Tag Archives: Mick Hart in Zelenogradsk Russia

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk Wired for Quality

Over the wire the buzz word is Telegraph

25 October 2024 ~ Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk Wired for Quality

“It’s all so confusing,” so says a friend of mine and quite often. He’s a scientist, now retired, so he should know. And he’s referring to life. When I echo his sentiments, “It’s all so confusing,” he invariably replies, “It often is,” and sometimes he will say, “… but it is also often quite exciting.” Sometimes, when reflecting on life, he opines, “It don’t make sense!” And although, ‘it’s all so confusing’ and also ‘often exciting’, it actually does make sense that there are two Telegraphs: one I wrote about recently, which is in Svetlogorsk, and the other of which I am writing now, this one is in Zelenogradsk. The Telegraph in Svetlogorsk is a cafe and an art gallery, whilst the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk a restaurant.

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk front entrance

Each Telegraph has a different function, but both are eponymously named after the same function their buildings had when the world was a different place.

The Telegraph Restaurant

The Telegraph restaurant in Zelenogradsk occupies the building of the old German telegraph and post office, which was established in the coastal resort in 1896. It is located at the top end of the high street. However, as the terms ‘top end’ and ‘bottom end’ are absolutely subjective, serving no useful purpose to man or beast, let me qualify its location by adding that it lies at the end of Zelenogradsk’s high street nearest the bus and train stations and not the end where the public park and sand is.

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk

The old telegraph building is one of those solid, stalwart red-brick affairs, instantly identifiable within the Kaliningrad region as being authentically German. In the summer months, a small area is set aside on the pavement next to the building for al-fresco dining and drinking; in winter, during the festive season, this same area is requisitioned for Telegraph’s contribution to the town’s impressive transformation into an imaginatively lit and magically decorated New Year’s holiday wonderland.

Whilst it occupies the ground floor of the former telegraph office, the contemporaneous Telegraph is accessed by a flight of steps. “It don’t make sense!” “It rarely does!”, with the exception of this region, where ground floors are often elevated above the basements below them to let in light from windows at pavement level.

On entering into the stairwell, the scene is set for the Telegraph experience. The walls are bare, stripped of their plaster, exposing the brick beneath. A black facsimile telegraph pole stands in sharp relief, and further along an illusory hole containing some kind of map twinkles in the muted light from illuminated markers. This introduction tells you in no uncertain terms that the Telegraph’s interior will not be run of the mill. It prepares you for an industrialised look with novel touches of retrospective modernity in keeping with the telegraph legacy from which it takes its thematic cue.

Exposed brickwork arch in the Telegraph restaurant

The two rooms, which are actually one room joined but visually separated by a deep, broad arch, continue the bare-brick look. The ceiling has a patchy effect, as though some of the plaster has fallen off, but as none lies on the floor below, we must chalk this up to designer licence. The lightbulbs in the industrial lampshades are the visible filament kind, they compliment the shabby chic, and the untrunked cable which supplies their power openly climb the walls.

The here and now in which we live may be the ‘wireless age’, but back in the day when the Telegraph building fulfilled its original function, the term ‘hard wired’ was literal. Appropriately, therefore, no attempt has been made to conceal the wires that link the bulbs. They travel across the ceiling in an exhibition of bold impunity.

The world of wires and plugs, the working environment of yesteryear’s telegraph offices is captured in some detail in the large, framed black and white photographs arranged around the restaurant’s walls. Study these at your leisure to see just how much times have changed.

Black & White photo of old telegraph office

Switchboard operators in a busy telegraph office

The theme of the mechanical age continues in the restaurant’s choice of tables. Old treadle sewing machines dating in manufacture and use from the 19^th to mid-20^th centuries make attractive tables once the machines have been removed.

The leading manufacturer of hand-operated and treadle machines was a company known as Singer, who suspended the Singer name in the mid-section of a wrought-iron framework, bridging the divide between whilst connecting the table’s end supports. The elaborate nature of the frame’s decoration is what gives the tables their appealing clout, and it is thumbs up to the Telegraph restaurant for retaining the tables’ pivoting foot pedals. Attractive features in themselves, should you be prone to tippy tapping, as in his youth was one of my brothers, these pedals will entertain your feet at the same time as you sit and eat.

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk

Telegraph is a restaurant, it isn’t really a bar, but it has a bar of sorts, and I like that. I never feel at home and cannot quite get comfortable drinking alcohol in a barless zone. Sitting in a restaurant, seated around a table without a bar in sight just doesn’t do it for me. I liken the experience to sitting in a car which does not have a steering wheel. Without a bar something is missing; most likely it’s the bar.

For all its designer emphasis on the basic nitty gritty, Telegraph is cozy. In the all-important lighting department, which is the principal component in any attempt at coziness, Telegraph scores 11 out of 10. Excuse me, whilst I correct myself, my maths are notoriously weak; I meant to say scores 12.

In one sense, this is not good. Telegraph is so terribly cozy that it’s hard to get me out of there. Thank heavens that buses and trains work to things called timetables, which is something else worth mentioning. Telegraph is but a short walk away from the town’s bus and train stations, making it, if you time it right, and I usually make sure that I do, the perfect stopping-off place on your outward journey and a convenient traveller’s rest at which to pause on your way in.

Talking of food, as we now are, Telegraph’s speciality is the promotion of Baltic cuisine. It must be up to snuff as the restaurant is duly cited in Wheretoeat [in] Russia 2024 and in December 2022 was awarded the regional title of ‘Baltic Cuisine’.

