Category Archives: VISITOR’S GUIDE to KALININGRAD

Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?

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.

Relative to this post
How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK
Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information
Is the Poland to Kaliningrad Border Open?
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
Hotel Mercure Gdansk: Reasons to Stay There!

Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?

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, cold evening — ^**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!

Sleep and Fly Gdansk. A motel convenient for the airport.

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 14^thof 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.

A view of the bar at the Sleep and Fly Gdansk

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.

Mick Hart at Sleep and Fly ponders on going to bed — 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!

The Main Thing

Sleep & Fly
Spadochroniarzy 12, 80-298 Gdańsk, Poland

Tel: +48 604 746 077

Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track

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Mick Hart’s one-track mind takes him to Art Depot

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.

A model train full of beer in Kaliningrad

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

Zelenogradsk at a bar in Ponart Brewery complex

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.

Seating beer bar restuarant in Kaliningrad

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.

Mick Hart with beer arrived by train at Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad

Mick Hart reaching for beer from model train

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!”

The main thing

Art Depot Restaurant
Kaliningrad, Sudostroitelnaya st., 6-8
(on the territory of the historical quarter ‘Ponart’)

Tel (reservations): +7 (963) 295 74 95

Opening times
Mon to Fri: 11am to 10pm
Sat & Sun: 12pm to 11pm

Website: Art Depot Restaurant

Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad Wonder No More

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“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.

Olga Hart at Kaliningrad Rabbit Hole Bar

White Rabbit in Rabbit Hole Bar Kaliningrad

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 20^th 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.

Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad ceiling is a work of art

‘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.

The Mad March Hair takes tea at Rabbit Hole

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.

Bowler-hatted waiter at Rabbit Hole, Kaliningrad

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 …

MIck Hart at Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad

Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation

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Ponart Brewery Another Bite at Creation’s Apple

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

And now an extract from my diary regarding my impressions of Creation (The Creation of the World exhibition). See my earlier post, Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

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.

Now see here > Restoring the Polessk Brewery in the Kaliningrad Region

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

Ponart Brewery Kaliningrad hosting the Creation of the World exhibition

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.

Biblical Creation of the World. A grotesque view of a grotesuq world

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.

Ponart Brewery images of the world's creation

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!

Olga Hart at Pomart Brewery Creation Exhibition

Apples of temptation Creation Exhibition, Kaliningrad

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

👉 PIVOVAR RESTAURANT BREWERY, KALININGRAD

Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

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A step-by-step guide to the six days it took to create the world

10 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

Holiness, theological doctrines and a biblical view of the world, these are some of the many spiritual components of our mortal existence with which, I imagine, I am rarely associated. I can think of hardly anybody among those few who think they know me, and that includes myself, who would even half believe that I would take an active interest in the genesis creation narrative. And yet, there I was ~ where, I shall tell you in good time ~ not merely taking an interest in, but following in the footsteps of, the Divine Creator’s plan.

The first question that was put to us was, “How long did it take God to create the world?” Where my wife got three days from, I have no idea. Her god must have been on piecework. My answer, after rummaging hastily through my Church of England primary education archives, “seven days”, was nearer to the mark, but our guide, a Lutheran priest, corrected me, just as I remembered what I have always considered to be a nitpicking distinction, claiming that the world was made in six days and on the seventh, the Good Lord rested.

This genesis paradigm has been used to explain why we go to, or in England used to go to, church on Sundays and why on that same day, before the evil ones changed the licensing laws, the pubs worked fewer hours, so that we, the people who used the pubs, would stay at home and rest in order to work greater hours in the restless week to come. Is nothing sacred to exploitation? The answer to that is no.

I had not been asked such searching biblical questions since I was a nipper, and, as far as I can recall, had never been asked them whilst standing in front of a giant globe of the world, lit up and suspended within a hushed and semi-darkened room, bathed in a red-filtered light, with a Lutheran priest standing before me dressed in a pair of jeans surrounded by a semi-circle of orange-painted rocking horses.

Something for the weekend, Sir?
Victor Ryabinin Art Exhibition retrospective 2021
Where Art Meets Interior Design
Telegraph Art Restaurant, Svetlogorsk

If this was not enough to persuade me that I had wandered onto the TV film set of the cult 1960s’ series The Prisoner, then the presence of a dinosaur’s skeleton poised at the side of the globe primordially grinning extinction at me brought me back to earth with a surrealistic jolt.

Ponart Brewery Creation: Dinosaur and large world installation at Kaliningrad's Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

In telling you that the cavernous, scarred, hollowed out, red-brick room in which myself, my wife, the priest, the globe and the dinosaur were congregated was one piece in the mammoth jigsaw of Königsberg’s Pomart Brewery, a rambling late-19^th century pile undergoing restoration and emerging from its ruined condition as a multifarious public space, those who think they know me, and this includes myself, will pick up on the one word ‘brewery’ and whisper slyly under their breath, ‘Hmm, so that’s why he was there!” But both of us could not be more wrong. Though it shames me to admit it, I was not strictly or exclusively at Pomart’s for the beer.

Mick Hart at the Ponart Brewery in Kaliningrad

Not that I have not been aware of the Pomart Brewery’s existence; could I of all people be guilty of this oversight? I have known it as a historic landmark fallen into dereliction and, in more recent months, as an ambitious restoration project, complete with functioning brewery. The fact, therefore, that I have not had time to explore it in either its faded former or current glory testifies to the many things that there are to see and do in and around Kaliningrad. But here we were, or rather there we were, at last, attending an exhibition called Creation, a deceptively simple title for something of such conceptual and spatial magnitude.

Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition

The art group ‘Grain’, Creation’s creators, originates from ‘Annenkirche’ (in Russian: Анненкирхе), or the easier to relate to St Anne’s Lutheran Church in the Russian city of St Petersburg.

The group describes their exhibition as a “biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern art … 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 the creation,” Creation’s creators promise. “You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether or not to bite the forbidden fruit.”

Tempted? I wouldn’t recommend it. Although among the exhibition’s stimulating props and large-scale installations, you will find no shortage of apples, like everything else in this tour de force the apples are only as real as symbolic licence permits them to be. The creators of Creation invite you to leave this material world and sink your teeth into something that you may have bitten into before, but which lies beyond the secular yonder to which you have grown accustomed.

Apples of Temptation at the Creation of the World Exhibition

Ponart’s Brewery was not created as a venue for Creation, it was created for the creation of Pilsner lager (there’s no accounting for taste), but as an exact fit for Creation’s needs, it is difficult to imagine anywhere else coming reasonably close. Ponart swallows everything whole ~ you, me, apples and all, even the giant globe of the world and the looming sphere of the moon. To the exhibition’s props, the gargantuan scarred-brick labyrinth constitutes a compatible universe, an expanse in which each exhibit finds its own unique space, providing the parabolic journey, along whose line the exhibits lead you, with a transport of celestial commentary and a glimpse into your own beliefs, which, latent within your spiritual landscape, are as revealing in their intimacy as they are in cosmic proportion.

