lost Weekend. I suggest you watch them both.
It’s that ‘Finish that last beer and go to bed’ look!
Either way there was not much time, and as much as parting with Sleep and Fly’s bar whilst it was still in motion was a rum-un and a wrench, if I did not leave it now, I would be passing myself on the stairs in the morning when going up them to bed at night.
So, take it from a man who has stayed in a very small room where everything looked larger, should you be travelling, Gulliver, to or from Kaliningrad via Gdansk, unless transiting all the way by taxi, you could do very much worse than stay in Gdansk overnight and finish the last leg of your journey the following morning or afternoon by bus, if heading towards Kaliningrad, or, if going the opposite way, by taxi to the airport.
Gdansk Old Town is beautiful, packed to the rooftops with atmosphere. There’s oons of historic architecture waiting for you to soak up, together with splendiferous beers, and an enticing array of grub from an eclectic range of restaurants.
On your return journey from Kaliningrad to the UK, if your flight is an early one, I advocate you take a room in a hotel next to the airport. You could, of course, elect to stay overnight in Gdansk again, but accommodation close to the airport mitigates potential meltdown in the unlikely event in the wee small hours your taxi-to-airport fails to show.
Should you go for the airport option, if, like I, you are somewhat sensitive when it comes to paying through the nose or through any other part of your anatomy, I would go for Sleep and Fly. Its pleasant and its comfortable. It’s got a bar where you can sit and drink, which is extremely convenient for a first-thing hangover, and, as its less than 10 minutes walk to the airport, if you like your sleep you’ll get more of it, since you wont have to factor in the time it takes to prepare for the taxi and the time it takes for the taxi to run you to the airport. In plain speaking, it’s a simpler option, with less risk and less hassle.
Plus, if like mine your phone is duff and and no morning call is forthcoming, back in the bar downstairs or even from your bedroom window, you will be able to see the plane you’ve missed taking off without you. And what could be nicer than that!
17 March 2025 ~ Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track
Of all the roles I have played, or wanted to play, I never considered myself to be a second Bruce Reynolds. But here I was, about to pull off in my mind the world’s Second Great Train Robbery.
Everything was set; planned to the very last detail. Nothing had been left to chance. The moment my accomplice hit the switch, the moment the lights went down, it would happen; unbeknown to and unseen by everyone, history would repeat itself. And when the lights came up again, as they would on cue, the train and its trucks would still be there, but as for its valuable cargo, all that would remain of that was the empty space where it once had been.
This was me then, watching intently as the train and its freight wagons loaded down with beers trundled past at eyebrow height, but with my mind at a lonely railway bridge tucked away in rural Buckinghamshire, which, in the summer of 1963, was about to enter the annals of criminal history.
When they finally caught up with Bruce Reynolds, they thought that they had collared the mastermind behind the most audacious heist of all time, but how mistaken they must have been. For had they got it right, I could hardly have been sitting here, in Kaliningrad’s Art Depot Beer Bar, free to monitor the freight cars of booze as they passed mesmerically before my eyes.
Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track
The less dramatic but no less novel circumstances in which I found myself was that of watching beer and other intoxicants being delivered to customers’ tables by way of a model train. Although it may seem that I am merely substituting a long-held boyhood fantasy for something from Alice in Wonderland, I am firmly back from both, biding my time in a world where the cliché ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was beginning to make me wonder why my entire life had been challenged by a second-hand lie detector.
I was actually sitting beneath the Gothic-vaulted red-brick ceiling of a series of interconnecting catacombs. Whoops, there it goes again! My imagination wandering at will where it will wilfully wander. Not exactly catacombs, but a subterranean space occupied long ago by an elaborate network of beer cellars belonging to Ponart Brewery, which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the largest brewery in Königsberg. This environment met my every requirement, blending the architectural style I love with social history, brewery history and my personal history of drinking beer.
And yet I had not imbibed sufficiently for me to invent the existence of a scaled-down railway that permitted drinks to be conveyed direct from bar to customer.
Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad
The train-delivery concept is as intriguing, as it is entertaining as it is educational. The train leaves Königsberg station, passes through the suburbs of Kaliningrad as they are today and from there heads out into the past across the Königsberg countryside.