Another award that Telegraph deserves is for its truly handsome website, especially in the category of ‘best designed for ease-of-use’. Navigate to its menu pages for a comprehensive and mouth-watering insight into the range of dishes it has on offer. And just in case you are wondering if I intend to provide you with links to the website and to the restaurant’s menu, wonder ye no more. Here is the link to Telegraph’s website: https://telegraph.rest/ and here is the link to its menu: https://telegraph.rest/menu . And whilst I am at it, here is the link to its page on social media: https://vk.com/telegraph.rest .

Ah, but it’s a grand menu to get lost in, isn’t it? But now that you are back, ask yourselves a question, are you fans of quirky? I most definitely am, particularly when it involves valuing and sustaining dying traditions. Thus imagine my delight on discovering that the present-day Telegraph salutes its earlier namesake by enabling its patrons to buy, write and send postcards directly from its premises to anywhere in the world. Who needs digital messaging and who needs things like WhatsApp when you’ve a pen, a card, a stamp and post box! WhatsUp with that? Nothing!

Postcards can be sent from the Telegraph restaurant at Zelenogradsk

My scientist friend, the one whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post, has a variety of different catchphrases to suit or not to suit as the case may be the topic of almost every conversation. For example, whenever we discuss Britain’s existential threat, the not-accidental migrant invasion, he will with cynicism and irony ask: “Well, what can we do about it?” When we are feeling philosophical, ruminating together on the mysteries of time, “Where would we be without it?” And when we discuss giants of history ~ politicians, generals, luminaries of the silver screen, pop stars, authors, artists and the figureheads of the American mob ~ his concluding remark is likely to be “And it didn’t do them any good!”

Let’s try to apply these questions and statements to the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk:

What can we do about it? Go there!
Where would we be without it? Deprived.
It didn’t do them any good! Well, obviously it didn’t. Because they decided to go somewhere else when they should have gone to Telegraph.

You see, when you look at it scientifically, it all makes perfect sense!

The main thing

Telegraph restaurant
Kurortny pr., 29, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region, Russia, 238326
Tel: +7 908 290-55-21
Website: https://telegraph.rest/

Opening times:
Mon to Thurs: 12 noon to 11pm
Friday: 12 noon to 12 midnight
Saturday: 11am to 12 midnight
Sunday: 11am to 11pm

Note: Reservations required

Mick Hart at the Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk

A serious business: Should I finish my pint first and then drink my marzipan-flavoured vodka or vice versa?

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony

Balt Restaurant Zelenogradsk Review

Updated: 30 June 2024 | First Published: 29 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony

I’m sure, almost certain, that it was not there 18 months ago when I last visited Zelenogradsk (doesn’t time fly!), but it was there now. I am talking about a new restaurant ~ new to me ~ that sits smack bang at the midway point of Zelenogradsk’s serpentine high street: a large, impressive, luxurious establishment set back from the street inside a broad paved plaza, its plate-glass single-storey extension forming a scaled juxtaposition against the taller four-storey building to which it is attached, the latter meticulously refurbished to a grand and imposing standard.

In the winter months when we were in town, the first impression of this restaurant from the outside looking in was PC; that’s not politically correct, but plush and cosy.

It was bitterly cold that day, and if the hallmark of a successful bar or restaurant is principally defined by the pulling power it possesses to tempt one off the street, then rest assured Balt restaurant has it.

Oh, did I forget to tell you? The name of the restaurant is Balt.

The first impression from the exterior of the building, which is so categorically bourgeoisie that Lenin had turned his back to it, was swish. I made a mental note, a simple equation: plush+posh+impressive+coastal-resort-town-centre = expensive. So, let’s jump to the bill. We had three dishes, nothing elaborate, a speciality tea and a glass of beer. It didn’t break the bank.

The second impression the Balt conveys is ‘big’. “It’s so big!” say your senses, when perhaps what they should be saying is not that it’s so ‘big’ but “It’s so tall”! In keeping with the modern trend in bar and restaurant design, the Balt is undeniably big, but, initially and accurately, the spaciousness perceived is confined to the height of the ceiling. In fact, the seating area which leads away from the entrance hall is limited to the perimeter of the extended part of the building; it forms the letter ‘L’, being a long, but slightly wider than the word implies, corridor. This is because, once again conforming to popular predilections, the restaurant is built around the kitchen, in other words built to a plan in which a centralised kitchen is King.

In the olden days, restaurants concealed their kitchens as though they were the black sheep of the family, the philosophy seeming to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This closeted mentality was an excellent way of keeping patrons on edge, since they never knew come the following morning, having enjoyed their meal the night before, whether their friends would be ready and waiting to scream, “You didn’t eat there, did you!” and then hamming it up with relish, proceed to recount in lurid detail the latest hygiene scandal.

Today, there is no need to be told by the ‘well-meaning’ ~ friends, family or the media ~ what goes on in restaurant kitchens, because everything is on display and laid out for the eyes to see. Restaurant kitchens have come of age. They are open, accessible, uninhibited, something to be admired, something to be proud of, not hidden away like a seedy back room in the depths of a mucky book shop. Restaurant kitchens have been emancipated, and a large part of that liberation lies in the transformation from an observance of cautious propriety to out-and-out exhibitionism.

True, some bar and restaurant designs tend to over-egg the soufflé. Displaying a kitchen eagerly in all its stainless steel, hygiene-oriented, busy, industrious, functioning glory is one thing, but it is quite another and quite inexcusable to overdo the exposure. Thankfully, Balt’s kitchen is a far more sophisticated and in-keeping centrepiece, enabling it to escape comparison with a man in a mac on a hill surrounded by too little foliage. I think the word I am searching for is ‘subtle’.