Each exhibit seems to signpost biblical images in your childhood past, which, as you are gradually reacquainted, shuffle to and fro against an ever-changing, dream-like scenery, part comprised of book illustrations, part the work of your own young hand. You can almost feel the wax of the crayons brushing against your fingers and feel the smile on your face at the Rembrandt you have created.

Ponart Brewery Creation: All creatures great and small at Ponart Brewery Exhibition, Kaliningrad

Creation is the kind of exhibition, the startling kind, where you can live the Earth’s first six days of life at a pace that suits your ruminations, and when you feel you have reached the seventh, you can take a well-earnt rest, for example, in one of Ponart’s relaxing bars or atmospheric restaurants.

Creation has never been so creative and Ponart’s never so tempting.

Creation’s Website
Выставка Сотворение в Калининграде

What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyers paradise?

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I went, I saw, I bought … and I am still buying!

Revised 19 January 2025 | First published: 16 June 2022 ~ What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyers paradise?

NOTE>: Kaliningrad flea market has moved! Follow the link to the new location here. Use this article to gain an insight and overview of what the market has to offer. The address of the new location can also be found at the end of this post.

In 2000, the first time I set foot on Kaliningrad soil ~ a giant step for a man who had never been to Russia before ~ one of the major attractions very quickly became the city’s flea market or junk market, as we like to call it.

Linked post > Beldray at Kaliningrad Flea Market a Surprising Find

In those days, the junk market was located at the side of Kaliningrad’s central market, a monolithic and cavernous complex consisting of all kinds of exciting combinations of traditional stalls, purpose-built units and multi-layered shops, selling everything from fruit and veg to jewellery.

To get to the market we would cut around the back of Lenin’s statute, which occupied the place where the Orthodox cathedral stands today (irony), and making our way along a make-shift pavement of boards raised on pallets, often treacherously slippy as winter approached, we’d pass amidst the wagon train of covered craft-sellers’ stalls, trek across the city’s bus park and, on the last leg of the journey, sidle off down a long, wide alley, which had rattling tin on one side and a towering building on the other. I have no idea why, as I was often in Kaliningrad during the sunny seasons, but my abiding memory of that alley was that it sucked wind down it like the last gasp of breath and was never anything other than cold, wet and raining.

Another ‘in those days’ was that the junk market extended along the side of the road, which is now a pedestrianised space between buildings ancient and modern and the latest super monolithic shopping centre.

Dealers could be found in an old yard opposite, plying their trade from a shanty town of stalls, all higgledy-piggledy, thrown and cobbled together, whilst public sellers set up shop on a narrow sloping scar of land, a grass verge at the side of a pavement worn down over the years by the restless itinerance of junk-seller hopefuls.

In our militaria dealing and 1940s’ re-enactment hey days, we bought twenty pairs of sapagee (high leather and canvas military boots) from a bloke stalled out on this piece of ground over several consecutive days. We also bought his Soviet military belts, the ones that he was wearing. On the last day of purchasing, we would have had his belt again had he more to sell, but all that he had left by the time we were through with buying was a piece of knotted string, which he needed to keep his trousers up.

When we left Russia at the end of a month’s visit, this was in 2004, border security couldn’t help sniggering when they found inside our vehicle twenty pairs of old Soviet boots, rolled up tightly, lashed down with string and packed away in bin liners. But he who laughs last, laughs longest. We hadn’t sneaked off with an icon or two or anything of any great value, but boots bought for a quid a pair that we could sell on in the UK at £35 or more a pop to WWII re-enactors and members of living history groups was unarguably lubbly jubbly. Whilst we wouldn’t get rich on the proceeds, it would certainly help to offset the cost of our trip to Kaliningrad. Dear, dear comrades, it shames me to admit what a despicable capitalist I once was.

When I first came to Kaliningrad (2000), I was buying stuff mainly for myself, but as I turned dealer, as most collectors are obliged to do to reclaim the space they live in, I did what all collectors must when the fear of decluttering wakes them in a cold sweat from their slumbers: I went out looking for more clutter, the justification being that I was no longer buying it for myself but selling it on for profit.

Believe you me, sooner or later (usually later), every junk hoarder arrives at a critical stage of consciousness, when they finally have to admit to themselves that buying old stuff is not just a compulsion, it is in fact a disease. After confession, however, absolution swiftly follows and, like all professional sinners, hoarders quickly learn that regular sin and regular confession go productively hand-in-hand. Thus, wherever it was we travelled to ~ be it Lithuania, Latvia, Poland or Odessa in Ukraine ~ the story was always the same: junk markets and antique shops loomed large on the itinerary.

What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyers’ paradise?

Be it ever so difficult, if not impossible, for the likes of us to understand, but accumulating old stuff is not everyone’s cup of tea. Thus, the first victims of the development and progressive gentrification of Kaliningrad’s market area were the junk sellers. Speaking euphemistically, they were ‘politely asked to move on’.

I must admit (there you go, I am at it again, confessing!) that when I discovered their absence, I was truly mortified: new shops, block-paved walkways, tree-inset pedestrian-only streets ~ to be sure an incredible face lift, which no amount of Botox or timely plastic surgery could hope to emulate. All, I suppose, applaudable. But oh! Wherefore thou goest junk?!

As it happened there was no cause for alarm. All I needed to do was go around the bend, something that I am known to be good at, and there it was, as plain as the specs (the vintage specs) on your nose.

The precise location of the junk market was ~ I use the term ‘was’ because rumour has it that the purveyors of indispensable high-quality items and second-hand recyclables may be made to move on again to make way for further civic tarting ~ parallel to the road at the back of Der Wrangel tower, thereupon extending at a right angle, along a sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy, tree-shaded stretch of embankment, skirting a remnant of Königsberg’s moat.

The better-quality items ~ such as militaria and Königsberg relics ~ are generally to be found on the stalls lining either side of the pavement. Here you can discover gems, although not necessarily, or regularly for that matter, at prices to suit your pocket.

German helmets & ceramics Kaliningrad Flea Market

The pavement-side sellers are mainly traders, people ‘in the know’, who are hoping to get at least market rate for their wares or substantially more, if they can wangle it.

Experience has taught me that in dealing with these chaps movement on prices is not unachievable, but don’t expect the sort of discounts that are possible to negotiate at UK vintage and boot fairs. Sellers in Kaliningrad are skilled in the art of bargaining and are seemingly absolute in their conviction that if you don’t want it at the quoted price some German tourist will.