To achieve this effect, models detailed in construction mark the route of the train and the settlements at which it stops, the old German names of which fastened to the wall, by corresponding to the booth-style seating, act like table numbers, enabling the bar staff to literally keep tabs on customers and their tariffs. The miniature version of Kaliningrad’s Central Station (once Königsberg Hauptbahnhof) from which the beer train leaves, stands proudly and unmistakeably, thanks to the accurate portrayal of its 1930s’ postmodern façade, at the point where all good beer journeys start, which is, of course, the bar.
To announce the departure of the train and the onset of one’s drinks, a bell is heard to ring, and the train carrying its valuable cargo steams urgently out of Central Station, travelling via Zelenogradsk ~ observable by its Ferris wheel ~ and off across East Prussia, except in this particular instance, it is charging along the side of the wall heading in one’s direction.
Being a beer and bar enthusiast but knowing nowt about model railways, except that they make good money at auction, I am unable to enlighten those who are interested in such things as to the track gauge of the railway, but presume that I can safely say that since the train is hauling lovely big pint glasses, the track width must be considerably larger than a Hornby Double O.
I bet that even Bruce Reynolds couldn’t have told you that.
The positioning of the bar’s booth seats at 90 degrees to the wall enables the train to divert to them as a full-sized locomotive would into a railway siding. The train and its precious cargo come to rest on a platform ramped up ‘viaduct’ style across the length of each table at a height above the seated occupants’ heads. This all goes to make the arrival of one’s eagerly awaited beverages infinitely more exciting, even, from the angle viewed, spectacular, the only drawback being that the supports on which the train track rests tend to get in visions way of normal social interaction with others in your group sitting on the opposite side of the table. This disadvantage, however, may be one concealing a hidden advantage, should, for example, the company you are in necessitate some subtle moves on the social evening’s chessboard, viz ‘Amanda Woke is a bit of a lefty, we’ll hide her behind that strut!’
The novelty of Art Depot Restaurant’s train network and the modern predilection for photographing everything, whether it moves or not, is not without an intrinsic risk, for should you be distracted and not act quickly enough to remove the cargo on arrival, the train can suddenly reverse, causing more than a mild hysteria as it makes off with your drinks back to the bar from whence it came.
It may strike you as rather odd that a beer bar housed in a former beer cellar located beneath a former brewery is not thematically predisposed to the matter of beer production, but the railway as a feature is not without connection both to the brewery itself and to the district in which the brewery stands.
A long while ago … and now
One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Ponart was little more than a village waiting to be subsumed by the expanding city of Königsberg. During this dynamic period, the district’s major employers were Schifferdecker’s Ponart Brewery and, from the 1860s to the 1900s, the Prussian Eastern Railway, which eventually came to be known as the Royal Prussian State Railways. The development of the railway system in East Prussia and Russia significantly impacted Königsberg’s commerce, stimulating demand for enlargement of the workforce.
The resultant influx of labourers generated a need for the provision of homes close to the industries the workforce would be servicing. The high-density living created by these converging influences can effectively be quantified from an observation of the housing stock type, which predominantly comprises three-storey flats built as a series of uniform terraces, and also from an estimation of the close proximity of the Pomart Brewery to the railway’s rolling-stock marshalling yard, which is crossable by a through-truss Bridge, acting as the gateway from the centre of the city to this erstwhile working-class neighbourhood.
So let that be a lesson to you!
If you think that a model train delivering beer to your table is a whimsy of a thing, it will do you no harm to know that at Art Depot Restaurant the railway theme ends not at your table but follows you into the toilets. Not the train itself, or the station master or the ticket collector, but piped noises you would expect to hear at a busy railway station.
Now, toilets are hallowed places with particular sounds of their own, so it is vitally disconcerting to hear the outside world inside of them; indeed extremely difficult when it’s “All aboard!” and the whistle blows to divorce yourself from the governing fantasy that you are actually in a station loo. Blast! I thought, having heard the whistle shrilling, the carriage doors slamming and the train a chuff, chuff, chuffing as it left without me down the tracks. I had only gone and missed the 8.30 to Nowhere! There was nothing more that I could do. Well, what else could I do? I would have to go back to the waiting room, sink another beer or two and hope that anyone watching me would mistake me for being anyone else but the man they thought I wasn’t: “That’s him! That’s not Bruce Reynolds!”
“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”
28 February 2025 ~ Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
There is a gastro-bar on Mira Avenue Kaliningrad which lies at subterranean level. At the bottom of the steps that lead down to its entrance is a sign. The sign says enigmatically: “Fall into the Hole, Get Lost in Time”. The name of this gastro-bar is unlike any I have ever encountered. How many Rabbit Holes have you frequented? Through the windows of the front door, I can see the bar itself, the thing with beer taps on it. Without a second ado, like a ferret down a rabbit hole, and what could be more appropriate, I cross the portal to the other side.