In fact, everything about Balt, not in its individual accoutrements but taken as a job lot, regarded in its entirety, is the epitome of subtle. How this works exactly is rather clever, because Balt is far and away not without a surprise or two, not undernourished in novelty.

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT

We were able to appreciate both the component parts of this dichotomy and its overarching effect from the favourable location of the table to which we had been escorted. The seats to which we had been shown occupied the latter portion upon the longer extension of the ‘L’ shaped room, almost at its inflection, thus availing us of a first-class view of each and all the different elements, which, when assembled as a whole, add up to the Balt experience.

First off, we were close to the kitchen, just a few feet away from the serving area: a long, curved counter on which chefs add the finishing touches to the dishes they are preparing before popping them into the tandoor oven, and from which attentive waiters pick up meals that are ready to go.

From our vantage point, we had a privileged view of the kitchen and the floor-to-ceiling tandoor, a large cylindrical-shaped oven used for baking unleavened flatbreads and for roasting meat. Once the open oven door and blazing fire beyond had ceased to remind me of crematoria, it was fun to watch the chef at work, sliding the various dishes and breads into the wood-fired oven with the help of a peel, a long-handled shovel-like implement with a flat metal pan attached to its furthest extremity.

Chef uses tandoor oven in Zelenogradsk restaurant Balt

Looking straight ahead, I noted with satisfaction the high-backed wooden chairs belonging to the nearest table. The back rests consisted of two vertical ebonised planks slightly angled toward one another. Close to their highest point a pair of semi-circles had been cut out so that in alignment they formed a circle. The only other concession to decoration was the seemingly random inclusion of small, pierced motifs ~ simple shapes which donated a touch of mystique without disturbing the minimalist balance.

Ebonised plank chair in resturant frequented by Mick Hart

My forward view also provided examples of ingenious lighting styles, including a heavy, orange tassel-roped pendant and lampshades mimicking small sheaths of straw.

Rope lamp shade in Zelenogradsk restaurant

The tables to the left and behind me were objects to be marvelled at. The tops were made of marble, the ends scalloped to give an uncut look. They were supported on a cluster of angled posts, recycled wave-breaking poles, some of which had been allowed to protrude through the table’s surface, and hovering above them with remarkable pendulosity was a clump or cluster of shell-like bowls, off-white in shade and in shape asymmetrical, which had me wondering, out loud as it happens, if they were really made from the pumpkin skins I imagined they were or from moulded papier-mâché

Zelenogradsk restaurant tables Flintstone-style.

Every item in the Balt’s atmospheric makeup is an imagistic letter in the word and concept of ‘Natural’: wood, stone, fire, rope, straw, vegetables. At one end of the subtle spectrum, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would not look out of place, but the Balt’s natural is a polished natural that borrows as much for its appeal on the application of chic sophistry as it does from down-to-earth and back-to-nature.

Crazy paving restaurant floor Baltic Coast

For all its emphasis on the natural world, Balt’s designers’ have hedged their bets, choosing not to preclude but include the fashionable tried and tested, omniprevalent in bar and restaurant, distressed industrial look.

This approach has become so widespread that it has gone beyond ‘must have’ to ‘can’t do without’. In the Balt, it has gone one further, becoming ‘Would you Adam and Eve it, the concept actually works!’: rocks, marble, stoneware vases, corn plants, vegetables and pieces of tree, rub along quite nicely, thank you, with gnarled brickwork, whitewashed slat-board, old beam ceilings, exposed ventilation ducts and suspended arty farty spots.

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT old brickwork

It is a tribute to Balt’s interior designers that they have managed to pull off a subtle, seamless fusion of modern chic and reclaimed-rundown and then wrap it all up in an eco-friendly ethnicity.

Harmony at the Balt restaurant, Zelenogradsk

In a nutshell ~ and I am sure that Balt would approve of the use of such natural imagery ~ the key word to Balt’s come-hither and dine-within appeal is harmony. Everything, including things that would normally be at odds with each other, are wedlocked. It might be a marriage of convenience, but one that is no less perfect for it. Even the ethnic music, with its emphasis on tom-tom beat and repetitive chanting, is low-key, Sade-like and subtle.

At the centre and everywhere else of this is lighting. I’ve said it before; I’ve said it again; I’ll say it again and keep on saying it: from Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris to The Four Seasons B&B in Brightlingsea, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong. Lighting is the magic drawstring that pulls everything together.

Balt’s lighting is soft, suffused and artistically modulated: a harmonising integration of ambient-sensitive ceiling spots and downlighters, overhead table pendants ~ each paired with its own novel shade ~ soft-glow wall lights, natural fire and candles. It’s good, because it works. It works because it’s good.

At this juncture, I know what you are thinking: So much for the Balt’s design; what about the grub?

Those of you who have read any of my bar/restaurant reviews will know that when it comes to food I’m hopeless. Why do I go to bars? To drink. Why do I go to restaurants? Usually because the company I’m in wants to go to restaurants, and so I tag along, but also because, as you may have deduced, I am an ardent fan of interior design and a connoisseur of atmosphere.

As a baked-beans-on-toast man, a man who likes simple food, I cannot provide you with a gourmet breakdown of the range of food Balt has to offer or the quality of its meals, and neither shall I try. However, a quick twirl around the internet should satisfy your curiosity. It might even tell you all you need to know.