The pavement Kaliningrad Flea Market — **A busy Saturday at Kaliningrad Flea Market**

If you are after military items, especially those relating to WWII and to Königsberg’s German past, then it is here, along this stretch of pavement, where most likely you will find them. Badges, military dog-tags, Third Reich medals and weapon relics are often quite prolific in this quarter, as is cutlery, ceramics and ceramic fragments, many backstamped with political symbols and the insignia of Germany’s military services.

A word of warning, however. For although Kaliningrad’s German heritage and the fierce battles fought there during WWII would reasonably lead you to expect a preponderance of genuine military relics, as anyone who collects Third Reich memorabilia and/or deals in this specialised field will tell you, counterfeit and reproductions abound. German WWII relics, both military and civilian, bearing ideological runes attained collectable status almost before WWII had ended, and a thriving market in quality replicas to service this growing interest emerged as early as the late 1940s.

Party badges, military decorations, particularly of the higher orders and those associated with the German SS, have been faked and faked extensively, and faked with such credibility that it is difficult to distinguish, sometimes almost impossible, the later versions from the real McCoy, particularly since many were struck from the same dies and moulds that were used to create the originals.

The rule of thumb when hunting out Third Reich bargains from dealers’ stock is that you are less likely to get a bargain than to experience a hard bargain, as the pieces acquired by dealers will almost certainly have been exhaustively studied and meticulously researched. However, if you are tempted to buy, pay attention to the item’s appearance. Remember that genuine military items dating to the Second World War are now well into their dotage ~ 80-years-plus ~ and just like ‘mature’ people will generally exhibit significant signs of age, age-related wear and tear and sundry other defects from natural use and handling.

The other thing to watch out for is a proliferation of similar items at any one time. When in the UK, I was a regular attendee at the Bedford Arms Fair, then held in the now demolished Bunyan Centre, you could guarantee each year that a ‘bumper crop’ of something or other would mysteriously materialise. What an alarm bell that is! For example, one year it was German army dress daggers. Every other dealer seemed to have some and all in mint condition; the next it was German flags. These looked and smelt the part ~old ~ with the exception of their labels, which did neither. So, beware! Before you part with your cash or touch your card on the handset, remember these two wise words: Caveat emptor!

When I buy German these days I do so not to sell on but mainly for nostalgic reasons, and because I am attracted by the historic value only, I am content to purchase military pieces, decorations, party badges and anything else that appeals to me that have been dug up out of the ground. Naturally, condition ranges from considerably less than pristine to battered, biffed, corroded and poor, but an item in this condition is more likely to be the genuine article than one that might be described as ‘remarkably well-preserved’. Moreover, you can usually buy such items at a price that won’t break your brother’s piggy bank (is that another confession?).

The same can be said for architectural pieces such as enamel and metal signs that are Königsberg in origin. Signs ~ advertising, military, street plaques ~ whatever they might be, are personal favourites of mine, since they make historically interesting additions to any thoughtful home design. In purchasing relics of this nature, the same rule applies as the guiding one proposed for determining whether militaria is genuine or not. Signs, whatever their type and whatever material they are made of will, in the main, have been used, thus commensurable indications of use and age should be apparent.

In the past four decades, as original signs, especially enamel ones, have grown in popularity and correspondingly price, various retro companies have been successfully plugging the gap in an escalating market, meeting demand with repro goods. Some of these shout repro at you from a telescopic distance, but as techniques in ageing evolve, it often can be hard at first glance, even after several glances and even after a detailed study, to separate the wheat from the chaff, particularly when impulsiveness knocks caution quite unconscious. And signs are not the only things that are being skilfully ‘got at’. I recall a ‘19^th century ship’s wheel turning up at our local auction house. It was so well aged and distressed that were it not for the fact that it was so thoroughly convincing, you could easily have talked yourself Into disbelieving that it was anything other than the genuine article.

This is what to look out for: Signs that are ‘uniformly’ aged or show wear and tear in places where you would most expect to find wear and tear but not to the extent that it dissuades you from going ahead with a purchase are to be placed at the top of the suspect list. The last thing you want to discover, after years of gazing lovingly at the antique sign in your home, romancing on the fancy that this was once on a Königsberg shop front, long imagining how eyes like yours lost in time and to memory alighted on it as yours do now, is to learn that your treasured piece of history was in fact knocked out in China less than a week before you bought it.

Königsberg antique enamel signs in Victor Ryabinin's art studio, Kaliningrad — **Original German/Königsberg signs** (photo taken Victor Ryabin Studio, c.2010)

Once authenticity has been established, anything to be had forming a direct link to Königsberg can only be irresistible, not just signs but home appliances, kitchen ware, tea sets, ornaments, furniture, garden tools, anything in fact, especially when that anything bears irrefutable provenance in the form of a maker’s mark. Metalware and ceramics embossed or printed with commercial references, ie references to memorable brands or specific retail outlets, are desirable collectors’ pieces. Old ashtrays, many of which are inventive in shape and size, are top whack in this category. Even if chipped and cracked, they still command high prices, and as for the best examples, which are usually in the hands of dealers, after you have exclaimed with astonishment, “How much!” in those same hands they may well remain.

Konigsberg relic at Kaliningrad flea market

For a less expensive and in-profusion alternative, you could do far worse than plump for bottles. Bottle bygones are dug up in their hundreds, possibly thousands, in Kaliningrad and across the region, but as there are as many different shapes, sizes and hues as there is quantity, it is not unreasonable to discover rare, curious and even exquisite bottles rubbing shoulders with the more mundane.

In the UK, old bottles from the end of the 19^th century to the 1960s are as cheap as chips (used to be, before the West sanctioned itself), but Kaliningrad is not the UK, so don’t expect to get bargains on a par. The trade here adjusts the market price according to the needs and instincts of German visitors, many of whom are easily swayed to part with more money than they seem to have sense for a fragment of their forbears’ past. But “Ahh,” I hear you say, “what price, philistine, can anyone put on nostalgia?” Must I confess again?

Mick Hart buys vintage bottle at Kaliningrad Flea Market

I have been known to part with as much as ten quid for an interesting and unusual bottle when it has caught my fancy, but this kind of impetuosity acts in defiance of common sense. If you haven’t got the bottle to part with that much, and you shouldn’t have (Frank Zappa: ‘How could I be such a fool!’), when visiting Kaliningrad’s ‘flea market’, turn 90 degrees from the pavement, head along the well-worn and sometimes muddy embankment, and there you will find bottles and a vast range of all sorts, spread out on the ground on blankets, perched on top of little tables, hanging even in the branches of trees, for this is the market’s bargain basement, home to mainly domestic sellers.

