Category Archives: Kaliningrad Region Photo Gallery

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

A festive day in Zelenogradsk

Published: 24 December 2020

Travelling for the first time from a small railway station tucked away in Kaliningrad, my wife, Olga, and I recently visited the coastal resort Zelenogradsk. It was a wet, cold, overcast day, and it was also Monday, so we had the pleasure of travelling on a very sparsely populated train. Even though we were the only ones sitting in a carriage that could hold 60 people effortlessly, we were still obliged to obey the mandatory mask-wearing rule, aka ‘muzzles’, as Olga calls them.

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

Cutting out the rail journey across town, the trip took about twenty minutes in total. First stop, Love café, for a bowl of piping hot mushroom soup, potato pancakes and a couple of carafes of vodka. Thus fortified against the inclement weather, we were better able to appreciate the delights of Zelenogradsk’s festive decorations. The upper end of the High Street was positively festooned with them, and there was no shortage for my paparazzi-minded wife to snap her mobile phone at, prior to uploading them onto Facebook.

Love café Zelinogradsk: Mick Hart & Olga Hart Xmas 2020 — **Mick & Olga Hart in Love café Zelinogradsk, Russia, Christmas 2020**

Although the lower end of the High Street was less profusely decorated, I was much taken with the latest socio-cultural symbol, which speaks volumes about our modern-day society. It takes the form of a bronze statue, modelled after a shapely young woman trouncing across the road. She is towing a case on wheels and, oblivious to everything around her but herself, is taking a selfie on her mobile phone. With her arm outstretched and her head tossed back, she is so completely self-entranced that when I put my arm around her she did not blink an eyelid. Thank you lady for that, but do watch out for the traffic now!

We took a stroll along the deserted beach, which only five months ago was a sardine tin of sun loungers, and then retraced our steps from the park, detouring in the direction of the Cranz water tower. My wife, knowing that I have a skeleton fetish, had steered me toward the Skeleton Museum, a truly novel establishment which I intend to write about later.

Then, it was back along the High Street, allowing Olga to indulge herself in her fetish ~ more photo-taking for Facebook. This made me grumble a bit. This never-ending compulsion to phone-photo everything for Führer Facebook has the irritating tendency to subjugate life to a series of fits and starts, placing real time in abeyance, putting it on hold in the most obtrusive and disjointing way. The inconvenience righted itself, however, when Olga, in order to placate me, suggested that we stop for a drink in the Telegraf restaurant, a capital suggestion with which it was inconceivable not to agree and which most mysteriously seemed to alter my point of view about photos. After all, I reasoned, over a nice refreshing ‘pint’, I would need the photographs for my blog.

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

Bicycle Zelinogradsk adorned for Christmas

Zelenogradsk, Russia, Christmas 2020

Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartment Blocks

Zelenogradsk’s new sea-view apartment blocks are duneright amazing!

Revised 1 April 2024 | First published: 19 August 2020 ~ Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartment Blocks

Now, whilst in Zelenogradsk, Russia, if you take the coastal route written about in my previous posts, you will eventually come across what could with accuracy be described as an architectural wonder of our modern age.

As noted in those previous posts, the block-paved thoroughfare runs parallel with the sea, but on walking it you reach a point where a series of low-level private flats, not so terribly old, obstruct you from making further progress. At this juncture, you have no option if you want to proceed but to continue your walk in land, a route that very soon brings you before a rather prosaic development residential in nature, most of whose flats which were up for sale last year are up for sale this year (2020). But as you turn to the right a most amazing visual thing happens, helped not a little, I suspect, by the mediocre tenor of the flats you passed a moment ago. In less than 18 months a new development has sprung from the ground, which, in its domineering height, prodigious bulk and latitude and by dint of its sheer proliferation in a relatively short space of time, really knocks you for six.