Our order at the Balt amounted to a snackette: a spicey vegetable platter on oven-baked bread ~ a white leavened flatbread similar in texture and taste to naan ~ and some exotic-looking poppadoms. It was not in the least expensive, but I will say that presentation took precedence over quantity. Now, were you to indulge in a main meal, the situation may be completely reversed or, like everything else at Balt, a happy medium struck.

I had a beer, naturally. It was palatable but served up in one of those peculiar ‘neither here nor there’ glasses, ie glasses that are neither small nor large, which frankly I find irritating. Half a litre, fine; half a half litre, fine; anything else exceeds my mathematical ability (see Soul Garden post).

Mick Hart at the Balt restaurant in Zelenogradsk

Olga Hart at Balt restaurant in Zelenogradsk

The Balt, I am told, offers a range of dishes based on Indian subcontinent fare, which is something of a luxury in this part of the world. The prices are so-so, but not so expensive that they will tear the lining out of your pocket, and the carefully choreographed atmosphere, which is as restful and relaxing as it gets, beats anything I have experienced anywhere else in the Kaliningrad region or for that matter in the UK. Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could!

The main thing
Balt (restaurant)
Kurortny Prospekt, 16, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region

Tel: +7 906 238 99 74

Website: https://balt.rest/

💚 Around the Kaliningrad region

Angel Park Hotel > An inspirational rural recreation centre on the site of an East Prussian settlement
Amber Legend Restaurant > Amber Legend Yantarny, a jewel in the coastal town of Yantarny
Fishdorf Country Guest Complex > A family-oriented retreat, secluded and steeped in nature
Fort Dönhoff (Fort XI) > An evocative 19th century redbrick fortress, part of Königsberg’s labyrinth defence network
Polessk Brewery > Beer, history and German-Gothic architecture (that’s my personal order of preference!)

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize

Zelenogradsk ~ streets ahead with imaginative decorations

Published: 10 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize

In the UK, the festive season is well and truly over. Unless you had a better time than most, the last remnants of the New Year’s Eve hangover will have sailed way into the ether, along with the memories you cannot remember and those you wish to forget. But here, in Russia, the festive holidays do not peter out until the morn of the 15^th of January. This is because the Russian Orthodox Church follows the old Julian Calendar and not the Gregorian one, so, although some religious denominations still celebrate Christmas day on the 25^th December and the big festive night for Russians is the same as that for the Scotties, New Year’s Eve, Russians also celebrate Orthodox Christmas on the 7^th January and Orthodox New Year’s Eve on the 14^th January. That’s an awful lot of celebrations in one month, but it does mean that the municipal decorations remain intact until the middle of January.

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize

Bearing this in mind, I took a trip to the Baltic seaside resort of Zelenogradsk on the 9^th of January to shiver in front of the sea and say hello to what are without question the most inspiring display of Christmas decorations this side of the Russian border.

I have no idea whether Kaliningrad holds a Best Decorated Christmas Street in the Region competition, but if it did, the main street of Zelenogradsk would win hands down. Words like magical and enchanting easily spring to mind, along with novel, imaginative and even bizarre!

This year I took my camera along with me and, although the snaps that I have taken do not do the panoply near enough justice, they do manage to give an idea of the thought and effort that each shop, café, bar, restaurant, etc put into producing the best expression of Christmas joy. They certainly make my Christmas baubles look pathetic in comparison, even when lit with flashing lights.

Which of the Christmas ensembles along Zelenogradsk High Street would I nominate for first prize? That’s a tough ‘un’. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Christmas decorative arch in Zelenogradsk

Amber Empire Zelenogradsk decorated for festive season

Snowmen Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations

Christmas decorated shopfronts Zelenogradsk 2022/3

Vintage Carriage Zelenogradsk High Street

Zelenogradsk specialist marzipan shop decorated for Christmas

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations, Meeskkee, teddy bears

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations with Olga Hart

Unusual Christmas decoration on Zelenogradsk

Some relevant links

Zelenogradsk Lit Up Like a Christmas Tree!
Amazed at the Museum of Skulls and Skeletons Zelenogradsk
An Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk with a Bear and Beer

Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast

Surprising but true

Published: 22 April 2021 ~ Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast

The following photographs were taken whilst walking the Zelenogradsk coastal route, starting from the promenade end and heading away from the town. To the left lies the land; to the right, on the other side of the hedge, the Baltic Sea.

See: An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

The route is divided into two sections, as indicated by different shades of block paving. One of these is the pedestrian walkway; the other accommodates all manner of locomotion. Which one is which is given away slightly by the presence of broken lane markings that run along the centre of the narrower strip.

Whilst this ‘road’ is closed to conventional vehicular traffic, among the roller bladers, skateboarders, bicycle and electric-powered scooter riders, small open-sided ‘buses’ can be seen trundling past at regular intervals crammed with tourists and those just unwilling to walk the not insubstantial distance that lies between the end of the prom and the white sandy beaches beyond. From one end of this route to the other is quite a trek, so if you are not much of a walker, all you need to do is hop onto one of these charabancs and away you go.

Architectural surprises on the Zelenogradsk coast

The first building to be photographed was this modern hotel peeping through the silver birch trees from behind a rather impressive wall of brick and granite construction, which has a wrought-iron railing top backed by translucent polycarbonate privacy panels. Such screens are ubiquitous in this part of the world, as is block paving. Whoever it was who introduced them it was not me, but, from a commercial viewpoint, I sincerely wished it had been.

Architecture Coastal Route Zelenogradsk — **Photograph 1: First hotel on the Zelenogradsk coastal route**

I suppose as modern buildings go, from the angle of this first photograph it all looks fairly prosaic, the functional attraction lying in those long, sweeping, curved balconies, which, I should imagine, guarantees discerning hotel guests a magnificent sea view.