Königsberg antique collectable bottles from Kaliningrad market

I have bought all sorts of things from this part of the market that I never knew I did not need, not to mention clothes that I have never worn and never will wear. For example, I was once obliged to buy an old tin bucket, and I would not dream of wearing it. It’s far too nice a bucket to use as a bucket should be used; so, there it sits in our dacha full of things that one day I possibly may go looking for but will never dream of looking for in that old tin bucket. It’s the sort of bucket that dealers such as I typically find in house clearances ~ a bucket of flotsam and jetsam left behind by the owner when he up and decided to die; a bucket of odds and ends destined to take up valuable space; the accidental contents of which having absolutely no value at all, I would never be able to give away let alone turn as much as a penny on. I sometimes wonder if this is not the only logical reason why people fill their houses and barns with junk, viz to make more work for those poor sods whose job it is to clear them after they, the owners, kick the bucket. And what a lovely bucket, my bucket is!

Mick Hart with vitage Tin bucket near Kaliningrad fort

Now, where was I? Ahh, yes wandering around on the bank mesmerised by matter.

As I said at the outset of this post, Kaliningrad’s ‘collectors’ market’ is on the move again. Please don’t quote me on this! As Elvis Costello said, it could be ‘just a rumour that was spread around town’, but its veracity is tied to the echo that the strip of wooded embankment roaming along by the side of the Königsberg fort may soon be hosting its last tin bucket. There is a whisper in the air of landscape reincarnation and the rustle of leaves in a public park.

Likewise, I am not entirely certain where this cornucopia of memories, this junk market par excellence, is now officially bound, although the wind in my tin bucket tells me that it may be somewhere not far removed from the city’s botanical gardens.

To be perfectly honest with you (another confession may soon be required), I really harbour no desire to know the new location ~ what the eye doesn’t see the heart won’t pine after. Thus, the next time that I wake up at the market handing over my roubles, I won’t be able to blame myself for going there deliberately and for buying things on purpose. Take a leaf out of my well-thumbed book: never leave chance to anything else but intention ~ you can always confess in the fulness of time.

*Proposed location of Kaliningrad Flea Market at time of writing:

Gaidara Street 8 ~ a piece of land, I am told, that lies opposite the bridge on the way to Sovetsky Prospekt.

Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad the Magic of Kavkaz

It’s magic at Kavkaz

31 December 2024 ~ Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad the Magic of Kavkaz

Like many towns and cities in Christendom, the centre of Kaliningrad undergoes a magical transformation over the festive season. Victory Square becomes a yuletide theatre, a stage of glittering silver motifs, including a life-sized Santa’s sleigh with reindeers and a larger-than-life iconic assemblage of 2025 numerals. A lofty, conical Christmas tree transitions through a dramatic series of illuminating colour contrasts. The commercial buildings that border the square are, for want of a no less appropriate term, all lit up like Christmas trees, whilst the municipal building facing the square takes the Christmas biscuit, with its symmetry of grazing lights gently and slowly ringing the changes in complementary hues through a violet, blue and turquoise spectrum.

Sleigh and reindeers Victory Square Kaliningrad

Welcome 2025 Victory Square, Kaliningrad

We were on our way to the Kavkaz Restaurant, and our route would take us across this bewitching bespangled world. I had one eye on the white magic and one eye on the black. In England, this is de rigueur nowadays, especially during the festive season, for every day and every way is a possible Christmas Market. Happy Christmas (and every day) from Britain’s politicians.

With no discernible goblins grabbing at the ghoulies, I felt safe to take my camera out and shoot some snaps for the folks back home. It was then, at that moment, I saw her: a Christmas angel with very long legs, wearing a skirt that was far too short for winter ~ whatever could she be thinking of? ~ and a pair of black leather boots. As amazing as she was, she was just another stocking filler. The real angel was yet to come. She was waiting for us in Victory Square, silver-white with wings to match, a tribute to the Christmas props with which she was surrounded. She was poised in the centre of Victory Square: a photograph waiting to happen.

“Oh, please take a photograph of me, next to the angel!” Olga pleaded. She knows that I have a limited tolerance to taking smartphone photos for the sake of harvesting ‘likes’ on social media. But that is part of the magic of Christmas, the willingness to make concessions for no other reason than because it is Christmas.

It was hard to resist the angel. She looked the perfect angel, with her voluminous white and silver wings, and here I am confessing that for all my reservations about incessant, gratuitous photo-taking, I myself was beyond redemption to get in on the act. The angel must have had some inkling of her photogenic allurement, as she had thoughtfully brought along with her a second set of wings, not so big and so bold as her own, but like the halos she also carried, convenient and prop sized.

Mick Hart with an angel in Victory Square, Kaliningrad

When your halo is a permanent fixture, you have no need for apparatus, but I was chuffed about the wings. I never knew until I watched Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life!, the most highly rated Christmas film of 1946 and notably of all time, that angels have to earn their wings, although I have often paused to wonder why mine are so long coming.

The angel, like angels should be, was only too pleased to oblige when we asked to take a photo with her. But just before we assumed the position, she whispered the secret to us that even angels as endowed as they are with all their celestial powers needed to keep the wolf from the door, so a small charge, a small gratuity, 200 roubles in fact, would stamp the seal on the deal. What is 200 roubles, I thought, in the collection box of Christmas. Is it not better to give than receive!

So, with the contract duly signed, Olga and then myself, encouraged by the angel, adopted various angelic-hugging poses, whilst first one then the other snapped away with my mobile phone.

At the conclusion of our photoshoot, we took out our 200 roubles only to be angelically told that we had run up a bill of 1000 roubles, as the going rate for angels was 200 roubles a photograph and not, as we had thought, 200 roubles a sesh. Well, blow me down with seraphim wings, you do learn something every day.

A thousand roubles lighter, we took three or four more photographs without the angel within the Square, which only cost us our time, and then we muggered off to Kavkaz restaurant.

Kavkaz Restaurant revisited

Cool in the summer, both kinds of cool, Kavkaz is in winter forever warm and welcoming, and now with its twinkling Christmas lights festively fondling the susceptible cockles of a receptive holiday heart, no less tender from having been shared with the angel, we were pulled with the ease of a Christmas cracker into Kavkaz’s spellbinding charm.

In an instant and magnificently, staff within this palatial place are swarming all around you: a small, attractive attentive army, ones very own personal retinue, whose task it is to get your clothes off and get you into a seat.

Once divested of your outer garments, you are ritualistically led away into a cavernous mesmerisation, where upmarket, hip and trendy live together in perfect harmony. You mean like Sir Paul McCartney’s ‘ebony and ivory’? No, I don’t mean that at all.

In a kitchen part exposed to view, white smocked chefs are wocking it up as if there is no tomorrow, whilst waiters hither and thither fly. The voices of the seated, who are already pleasantly wining and dining, form a mood-inspiring background murmur, akin to the sound of soothing white noise blotting out the primordial row of that noisy neighbourhood dog.

If ever the Wizard of Oz had owned a palace like this, it could not have been half as entrancing.