Like Alice who passed before me (Who the !*!* is Alice?), who, it has been suggested, had an addiction of her own, I find myself in Wonderland. But first a passing word, or more, on what we mean by ‘cozy’.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
When people use the term ‘cozy’ they usually employ it in a complementary or even compensatory way, intimating that whilst the place they are describing may be small, it is warm, comfortable and inviting.
Before becoming a city slicker, I lived my life among country folk, whose view of the average rabbit hole was anything but romantic, and I tended to concur with them. But this strictly urbanised concept persuaded me to revise my opinion.
From the moment I entered its rarified world, I felt the urge to compare it to the British pub of yore, with its typical two-room segregation: one for the serious drinker, traditionally known as the public bar, and the other for more discerning types, which went by the name of the lounge. But the two-room similarity ends at this point of the parallel, since whilst one side of the gastro-bar has a discrete and inglenook feel and the other, being slightly larger, though not tremendously so, an aspirant sense of restaurant, neither one nor the other can be said to be less cozy.
It is the larger room of the two, however, where Wonderland is best perfected. Not exactly the gossamer Wonderland as conceived in the maze-like labyrinth of Lewis Carroll’s inventively playful, playfully odd, often obtuse and fantasy-making mind, but rather the rich star-spangled extravaganza bristling with special-effects, which, we are told at the time of writing, is the highest grossing film of director Tim Burton’s career. The framed anthropomorphist images displayed on Rabbit Hole’s walls are not the exquisite renditions of Tenniel or of Attwell, they are loud, near-modern grotesque, decidedly Burtonesque, and the looped Alice in Wonderland film shown silently on the wall-mounted screen needs no introduction: it is Mr Burton’s Hollywood blockbuster.
One of the most compelling draws of this pantheon to Burton ~ no, not a monogrammed pair of Alice’s ~ is its enticing assortment of Wonderland hats. Casually tossed in a wicker basket just below the TV screen, these simulated props, which identify with Alice’s fictional characters, enable those who are smitten by the happy-snappy smartphone age to plonk them on their bonces, take photos of each other and feed them proudly to their ‘Like-clicking’ friends, who are presumably waiting, phones in hands with nothing but bated breath, for the next instalment of lives that surprise. ‘If the hat fits, it fits’, and the management of Rabbit Hole have latched onto this modern compulsion, for it certainly fits their marketing ploy.
Wearing an Alice hat or not, there is something important you need to know about dining out at Rabbit Hole, which is that before the evening is out you will be rubbing Deep Heat into your neck. I think we can safely say that the last thing Mr Burton would likely want to hear is that his multi-billion-dollar film has been upstaged by a ceiling, but there you have it, and there it is.
Rabbit Hole’s ceiling is a work of art, an engaging, colourful illustration that wouldn’t look amiss in an early 20th century children’s story book. It is in itself a fitting tribute to the golden age of authentic Alice.
Its canvas is awash with iconic Wonderland objects, which float around in a densely turbulent space as though, caught up in the Wizard of Oz tornado, they have been flung at random and as a whole into ever-lasting affection, which, as all we avid readers know, is the library of our impressionable years to which we owe a lifelong membership.
‘Crikey!’ you might think, as you crane your neck in admiration, ‘they’ve even crimped’ the ceiling, but in this respect you’d be lavishing praise where praise is not readily due, for whilst the effect lends the images an appropriate dreamlike character, as every student of Königsberg’s history knows, or if he doesn’t should, the series of narrow arches that give the ceilings of basements and those in old industrial buildings in this part of the world their characteristic ripple, as aesthetically pleasing as they are, are principal to the fulfilment of an essential structural purpose. Having made this distinction, however, artistic concept and construction complement each other, as though their eventual coexistence had been ordained by Carroll himself. Carroll’s tale has innumerable twists, but Rabbit Hole’s ceiling has a few of its own.