Moving along a little, it soon becomes apparent that what we have been looking at a moment ago is merely a wing extending from the main body of the building (photo 2).

Hotel on Zelenogradsk coast — **Photograph 2: A wing of a very capacious hotel**

Photograph 2 is a shot looking back at the wing, detailing both the curved balconies mentioned earlier and, above them, in the roof, recessed balconies of the sort that feature extensively in the design of the Hotel Russ, Svletogorsk’s premier hotel, which, sadly, if my informants do not deceive me, has recently closed.

Grand Entrance Hotel Zelenogradsk — **Photograph 3: Hotel entrance**

Photograph 3 reveals the front of the hotel, a solid-looking establishment with large arched windows, a tier of ‘porthole’ windows above and a grand entrance extension, the curved top an enclosed balcony in glass and below a recessed entrance hall fronted by a colonnade which supports the upper balcony.

The fourth photograph shows the cloistered effect achieved by the colonnades and gives some indication of the not inconsiderable space occupied by this building.

Architectural feature of Zelinogradsk hotel — **Photograph 4: Side view showing the cloistered extension of the entrance**

Photograph 5 is taken looking away from the corner of the last building depicted. The brick pier wall continues and behind a solid gate, accessible via intercom system only (they like that sort of thing here, as well), sits another hotel, set back from the road, its central tower and turret paying appreciable homage to the architectural Gothic legacy from which it is descended, a striking feature reflected in and harmonised by the pitched window gables surmounting the rooftop balconies.

Modern Gothic on Zelenogradsk coastal route — **Photograph 5: In the Gothic style** ~ **Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast**

As in the first hotel, the second design also favours roundel windows, and these are apparent yet again, but on a much larger scale, in the massy and incomplete edifice looming out of the background.

Vast Arcade of Windows Zelenogradsk Hotel — **Photograph 6: Windows aplenty through which to see the sea**

Photograph 6 depicts the curvilinear glass and steel structure of the furthermost point of the first hotel, whilst 7 gives you a fuller perspective of the Gothicised structure as seen above the entrance gate.

Modern Gothic Zelenogradsk — **Photograph 7: Closer look at Gothic styling**

The hulking monolith captured in photograph 8 reminds me of the J-hangar still resident on the site of Polebrook Aerodrome in the UK, a former US air base left over from World War II.

Hotel Svetlogorsk Coast like an aircraft hangar — **Photograph 8: Big and yet unfinished** ~ Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast

In this picture, the building takes on the appearance of two half segments of a giant arch but as a later photo reveals (photo 11), taken from the opposite end of the building, the effect is an illusory one, as the unfinished project is missing its central vertical section which, had it been in place, would have completed the visual aspect of single-span uniformity.

From the distance, it appears as if the hulk is wearing my Uncle Son’s string vest, but at closer quarters it looks the same. The green string undergarment, which must have once been used, I presume, to screen the unfinished structure, is somewhat tattered and torn and now simply hangs there, adding to the forlorn neglect with which the building is heavily imbued. There is little doubt from the round tower, half risen at the front of the building (photo 9), that at its conception ‘big’ had gone hand in hand with grand, but unless something dramatic happens and happens fairly quickly, call me presumptuous if you will, I feel that there is little chance of booking a room in this hotel at any time in the near future.

Photograph 9: A would-be grand entrance
Photograph 10: Not quite complete

After this cavalcade of large and impressive, it is odd and oddly reassuring to discover that the landscape suddenly changes, revealing two normal-sized single residences, both senior in years to the previous buildings, sitting favourably in decent-sized plots behind a lush, green privet hedge. (photo 10)

German Houses on Zelenogradsk Coast — **Photograph 10: Houses of some age along the Zelenogradsk coastal route**

The first house has had a recent makeover. Its original terracotta pantiled roof, which may have been replaced after the war with asbestos, as is the case on the house adjacent, having been fitted with a metal roof of tiled terracotta profile. Note the use of pretty carved edging boards, picking out the gradient of the Dorma windows and the nuanced roof levels, a theme accentuated by the blue and white fascia boards that run along the recessed gabled ends and emerge again in the blue window shutters, all of which make for an attractive cottage effect.

Large Hotel Small Cottage on Zelenogradsk Coast — **Photograph 11: Different scales, different times: cottage & hotel**

Photograph 11 also gives you an accurate idea of the scale differential between the J-hangar and the house I have just described.

The next house along (photo12) is obviously nowhere near as quaint and fetching as its neighbour, and may in fact be flats, but the roof format is novel and so far the building has survived land grab for development.

**Photograph 12: A residential property overlooking the sea in Zelenogradsk, Russia**

We now come to that part of the coastal route where a conglomeration of different buildings vie for visual attention, the scene dominated by one incredibly large but incomplete hotel, which out-scales everything else around it (photograph 13).

Massive Unfinished Hotel Zelenogradsk — **Photograph 13: One of those ‘you can’t miss it’ hotels** ~ Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast

Disequilibrium of scale is nowhere more easily demonstrated than in the stark juxtaposition of the towering grey colossus with its single domicile rectangular neighbour (photograph 14).

Modernist house on Zelenogradsk coastal route — **Photograph 14: Built in the Modernist style**

Built in the contemporary Modernist style, David is to Goliath what light is to dark, and whilst I am only guessing mind, since the owners have not asked me round to consider the finer points of their property, from ergonomics to materials used, in fact everything about this house, speaks to me of ‘smart home’. Take the precedence, for example, of the cut around in the fence to make way for the pampered bough of that tree (photos 15 & 16). How many trees either have their more assertive branches lopped off or have to wait a100 years or more before they can force their will upon a constraining fence? Not many trees can boast the patronage of such an ecologically enlightened owner as the one who designed, planned, built or simply resides and enjoys this light, airy, modern abode.