Would we be led to the left, or would we be led to the right? On this occasion we are led to the right and given a table for two. My back is against a solid brick pillar, just the way I like it. Seats in restaurants and bars, just like friends and angels, are meant to be chosen carefully; if you don’t feel comfortable where they’ve put you, you won’t enjoy your meal; in fact, the entire evening could be ruined. If you don’t believe me, ask Wild Bill Hickock.

We had dined at Kavkaz before, and the first reason for returning was that Kavkaz serves good food at value-for-money prices, but I was also there on a mission. We have a project pending, and I could think of no better place than Kavkaz to consolidate our knowledge of shabby chic design. From my vantage point, with my back to the wall, I had a commanding view of all that I wanted to see.

Olga and Mick Hart at Kavkaz, Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad

The place was busy this evening, the only available seats were on my left and these, too, would be taken later. A squadron of waiters and waitresses, dressed in their becoming livery of tan trousers and matching waistcoats, flitted swiftly from table to table. The restaurant is so vast that every waiter is wired. Ah, the wonders of the electronic age. Wherever would we be without a plug stuck in our ear or a smartphone in our hands!

The buzz it was a happy one. It had that unmistakeable festive feel that Christmas brings to the better world of Christendom. Long may it prevail. An atmosphere like this, which is to say comfortable, requires a specific beer, and the atmosphere this evening seemed to be calling out for Maisel’s Weisse, but first the waiter brought to our table a complementary carafe of water (you have to drink it sometimes) infused with a sliver of cucumber. That sure was a new one on me!

The beer was fast on its heels, and not long after along came our meals. The restaurant may have been busy, but the service as always was slick and swift.

At half time, who should arrive but Father Frost and his daughter. Shimmering silver and white, they passed from table to table, with a Ho! Ho! Ho! and a Snovam Gordam (Happy New Year), handing out small presents to children, who were wreathed in smiles, with sparkling eyes and amazed and enthralled expressions. Call him Father Frost, Father Christmas, Santa Claus, call him what you will, it’s a non-negotiable fact that the world needs a lot more of him.

To even up the score, there was another, a dark and mysterious figure, wandering amongst us, looking as if he had just stepped off a Roger Corman film set. This sinister apparition, a man we must presume, or something of mortal substance, was dressed from head to toe in black. The hood, or cowl, that he was wearing, completely obscured his face, turning his eyes and thus his soul invisible. If one was to level one’s own eyes to a point at which they strained, one could just make out whatever it was inhabiting concealment, peering out from behind an obfuscating curtain of gauze, an almost impenetrable barrier, which must have dramatically altered the hidden incumbent’s perception of anything outside his inside world.

Hobgoblin and veiled figure, New Year's Eve, Kaliningrad

Perched upon his shoulder, above a hooked, outstretched and angled arm, was an ugly looking so-and-so, which, every now and again, according to its will, would home in on a table of quietly seated innocent folk and invade their zone of comfort. Who was this mysterious stranger? And what was his purpose here, tonight?

Nobody seemed unduly perturbed by the presence of this denizen duo. In fact, wherever the two would wend, which was everywhere, they seemed to raise a smile if not a laugh. But the black veil and swooping creature had an entirely different effect on me. Give me Father Frost and his delightful daughter any day of the week, rather than this Soros hobgoblin and his blighted bedighted funereal future. But I ask you to forgive me. My imagination has a reputation for being overly sensitive and has been known to play tricks before. And yet I did have an auntie called Clair Voyant, and my uncle was blessed with crystal balls … It was enough to make me want to order, in fact I felt I had to order, another pint of Maisel’s Weisse.

Festive season mythology at work in Kaliningrad

When eventually ~ eventually being of no greater duration than possibly two minutes, although to hypersensitive senses it seemed there was nowhere he could not be for any length of unspecified time ~ this ominous be-gauzed spectre of inauspicious things to come, and his malevolent menacing mate, left the spot where they had been preying, my clarity was restored.

I took a gulp of Maisel’s Weisse ~ what nectar! ~ and afforded myself the luxury of staring into the middle distance, freely.

Mirror Mirror on the wall do you tell the truth at all?

Between the wall and the open room, an altitudinous wooden screen of shelving had, in the imaginative Kavkaz manner and by considered intersection, created a narrow corridor, leading away from the dining area down to the gents’ and ladies’ loos. A very important direction.

At the end of this long and narrow walkway, mistaken by some for a models’ catwalk, stands a large, tall, gilt-framed mirror. People walking towards it react to its presence in different ways: some gaze directly into it, in the hope of receiving their own approval; others seem to fall shy of it, briefly looking then looking away, but often casting a sideways glance before they turn the corner, as if by failing to do so, they might lose sight of their very existence; and still others stop in front of it, forced to a halt by their own adoration.

One young lady was so enthralled by whoever it was she wanted to be, whatever it was she wanted to see, that she walked that way several times and even, on one occasion, brought her friends to look in the mirror with her. I wondered what it was that each of them could see and if they saw the same as one another. What was that mirror showing them? Was it their present, their past or their future? And would that mirror still be there, say in 50 years from now, should they ever return to Kavkaz, which reflection would they see: the one they had left behind today or the one which they would bring with them?

The time would come this evening when I would have to walk that way myself, and that time inevitably came halfway through my second pint.

What, I thought, was this mirror up to, so bold, so brash, so strategically placed that in any age more primitive it could have been mistaken for a portal to your soul. In Kavkaz, as in life, this is a mirror you cannot avoid. When you have to go, you have to go. But when it was my turn, I wilfully looked away, not completely sure, however, who or what the mirror had captured, or if that something had looked like me had it been grinning as it went past? Mirrors can be funny things. Things funny be can mirrors. Is it little wonder that vampires seldom use them?

Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad

Back safely at our table the spirit of Christmas welcomed me in the form of a Georgian special. I found a glass of chacha, a Georgian pomace brandy, sitting next to my pint. I had not yet had the pleasure of sampling such a rare intoxicant and was surprised, as much as a vegetarian can be, that I took to it like a hungry shark in a swimming pool, so much so in fact that I had to have another. The fermentation was truly delicious, but I threw myself a lifebelt after the second glass for fear of becoming a goldfish in my reckless Christmas ocean. Sam Cooke knew a lady who couldn’t do the cha cha cha, but that was his problem, not mine. My problem was that I could, but knowing I could, I shouldn’t.

The one thing that I should be frightened of, but, alas, forsooth, am not, is turning into a pumpkin. It is hard to get me home once I have found a hospitable place. But all good things, as we are told, and told, and told, and told … must, and do, come to an end, even a night at Kavkaz.

Leaving the Kavkaz is never easy, particularly when it is still in motion and more so particularly at this time of year. Yet, like all the best and worst of villains swear when their time is up, “You haven’t seen the last of me! I vow I shall return!”, the same was singing in my ear.