If you haven’t come to Rabbit Hole to gawp in amazement up at the ceiling, the only explanation can be that perhaps you are here for the food.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
I see a lot of positive comments regarding the quality of Rabbit Hole’s food posted on the internet but have failed to find anything much written about the quantity. A word in your ear, if I may. On the evening that we dined there, one amongst our group was rather disappointed that the prawn salad she had ordered only contained as many prawns ~ two to be precise ~ to justify its name and warrant its plurality. And I was not exactly impressed when the baked potato for which I had paid the British equivalent of three whole pounds was lost in the landscape of a bowl whose suspiciously disingenuous proportions could have taken a single olive and optically turned it into a melon. Taste in all things was in place and thus it goes was quality, but the whereabouts of quantity was anybody’s guess, perhaps it was off taking tea with Carroll’s March Hare and Mad Hatter.
I have no idea what brand of beer they serve in Alice’s wonderland, do you? But down in Kaliningrad’s Rabbit hole, I was perfectly happy to reprise my friendship with the ever-amenable Maisel’s Weisse, which, as every student of good beer knows, perhaps those very same students who are so up to scratch on Konigsberg’s history, is a special Bavarian wheat beer.
I would have been quite content sitting and sipping at my Maisel’s Weisse whilst gazing at the ceiling ~ pass the crick-in-the-neck cream, please ~ had it not been for my discovery of that something exciting going on at a nearby table of ladies. They had just received a wooden platter from the waiter in a bowler hat containing umpteen shots of different vodkas. You may recall, and if you don’t here is the link that will jog your memory, that I knew all about these special platters and the different vodkas they conveyed, having been bought one at the Dreadnought.
Did Rabbit Hole have a vodka or two tinctured with different flavours? Most certainly they did not! They had a vodka or 54, replied the indignant waiter, and before we could disarm him, he had whipped his phone out of his pocket as smartly would have Hickok had he possessed a mobile phone instead of his trusty side-iron, and tippy tapping away on his phone, not Hickok but the waiter, he began to recite a list of vodkas as long as Alice’s arm when whatever the potion it was she drank inflated her general stature. The only way we could switch him off ~ and here’s a mark of salesmanship ~ was to interrupt his roll call by ordering up a batch of those vodkas upon whose fragrant personalities he was so zealously expatiating.
The least adventurous of our party, and, if the truth be known, cursed by the same affliction as Wonderland’s White Rabbit, I stuck to my staple flavoured vodka, horseradish, a choice I presumed would be safe by precedent, but which, as it transpired, was nothing of the sort. The grimace on my face could, I suppose, have been mistaken for the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat, but whatever it was that he was on, this was not my fix. I am not sure what became of the radish, but I felt the kick that came with the horse.
The next safe bet was cherry flavour, but this concoction as nice as it was being rather more sweet than I cared for, made me think that it may have been more prudent had I approached it via the stepping stones of turnip, carrot, swede and cucumber, but that my friends is what tasting is, a bit of a tightrope to getting it right, but a talking point when getting it wrong.
By the end of this Rabbit Hole evening, the unpredictable marriage of Maisel’s Weisse with exotic vodkas brought me to the realisation why when Alice drank her magic infusions one minute she felt too small for the room and much too tall the next. But the sorcery hadn’t ended here. Before returning to the ground above me, I was aghast to see in my reflection that some of the vodkas had gone to my head and one ~ it must have been carrot ~ had definitely gone to my ears … Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit …
18 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation
>> Creation — the famous exhibition from Annenkirche and the art group Grain is now in Kaliningrad! This is a biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern Christian art. The exhibition is located within the walls of the atmospheric old Brewery Ponart, where the past and the present, faith and creativity, deep meaning and stunning visual design are harmoniously combined. At the exhibition, you will learn all the most important things about the days of creation. You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether to bite or not to bite the forbidden fruit. Large-scale installations and aesthetic locations help to penetrate the theme and provide the opportunity for many beautiful keepsake photographs. << Translated from the exhibitor’s website
Sailing past the world and saying goodbye to the dinosaur, we entered a short, narrow section of corridor, the walls of which were decorated with multiple lights, each having flower petal shades in hues of natural green and yellow. This room appeared to represent Day 3 of God’s world creation: the introduction of the natural environment, the phenomenon we call ‘nature’.
The impact of the following room would have been awesome without comparison to the cramped and confined space of the last, but no such prelude was necessary.
We were now standing in an area of the old brewery, which once would have comprised three or four storeys but, gutted from floor to rafters, had been recast as a towering shaft, gnarled, scarred and ragged. The entire confinement was bathed in a low red glow, causing me to bookmark Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, which was a rather unfortunate negative parallel, because the huge illuminated moon suspended from the ceiling suggested that in the narrative structure by which the rooms were sequenced, we must have arrived at Day 4, the creation of the universe. Don’t quote me on this, however, as my proficiency in maths is far below the standard of the divinity’s.