Photograph 15: Tree with a view
Photograph 16: A tree-friendly fence

Three paragraphs back I used the phrase ‘conglomeration of different’ buildings, and you can see what I am getting at in photographs 17 and 18. Photograph 17 reveals a building defined by steel, glass and cladding, which mixes its angles with its curves in such a way that it would not be out of place situated among the first of London’s Dockland’s building’s that popped up futuristically above the lines of Victorian terraces during Maggie Thatcher’s reign.

Architecture Zelenogradsk coast — **Photograph 17: Not London Dockland’s but a building on Zelenogradsk’s coastline**

The commercial building in photograph 18 follows the lines of the former, but the brick fascia softens and traditionalises the general impression, and the pale colour scheme, quite by chance I am sure, falls satisfactorily into the company by which it is overshadowed.

Surprising architecture Zelenogradsk coastal route — **Photograph 18: A gallery of windows from which to see the sea**

Putting things into perspective, photograph 19 provides a view of the commercial building framed against the back of its ‘Dockland’s’ neighbour, whilst the long shot in photograph 20 freezes two people in time on their bicycles and pins down the scale differential of the adjacent buildings.

Architecture Zelenogradsk coastline — **Photograph 19: New-builds in relation to one another**

Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast — **Photograph 20: Putting it into perspective**

Next on the list, photographs 21 and 22 spell tasteful. This house, houses, apartments ~ what do you think? ~ synthesise modern lines with a diamond-shaped brick-infilled frieze, the type of which is evident on a number of Königsberg buildings extant in Kaliningrad.

Photograph 21: Architectural surprises on Zelenogradsk coastal route
Photograph 22: A residence of class

The overall impression is an amalgamation of the past and the present; bold but not brash; and you have to like the look and feel of those three-section big arched windows.

Whilst there is no shortage of different, alternating, archaic, modern, breathtaking, surprising, lavish, opulent, historic and ‘you name it, it’s here’ type of architecture in and around Kaliningrad, what is surprising, given the rest of the prolificity and sweeping variation in design and style, is the indisputable fact that the region as a whole finds itself extremely fence-challenged ~ more about that in a later article.

I would like to think that the old, tin, corrugated fence that encloses the properties in photograph 23 is not a woeful misjudgment made both by restrictions of budget and limited DIY skills but is merely a temporary fixture, knocked up to conceal ongoing building or garden work. This may well be the case, although whilst construction site hoarding in this part of the world is commonly metal and corrugated, it is usually identified by rather garish alternating blue and white panels, whereas home-owners’ fences can be anything in the same material from glistening silver to chocolate brown. In this instance, along this exclusive stretch of beautiful coastline, let us pray for respect and sanity and keep our fingers crossed!

Surprising architecture in Zelenogradsk — **Photograph 23: Lovely houses ~ shame about that fence!**

The first house that rises in tone as well as substance above the offending fence is not the heretic that you might think it is. It could be a remodelled German house or a new-build that has been given the half-timbered look, either by adding the requisite woodwork or painting it on to achieve the desired effect (photo 23). Along this coastal strip it is, by virtue of its standalone difference, yet another example of the energised eclecticism that devolves to the individual if left to his own devices, free, that is, from the overwhelming behests and underwhelming mediocrity imposed by stolid planning restrictions.

Whilst this may be the only example of a love affair with medievality on this particular route, it is not alone. A number of revamped and new-build properties in and around the Kaliningrad region are in receipt of half-timbered dressing, and even high-rise tower blocks have not been deemed exempt.

The house depicted here wears it well, and heralds at this point on our route a return to in-scale housing, as illustrated in photographs 24 and 25.

Photograph 24: Attractive house on Zelenogradsk coast
Photograph 25: An individual approach

Admittedly, the intervening presence of a compact castle, built of or faced with red brick, intrudes somewhat (photograph 26), but for me and all like me who went Gothic when Goth subculture and steampunk were just a twinkle in a fad-fashion eye, the question what is not to like about a building overlooking the sea which has a tower to the front and flanking turrets on all four corners is one that need not be asked. One presumes, however, that the roofline has yet to be finished, and one would hope that such completion will entail the suitable erection of conical rooves on top of the central tower and the four adjoining emplacements. Photograph 27 shows the ‘castle’ from the return direction of the coastal route with the half-timbered residence to its left.

Photograph 26: A Russian man’s home is his castle!
Photograph 27: A castle & a half-timbered house

To end this tour, I include for your delectation three more photographs exemplifying the widely contrasting nature of architectural genres with which this magnificent stretch of the coast has been populated.

The first (photograph 28), is what I think of as the route’s halfway house. It is a hotel/restaurant/bar, whose architectural style is a flamboyant composite, a self-contained contrast that reflects the divergent compositions of which it is a part. For example, the balconies on the first floor could have mirrored those above them, not only in style but also in materials, but why not have Art Deco curves made from masonry on one level below a platform base supporting angled wrought-iron fencing on the next? More angularity is achieved in the vertical triangulated stairwell window, which is escorted on either side above eaves level by a pair of Gothic parapet piers surmounted with sloping tiles, whilst the roof itself manages a low pitch profile thanks to the two hulking chimney stacks that rise up from the back like mighty sentinels.