And that’s the way it always is, and that’s the way it should be, whenever you go to Kavkaz.

Happy New Year!

Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad

British pub-like brew bar and restaurant

27 December 2024 ~ Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad

Shame on me! It was one of my brothers who first discovered the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery, ‘hidden away’, he said, close to the foundations of a Kaliningrad Spar. That’s Spar as in supermarket not spa as in Roman baths.

He was right in the first place, the location is unusual, or so it seems to us Brits, but not in the second: A large, illuminated logo-branded sign strapped atop a cylindrical portico, all glass and rather tall, facing a busy road that leads to Kaliningrad’s city centre can hardly relate to something said to be ‘hidden away’. But, if that is so, how come I missed it?

The obvious answer is that, unlike my brother, my whole life does not revolve around hunting out bars and beer (polite cough).

I thanked him for letting me know and assured him that when I could find the time I’d stroll along and check out this bar. Then away he went, and off I rushed.

Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad

Since that pioneering visit, I have returned to the bar under the Spar on three or four occasions, which, given the calibre of the establishment, may not nearly be enough.

My recent tarriance at the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery found it, I am pleased to say, much the same as it was on previous visits. We like things to stay the same, don’t we. How does it go? “If it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it.”

I stood outside for a moment and allowed myself the luxury of admiring the bar’s grand portico, until someone, no doubt wondering what had so arrested me, asked if I needed help. This was really nice of them, but having been beyond help for more years than I care to remember, I politely replied, “It’s much too late,” thanked them for their indulgence, then did all that I could to remove myself before someone else came along and mistook me for Colin Conspicuous.

In any event, there’s only so much portico admiring that one can reasonably do when there are better things to be doing, and beer is one of those better things. The next step was to literally pass through the portico. This is what I did.

The grand portico of the bar below the Spar leads to expectations that bad management could easily upend. Thankfully, no such failure is engendered. After the grand portico comes a grand staircase, which leads to a grand lower floor and to a lady behind a cloakroom counter.

The lights in the entrance hall are dim, mindfully so, and together with the woodwork, of which there is plenty, has a significant impact on first impressions. Would this bar be in England, the dark varnish on the doors, panelling and staircase balusters would peg its origin to the 1980s, but as cultural influences take time to travel, my hunch is that the premises date to the mid-2010s.

The pre-bar experience, in spite of the paintwork’s distressed character, which could be actual or artificial, has rather stately and formal overtones, which carry over into the bar itself. And what a bar it is. Vast is a word that springs to mind: JD Wetherspoon vast.

Size isn’t everything, or so we are led to believe, and this is perfectly true if it fails to work, but in this establishment it does work. In fact, it works rather well, even better than most.

The ratio of seating to open space is well balanced, not at all cramped, packed or crowded. A full complement of seating types is offered, including cubicle, booth, banquet, open table and bar stools. I could run around a place like this all night trying different seats, with a different beer on a different table whilst availing myself of a different perspective. But, of course, I wouldn’t do that, because I look silly enough. Like most of us who are creatures of habit, I usually make for the self-same seat that I have occupied on previous occasions, or find a seat as near as dammit, and these are those that have snob-screened partitions to the left of the entrance facing the bar.

There was one occasion, completely out of character, when feeling oddly adventurous, I went and broke the mold. That’s not quite the same as breaking one’s beer glass, which always is and always has been a tragedy, it’s simply an introduction to saying that I found myself sitting pretty, if ever an idiom of this kind could be used to describe one such as I, elevated high and mighty upon the luxurious centrepiece seating, my foam-frothing formidable pint clasped firmly in my hand, the foam-padded faux-leather ochre beneath my pampered bum, which was, of course, in trousers. This, however, was a one-off move. I suppose I like my regular seat as it looks out over the bar, a regular bar at that, with beer pumps thrusting from it and immediately behind it well-stocked spirit shelves, which add to its British persona.

Bar at Pivovar Brewery Restaurant Kaliningrad

Brewing vats at Kaliningrad's Pivovar Brewery

We have already debunked the myth that Pivovar Restaurant Brewery is hidden away German-bunker style, establishing in the process that this clever bar beneath the Spar packs a surprise in size (notice how I rhymed that!). To that we can now add that there is also nothing in its name that conceals the fact that beers are brewed on the premises and that the grub it serves is rather special.

Almost without exception, internet reviews posted by former Pivovar diners are cock-a-hoop and thumbs-up good. Indeed, I myself have once or twice partaken of the victuals, and though far from being a seasoned gourmet am happy to relate that there was nothing to complain about. So, if you are one of those whose reason for eating out is to give your complaints to the chef, you will need to go elsewhere.

The same advice applies if you are longing for a pint of bad or boring beer, since the beer at Pivovar Restaurant Brewery is consistently applaudable, as much for its quality as it is for variety.

The beer range, though not, for example, as breathtaking as the Yeltsin’s revolving stock, is, nevertheless, not to be sneezed at, with or without your old plandemic mask. Most certainly you will find that in downing one of Pivovar’s beers you will want to sink another, maybe more.

On the occasion of my first visit to Pivovar Restaurant Brewery, I wondered why the waitress had handed me the local newspaper. Did she want me to read the article on the art of looking not quite so obviously English? It was only when I spotted the bar’s distinctive beer vat logo centred within the paper’s masthead that the rouble finally dropped: this was no local rag, it was, in fact, the menu.

I cannot recall in my long and distinguished pub-frequenting career ever coming across something of this nature. It is a simple but effective touch, as the branding remains in your mind. “It’s that bar. You know the one; the big place under the Spar. The one that has menus that look like newspapers.”

Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad's newspaper-style menu

a pint of delicious beer on Pivovar bar's menu

There are restaurants and bars in Kaliningrad whose menus are printed in Russian and English. I suspect that this was done to coincide with the World Cup tournaments which Kaliningrad hosted in 2018. Unfortunately, Pivovar Restaurant Brewery did not follow this trend, and since the world we live in today is a lot different than the one we inhabited yesterday, insofar as English-speaking folk are thinner on the ground, the bar’s management must sigh with relief that they saved themselves the extra expense. However, that having been duly noted, I was there on the premises, all alone in the world of written Russian, squinting through my Franklin Splits in an effort to determine which one of their excellent beers they could tempt me with today.

Luckily for me, language has never been a barrier, at least not where beer is concerned, although it doesn’t hurt at all to have a decent memory. I went for a deep, dark beer that cost me 300 roubles. This was not the first time that I had drunk this beer at Pivovar Restaurant; thus, cynics might postulate that working from memory negated the need for further squinting, they might also insinuate that as the beers on the menu’s consecutive pages were rather more expensive than the one I had chosen on the front page, I had gone for the cheapest option.