Completely out of scale with everything around it and consuming more ground than a migrant camp in Calais is the most enormous high-rise residential estate that I have ever encountered. With your senses still reeling from scale fright, the foreground flats and those behind them marching regimentally down the steep fall of the hill, grab you by the Gothics. If, like me, you are a Gothic freak, adore Gothic almost as much as drinking a pint of real ale in the company of Nigel Farage, then you will put aside any prejudices that you may have adopted against kitsch and lap what you see before you up like a Westernised Bela Lugosi on a boy’s night out in Butlins.

Gothic towers in Zelenogradsk Russia — **Gothic ~ get the point!**

Here, there are more than enough perpendiculars, faceted angles, towers, turrets and pinnacles to give every Gothic addict the fix they crave and need. Yes, I know that these structures are modern, but I have personally consulted with Tom Cat Murr in whom, he has assured me, no catatonia has been induced by their 21^st century origin.

**Zelenogradsk Apartment Blocks with a touch of Gothic**

I am not sure, however, that either he or I feel the same way about the estate’s alter ego, those just as massy structures that run in line with their Gothic neighbours along the unfinished roadside and which extend at right angles from them.

**Zelenogradsk flats, Russia: two styles face off against each other** ~Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartment Blocks

The flip side to the Gothicised coin is a vast battery of impressive apartments built, correction embellished, in the Neo-Classical and Neo-Renaissance spirit. Designed with corners, angles and twists enough to thwart prescribed conformity, and assisted in this respect by the natural decline of the landscape, along whose downward curve this Goliath series of buildings march in the most dramatic manner, the stacking effect of shelves and ledges, inclusion of white panels, many adorned with relief motifs, and woven into the frieze a colonnade of arches strike a Kensington/Chelsea chord in me, chiming, whilst not exactly in tune but all the better for it, with a nuanced note in their juxtaposition against the light-brick infill. The icing on top of this pastiche cherry has to be the recessed oval, a final flaunting touch of extravagance clearly seen at the front and centre of the classic Dutch-styled gable.

**The icing on the top** ~ Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartment Blocks

Whatever your feelings towards these 21^st century additions to Zelenogradsk’s built and natural environment, you have to admit they are a big improvement on the experimental, rectangular-limited, mass-housing pre-fab models constructed during Stalin’s reign and the clunky pre-cast concrete jobbies, known as the Khrushchyovka, that went up at an alarming rate in the late 1940s and 50s.

Nevertheless, for all their ubiquitous uniformity and quick-assembly triumph over the lauded principles of aesthetic finesse, they, these seemingly once drab predecessors, have, with the re-evaluation that typically comes with the passing of time and hindsight, acquired, especially in recent years, an era-defining nostalgic status similar in intrinsic import to the cult of personality.

However, whether today’s apartments that are changing Zelenogradsk’s shoreline profile into a high-density urbanised landscape will be accepted so sympathetically by tomorrow’s generations depends on values we cannot predict. As with everything in our immediate lives ~ only time will tell.

Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartments — **We will see them from the beaches!**

Svetlogorsk Gothic (Rauschen)

Rauschen (Svetlogorsk) Gothic Architecture

This is one of my all-time favourite buildings in the Kaliningrad region’s coastal resort, Svetlogorsk (German: Rauschen). Without genning up on its history, I would estimate that it dates to around the 1920s and is designed and constructed in a neo-Gothic style. The wooden cladding, turret finial, pointed and high gables, clambering levels and fascinating asymmetry make for a very interesting Carpenter Gothic structure steeped in the Romanticist tradition. Hoffmann would have been proud of it!

Svetlogorsk Gothic (Rauschen)

As noted in my previous article, at the turn of the 21^st century, this was home to the Café Mozart. It has sat idle and empty for many moons since and was up for sale in 2018, although on our New Year’s Eve trip 2019-2020 to Svetlogorsk , the ‘for sale’ banner was missing. Has it been sold? Is it ‘off the market’? Who knows? All I know is that it embodies all the atmospheric architectural features that my imagination needs and craves!