A low, not humming sound, but musical chord, which wavered slightly, but not enough in noticeable degree to be called melodic, vibrated sonorously through the vertical vastness of this lofty chamber, adding audibility to its already visual awesomeness. Stunned by the giant moon, I also found myself becoming inadvertently absorbed by the many scars with which the faces of the wall were pocked and disfigured, the many uneven ledges and protuberances, the legion of empty joist holes, which reminded me of eye sockets in the face of an ancient skull.
Scaling three of the four walls was a metal staircase, linked by two horizontal platforms at higher and lower levels. This was a staircase which, if you had not turned adult, you would want to climb immediately. Up I went!
The difference in elevation of the two landings provided an agreeable variety of photo opportunities, which, have smartphone will snap, we, of course, took full advantage of.
At the summit of the steps, we passed into a small piece of truncated passageway, emerging thereafter into a great rectangular room, the installations and arrangement of which in relation to one another reminded me of the surrealist work of Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s collage animator.
Lighting ~ green, blue, orange-red ~ bird flocks strung in mid air, paintings of beasts on the walls, a row of trampoline-seat swings and, in the centre of this row, but at the further end of the room, an enormous pointing white hand (if this had been the UK, it would have been liberal black), thrusts out of the heavens (in this case from the ceiling) through clumps of something that I am rather fond of. I was thinking ‘cauliflower’; the artistic creators most probably clouds.
“Michaelangelo!” Olga announced, annoying me. I had wanted to say it first
The next venue, the room immediately above the one containing the giant hand, was, arguably, more surreal than the last. Two rows of the same sized but differently stylised mannequin heads centred atop rectangular plinths travelled along the centre of the chamber, whose every wall had attached to them paintings of a symbolic nature depicting either variations on the theme of divine creation, Michaelangelo’s version, or unsympathetic renditions of the progenitors of original sin, the hapless Adam and Eve.
Lighting continued to generate atmosphere as it had in the rooms before, and once again could be heard that low, impenetrable but penetrating, measured background hum, which, speaking for myself, had nothing of hallelujah in it but a lot of numbing depth. It gave me grim satisfaction to note that it, and all I had experienced whilst on this voyage of wonder, accorded with my sullied view that of all God’s myriad creations, with the exception of man himself, the world is the most imperfect. Indeed, I have to say and must say, that you would need to be less receptive than deaf, dumb and blind, or a child upon a rocking horse or swing, not to arrive at the end of this incredibly evocative ghost-train ride with more of awe and wonder and less of self-possession than you had upon starting out.
True to form, there is nothing in this biblical treatise on the creation of the world that does not deserve to be called amazing but at one and the same time peripherally unsettling, and nowhere was this more apparent than in each and every one of the artistic interpretations of the spark of life and the fall of man.
The grotesque ethereal landscapes portrayed symbolically in these works of art made the scores of red rosy apples suspended on threads of different lengths, some so long that the apples attached to them descended through circular pits in the floor, wherefrom they could be witnessed hovering above a rectangular trough scattered with scarlet bricks, divine enough to test the wrath of God. This then is the thematic ethos of the exhibition’s penultimate room, where it is hats off to Creation’s creators who, by ingenuity or by accident, have made the legendary curse of original sin never seem more tempting!
I will never now be able to look again in innocence at a store-bought rosy apple or pluck one off a tree without that the act of doing so emphatically returns me to this desirous scene at Ponart Brewery, as well as to the mythological premise that almost every instinctual human act is sin wrapped up in guilt or guilt wrapped up in sin.
It occurs to me that there is someone out there who is abrogating responsibility for filling this flawed world of ours with a dynastic glut of apple pluckers. Tell me, who can think of Granny Smith when the orchard in full bloom is full to bursting with attractive distractions like Honeycrisp and Golden Delicious? It’s easy to blame it on Adam and Eve, they are not here to defend themselves.
Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation
The truth of the matter is that the biblical story of creation, that masterpiece of tragedy of which we are a part, means different things to different people. Go and see it for yourself, and ask yourself at the end of the journey, is the biblical view of our world a slice of apple pie, or does it give you the pip? One thing is for certain, Creation is an exhibition, which starts and keeps you thinking. https://zernoart.ru/creation_kaliningrad