I was far too preoccupied with practising my reading skills to give a definite account of what it was the waitress said to her colleagues after I had ordered. For all I know, she could have said, “Yes, it’s him, alright, that same old tight-arsed Englishman, disguised by beard as Father Frost. He always goes for the cheapest beers!”

“Happy Cheap Year and down the hatch!”

Beer and beards — they were made for each other.

Foaming around the mouth hair, I did not on this occasion partake of the bar’s cuisine. I had a thousand roubles in my pocket and a calculation in my mind that should I order another beer, I would be left with enough nalichka for a loaf of bread and a tin of baked beans from the Spar above the bar.

Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad

On the evening that I was at Pivovar’s, I was flying solo, so all I needed was a table, a chair, and, of course, a glass of beer. However, the size of the restaurant/brewery and its range of food and beer make it the perfect fit for business lunches and birthday parties. Birthday parties are a Pivovar speciality and are catered for at a 10% discount, whilst business lunches are bookable throughout the working week, from Monday to Friday inclusive, between 12 noon and 4pm.

Another Pivovar humdinger is its Beer to Go service. Carry-outs can be purchased in 1 litre or in convenient 1.5 litre containers at a cost of 320 and 480 roubles respectively. Alternatively, food and beer combinations can be collected in person or delivered to your door (web-page link here).

And here you will find a link to the brewery’s beer selection.

It would be completely out of character if I failed to mention how much I appreciated the retro signs, wall mirrors and other memorabilia which light up the stairwell and entrance hall to the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery. Not only do we like things to stay the same as they were, as when they do they remain the same as they are, but we also like all things retro. Moreover, we like good beer, which is why we like to like Pivovar Restaurant Brewery.

The main thing

Pivovar Restaurant Brewery
137b Alexander Nevsky St, Kaliningrad, 236008
Tel: +8 (4012) 585-999
Website: https://www.kld-pivovar.ru/

Opening times
Sun to Thu: 12 noon to 11pm
Fri to Sat: 12 noon to 12 midnight

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Obtaining a Visa for Kaliningrad, Russia

Revised 22 December 2024 ~ Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Airspace Closures

Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Natzify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information.
Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide

Links
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

To visit Kaliningrad, you will need to apply for and have been issued with a Russian visa. For those of you who are not sure what one of these is, it is an official document that permits you to legally enter a foreign country, in this case the Russian Federation. The visa is valid for a specific duration of time. It contains the date of entry to the country and the date of exit, as well as your name, travel document (passport) details and the purpose for which you are travelling.

There are various types of visa depending upon the nature of your visit, but, for the sake of this blog, let’s assume that you are visiting Kaliningrad as a tourist.

Russia Kaliningrad Tourist Information: Tourist Visa

A tourist visa will allow you to enter Kaliningrad, and leave, within a specified time-frame of 30 days. This means that the maximum length of stay in Kaliningrad is 30 days and no more. It is important that you leave the country before or on the date of exit.

Before a tourist visa can be issued, you will need to have confirmation of where you will be staying throughout the duration of your visit. Two documents are required, commonly referred to as visa support documents, and they consist of: (1) a Voucher; (2) a Booking Confirmation.

If you are staying in a hotel, you will need to ask the hotel to send you a hotel voucher and confirmation of tourist acceptance. Once you have received these, you are then ready to make your application.

To complete your visa application, you will need the following:

1. An original passport, valid for more than 6 months, containing at
least 2 blank pages for your visa and entry/exit stamps

2. An application form

3. One valid passport-type photograph

4. Payment for application

Note: The Russian Service Centre (The Russian National Tourist Office) can assist you with all stages of your application, including visa support documents. You can contact them by telephone on 0207 985 1195; and/or visit this page on their website: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/

Their location and postal address is:

Russian Service Centre
Russian National Tourist Office
202 Kensington Church Street
London W8 4DP

Applications for a Russian Visa are typically handled online now, and all the information and guidance that you need can be obtained by visiting this page: How to obtain a Russian visa in London in 2025 – Visit Russia

However, you will still be required to go in person to the Russian Tourist Office at 202 Kensington Church St, London W8 4DP for biometric scanning . This sounds worse than it is. Biometric scanning means that you need to supply your fingerprints.

You can attend the office to submit your fingerprints Monday to Friday from 9am until 1pm. Click here for a map of the Tourist Office location.

Alternatively, if you don’t mind paying for it, visa officers can come to your office or home anywhere in the UK and take your fingerprints there. Click on this link for more information: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/biometric-data/

The time it takes for you to receive your Russian Visa depends on which service you pay for. Visas can be received within two days of the completion of the application procedure.

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information: Professional visa support company

To make things easier for you, there are various visa-support companies that you can contact, which will take you through the entire process. My support company of choice is Stress Free Visas, if only because if you do get stressed whilst using them, you can have a good laugh at your own expense! Their website address is www.stressfreevisas.co.uk.

When using their service, you will be asked to fill an application form online. It is as well to know what to expect before you start, since when they start asking you questions, such as what is your inside leg measurement, it will be difficult to do so unless you have a tape measure already at hand. OK, it’s not that bad, not quite, but there is information that you will need that you might inconceivably not have thought of.

To this end, please see the following:

Q: Who is paying for your trip to Russia?
A: [If it is you, put ‘independently’]

####

You will be asked ‘information about your financial situation’. You will need to enter your ‘overall monthly income from all sources’ and various other financial details.

####

You will need to include your National Insurance number

####

You will be asked to enter ‘place of birth’ and ‘date and place of birth’ of your spouse

####

You will be asked to provide the following details about your parents:

Name
Date, country & place of birth
Nationality
If deceased, date & place of death

####

You will be asked to provide the name of the hotel you will be staying at, plus address and telephone number

####

And that, as Bruce Forsyth used to say, “is all there is to it!”

To assist you in all visa-related matters, here again is the web address for Stress Free Visas: www.stressfreevisas.co.uk

Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information

Poland: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/poland/entry-requirements

Lithuania: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/lithuania/entry-requirements

Visa advice pertaining to Russia: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/russia

Links to Airport/Airline websites

Airlines

Lot Airways
Web: www.lot.com

Aeroflot
Web: www.aeroflot.ru

Wizz Air
Web: www.wizzair.com

Rynair
Web: www.ryanair.com

Airports

Khrabrovo Airport Kaliningrad
Web: https://kgdavia.ru/
Tel : +8 (401) 255 05 50

Luton London Airport
Web: https://www.london-luton.co.uk/
Tel: 01582 405100

Gdansk Airport
Web: https://www.airport.gdansk.pl/
Tel: +48 52 567 35 31

Vilnius International Airport
Web: https://www.vilnius-airport.lt/
Tel: +370 612 44442

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

UK to Kaliningrad

Updated: 16 December 2024 ~ How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

Airspace Closures

Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information.
Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide

See: Airlines/Airports Websites at the end of this post

How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK

Most people travelling from the UK to Kaliningrad are not going to do so by car, train, taxi, bicycle or hitching. Some of you might, but most of you won’t. You’ll want to come by plane, so that’s what I will focus on here.