The penultimate photograph (29) shows what happens when true juxtaposition is given free reign. The neoclassical addition in the background, which rubs shoulders with the angular pastiche in photograph 28, is yet another surprise on the architectural catwalk along which we have walked together. It is referred to in a previous post: An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route.

And the last photograph in this post (30) is reserved for what used to be and thankfully still is — a survivor of the ever-changing present. It even has a proper wooden fence!

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An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

Seeing the sites in sight of the sea in Zelenogradsk

Published: 19 April 2021

Preface

This post is based on an extract from an entry in my 2020 diary, written last August, which I would like to use as a prelude to a pictorial piece on the architecture lining the coastal route in the seaside resort of Zelenogradsk on the Baltic Coast in the Kaliningrad region of Russia.

Last May, and subsequent to it, articles began to appear both in Russian and international media, some favourable, some not, which reported that as coronavirus strengthened its grip a boom in domestic tourism had been sparked in Russia to take advantage of and to compensate for closed borders and international travel restrictions {Russia Wants to Spark a Domestic Tourism Boom. Will It Work? ~ The Moscow Times}

Did it work? It would seem so ..

August 2020

Zelenogradsk has a wonderful, long, broad sandy beach, more than enough space to accommodate this year’s influx of tourists. And all you need if you require a more secluded spot is to take the coastal path away from the centre and head off in the direction of the Curonian Spit.

We all know that walking is supposed to be good for you, but should you prefer to travel on wheels, you can always take one of the little six-to-eight-seater charabancs that buzz up and down the vehicular lane along the coastal route. Alternatively, you could rent yourself a bicycle for the day, or a small pedal go-kart, which accommodates a ‘driver’ and a passenger, or invest in one of those zippy little electric scooters that are fast becoming the most fashionable way of adding yourself to motorisation.

Whatever your choice of locomotion, It is worth taking the coastal route just to witness the diverse array of non-pedestrian options whizzing up and down, from the relatively mundane to the unreal, weird and whacky.

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

I am never quite sure what to call this stretch of, er? — this route. ‘Track’ creates the impression of something mud-like winding through the dunes and undergrowth; ‘path’ limits it to a contagion of plodding feet; and ‘road’ makes it sound like the M25. In essence, it is a combination of all three ideas, except that it has a block-paved hard surface, is essentially straight, is too wide to call a path and being closed to regular traffic cannot be called a road.

Although motor vehicles of the regular variety are prohibited, as I mentioned earlier, things with engines attached other than human legs do traverse it as, at the same time, so do feet.

Basically, the route is divided into two parts: one side, the broader of the two, is reserved for pedestrian access; the other, about three times the width of a standard bicycle lane, is allocated for vehicles and is divided yet again into two directional lanes.

On the landward side of this route, it is competition time for who can build the biggest and most impressionable hotel. They come in all shapes and in very large sizes, but most share an architectural predilection for the curvilinear forms utilised so memorably, and thus so effectively, in earlier Art Deco building formats.

Brought up to date in the early twenty-first century with the accent on glass and plenty of it, the semi-circular portico and centralised tower stairwell are particularly popular features in these ‘look, I can see the sea!’ hotels.

The odd one out in this nuanced continuity, which diverges in no uncertain terms from the prevalence of the others, is that which in its fundamental shape, external facings and decorative embellishments is a dead ringer for the sort of neoclassical hall that you would expect to find, and do, in the heart of the English countryside.

Neoclassical design Zelinogradsk — **Neoclassical design on Zelinogradsk’s coastal route**

Grandeur of scale, geometrical lines, functional columns, dentil moulding, cornices and balustrades, this building has the lot, and perhaps even a little more besides, for I have noticed that when modern Russian architectural design emulates the ideas of an earlier aesthetic period, imitation is not nearly enough when opportunity allows to surpass.

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

A sight that may not be exclusive to this part of the world or to Russia generally, but is ubiquitous enough to place it in a national context, is the unfinished, ‘grey scale’ construction. I have not counted them, but there are perhaps as many unfinished hotels along this route as there are complete ones, although, given the success story of Russia’s incentivised holiday-at-home programme and, news just in, that most of the region’s hotels are already fully booked for the 2021 summer season, it may possibly not be long before these redundant-before-completion hulks are finally brought to life.

Unfinished hotel in Zelinogradsk — **The view from here will be spectacular once they finish building it …**

In addition to hotels, also on this route you will see the last remaining but inevitably fleeting glimpse of homes that hark back to the days when Zelinogradsk was Germany’s Cranz. Although these buildings, once reasonably grand but modest by today’s standards and made doubly so by their bold new companions, display all kinds of interesting and sometimes quite astonishing DIY distortions enacted during the Soviet era, their quaint construction and kinder presence on the environmental scale can still be felt and appreciated, and it is a great pity that given the premium placed on the land that these houses occupy that it is only a matter of time, I suspect, before they are rubbed out and in the name of progress replaced by more of the same by which they are surrounded.

German building Zelenogrask coastal route — **A Cranz home being restored along the Zelenogradsk coastal route**

This stretch of road, causeway, path ~ call it what you will ~ does not go on forever. In fact, it runs out rather abruptly, interrupted by a tall and fairly non-descript hotel and thereafter a series of ground and one-storey flats with, at the rear, integral garages, tiny yards cloaked with high walls and that decidedly late Russian phenomenon, the massy wrought iron gate translucently obscured by polycarbonate sheeting.