Flights from the UK to Kaliningrad

As far as I am aware, there are no direct flights from the UK to Kaliningrad, and there has not been for some time.

The last time I flew back from Kaliningrad to London direct was many years ago. I remember it well, as I sat in the front of the plane looking through the open door to the flight deck. The date was 10 September 2001. It was most probably the last day that you would be able to do that on an international airliner.

I am told that the only ‘convenient’ way to fly to Kaliningrad from Europe is to fly to Turkey and from there to Kaliningrad. If you aren’t in the market for paying between £400-£800 pounds, then I wouldn’t bother.

If you do fly to Kaliningrad, you will land at Khrabrovo Airport. Once a relatively small red-brick building dating from the Königsberg era with a high wire fence, today Khrabrovo Airport is a modern terminal possessing all the usual facilities.

From Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad

The distance from Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad central is about 20km.

The easiest way of getting to Kaliningrad is by taxi. Look for the cubicles by the airport terminal exit, which offer taxi services. The fare to the centre of Kaliningrad typically costs between 700 and 900 roubles (approx. £5.32~ £6.83). Here is a price guide by destination using licensed taxis (recommended).

The cheaper option is to travel by bus ~ fare 50 roubles (0.38 pence). The route number is 244-Э. Payment is made on the bus, either to the driver or a conductor. Buses run frequently, about every 30 minutes, between 9.00am and 9.00pm (Link to Bus Timetable). The average time of the journey to Kaliningrad’s Yuzhniy Bus Station is 40 minutes.

Kaliningrad via Gdansk, Poland

Wizz Air: How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK — (Photo credit: Serhiy Lvivsky)

The route that most of us take when travelling to Kaliningrad is to fly by Wizz Airlines from Luton London Airport to Gdansk and then travel from Gdansk to Kaliningrad.

Time was once that I would take a pre-booked taxi from Gdansk Airport to Kaliningrad. If you had contacts in Kaliningrad, which I had, someone could arrange this for you. In 2024, I was told that the journey to Kaliningrad from Gdansk Airport would cost you in the region of £200-300. This is a gigantic leap in price from the 100 quid that I was paying back in 2019. Why? Could the price hike be associated with border-crossing difficulties emanating from coronavirus restrictions, a by-product of western sanctions or just plain old profiteering? Whatever the explanation, you might be of the opinion that the taxi option is no longer viable. Even if you like spending money, Poland is no longer accepting vehicles with Russian number plates crossing from Kaliningrad into Poland (now, where’s my screwdriver!) (Link to article on Poland’s extraordinary measures. It also mentions a ‘big wall’, so you won’t go climbing over that, will you, with or without licence plates! So there!)

🤔Is the Poland-Kaliningrad border open? (A personal reflection)

Bussing it from Gdansk to Kaliningrad

I have travelled by bus to and from Kaliningrad via Gdansk many times now.

To do this, you must first take a taxi from Gdansk Airport to Gdansk Bus Station, located at 3 Maja St 12. There are plenty of taxis at the airport rank, and the cost of the trip is about 87 zloty (£16).

The bus ticket from Gdansk costs 170 zloty (approximately £33). There are 3 buses a day from Gdansk Bus Station, and the last bus leaves at 5.00pm. The approximate travel time is advertised at 3hrs and 30 mins, but in reality it often takes longer than this, due to the grilling you get at both borders, especially since the Polish border authorities introduced the practice of photographing everyone on board: Smile please, we are going to make crossing into Kaliningrad extremely irritating for you. It will be inside leg measurements next! (Spoiler: My past two trips took 8 hours on both occasions!)

Catching the bus means buying tickets online in advance. By far the most straightforward and therefore best online booking service is Busfor.pl

Example of Busfor’s Gdansk to Kaliningrad page below:

There was a time when the bay from which the Gdansk>Kaliningrad bus service operated was Gdansk’s best kept secret. You could try asking at the bus information office, but if they had that information they would not be letting you have it. Later, they stuck a piece of paper on the wall, which revealed the bay to be number 11. Don’t be put off if when arriving at the bay you see the name Królewiec and not Kaliningrad. According to what I have read, in 2023 some bright Polish spark came up with the idea of renaming Kaliningrad or, as they put it, reverting the name to its historical Polish name. That’s helpful, isn’t it?

The facilities at Gdansk Bus Station are bog standard. It does have a bog (It will cost you 4 zloty for a pee.), but the metal tins that used to function as a left-luggage department have moved, TARDIS-fashion, from the interior of the bus station to a bit around the back of it, and the Bus Station cafe, which was basic but useful, as there are no other cafes nearby, has closed. There is a burger bar in the bus park, which, in winter has a plastic sheet around it, where you can stand and wait for your order.

At the time of writing, you will have approximately two hours to kill if you catch, for example, the morning flight from London Luton Airport to Gdansk in time to catch the 3.00pm bus. My advice is take a walk into Gdansk Old Town for great cafes and an historic atmosphere.

The buses dock at Kaliningrad’s Central Bus Station in the vicinity of the city’s South Railway Station. Change here for local buses, coaches to Svetlogorsk/Zelenogradsk coastal resorts and taxi services.

Kaliningrad via Vilnius, Lithuania

It was once possible to get a train from Vilnius, Lithuania, to Kaliningrad (the trip took about 7 hours). That service has been suspended now, and if you travel to Vilnius from the UK by plane, the only way to get to Kaliningrad by public transport is to take a bus.

There are three buses from Vilnius to Kaliningrad each week. The timetable can be found here (You will need to translate from Russian.): https://avl39.ru/routes/int/litva/

🚌Vilnius Bus Station Information 🚌

The journey takes about 7 hours in all but can be longer depending on the number of passengers on the bus and the time it takes to clear border control. The schedule is a late night/early morning job!

Tickets for a one-way journey cost approximately 5800 roubles £45.50; 10,500 roubles £84.30 return.

Buses arrive at Kaliningrad’s Central Bus Station, where connections can be found for multiple routes throughout the Kaliningrad region and also onto Gdansk in Poland.

Kaliningrad’s public transport buses run from the bus/rail concourse, which also serves as a drop-off and pick-up point for taxis.

Rumour has it that an alternative to the cross-border bus from Vilnius is to use local buses/trains, cross on foot via the Kibartai-Chernyshevskoe border and then use local buses/trains on the Russian side. I cannot confirm this, as I have not personally used this route, but it is one you might like to check out.

📄Kaliningrad Visa Information when travelling from UK 📄