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

At any point along this route, it is possible that you may wish to descend to the beach below, which is something that you can do thanks to thoughtful sequences of broad steps provided at regular intervals. There is one last chance to do the same at the front of the tall hotel, after which, if you want to proceed further, needs must that you hang a hard left. This takes you into a paved area fronted by what once must have been flats par excellence, but which have lately been dwarfed and left behind by one of the most amazing seaside residential developments ~ amazing both in scale and style extravaganza~ that has ever taken me by surprise whilst I was going around the bend.

But, in the last analysis, if, for some peculiar and indefinable reason, you are not taking this route to look at the buildings, then on the other side of the road, over the hedge, you will see the sea. In late summer, on this stretch of land, I have had the good fortune to witness some of the most sublime sunsets that I have ever encountered, which is another feather in the hotel cap along this particular road, track, path, walkway, esplanade or route. Call it what you will, if you are holidaying in this region don’t forget to travel it or, better still, book yourself an exclusive view from one of the splendid finished hotels. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

**Sunset: An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route**

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Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman

Updated: 15 April 2021 / Published: 14 August 2020 ~
Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman

If, like me, you love social history and the historical insight that different architectural features and the time-honoured states of buildings offer, then wherever you are in this region, in Kaliningrad itself, the small outlying towns or, as we were recently, walking around the backstreets of Zelenogradsk, one of this region’s coastal resorts, you will not be disappointed. Every street is an eclectic cornucopia of surprises. At first sight, there is, as they say, no rhyme or reason in it; it is what it is ~ a haphazard delight of old, new and second-hand ~ but memory lane has its own rhythmic structure and with each successive step you take any suspicion of discord soon converts to nostalgic rhapsody.

Idyllic Cranz Cottage in Zelenogradsk, Russia — **Idyllic Cranz cottage, Zelenogradsk 2020**

Take one of the streets that we walked today. In no specific order, we were presented with old German two-storey apartment blocks, which once would have been quite lowly dwellings, interspersed with little German cottages, juxtaposed with Soviet concrete flats, contradicted by grandiose houses ~ modern Russian villas built in a fantasy Königsberg style, some boasting an impressive intricacy of irregular shapes and forms complete with fantailed turrets.

In contrast with the brand-spanking newness of the late-comers, almost all of the older buildings exhibit multiple signs of age-related wear bolstered by years of neglect, together with ‘they should never have done it themselves’ extensions, inadvisable infills and hasty slapdash repairs, all executed with expediency and cheapness aforethought, using whatever materials came to hand and by people who, by the looks of it, had no basic DIY skills, much less respect and even less sensitivity for stylistic integrity and continuity of any kind.

Paintwork upon paintwork overlaid and showing through; cement rendering failing and falling exposing the original bricks beneath; the weathered and blistered doors knocked-on, opened, shut and left unpainted for many a year; here a piece of bas-relief, there a small rusting plaque; the wooden lean-to crying out for paint; the ubiquitous asbestos roof shoved up there by make-do Soviet labourers; the myriad examples of patchwork and bodging ~ all of which put me in mind of a Victor Ryabinin ‘assemblage’, in which each piece of the uneven jigsaw owns its own significance but together are transformed into a higher understanding of the mysterious way Time has of moulding, reshaping and reforming structures, perception and our lives.

The combination of natural ageing and neglect in these properties are to the ardent history buff and nostalgia junkie alike what stratigraphy is to the professional archaeologist, each strata determining, by its recognised specificity, an indelible link to a certain period or time identifiable by the tastes, the fashions and fads by which it was defined. And each repair and ‘improvement’, however clumsily executed, from an add-on Soviet bunker in drab grey brick or degrading bullying concrete to lashed-up electric cabling that should never have been allowed, are part and parcel of these house’s history, a separate and distinct page or possibly complete chapter in the life of what was and is ~ at least for now.

As strange as it may seem, the streets that these houses are on do not suffer from any sense of disjoint or jumble. They exhibit true, aged-in-the-wood, natural time-honoured diversity, not the falsely sold, theme-park variety or anything forced through agendas. They exist within and as part of the changing seasons of time and require nothing from you, no cosmetic apology not even your appreciation if you would rather withhold it.

As natural as the phenomenon of nature itself, the two join hands and what could be intrusive in any other context becomes a comforting, comfortable soulmate.

Vegetation leans out through fences, both tumble-down and modern, to gossip with grass verge and luxurious-planted flower beds; the trees and bushes crane over these fences to listen in; some of these trees have not had a haircut since coronavirus began and long before a conspiracy theorist invented it. Almost joining aloft in some places, and thereby creating a green and some might say unkempt vista, the verdure tests the beholder’s eye. For me, however, this is where the inherent beauty lies. But as each of us makes our own reality, who am I to say?

Olga remarked that most people would not understand why we adored the ‘mankyness’ of it all. She was referring to the houses as much as, if not more than, to the overgrown gardens, rough garden tracks, hastily erected grey-brick soviet sheds, toppled fencing, unmanaged back yards, wild foliage and everything so natural and so unmolested that it reminded me of the England of my youth, when England really was England; a time when people still lived in small modest cottages with old tin extensions bolted on the side, when gardens were ramshackle with home-made sheds and there was a healthy preponderance of honest to goodness dereliction, land overgrown across rubble, and even deserted houses and barns, barns that were real barns not supercilious conversions ~ the England I knew as a boy, that ‘green and pleasant land’ before every piece of land was gobbled up for investment, every garden gentrified, every humble house knobbed up and every barn des resd, until, by stealth, inevitably and far too quickly, reality gave up the ghost and died, its corpse was carried out and pretentiousness moved in.

Loud scream across the empty void of time!

One architectural style typical in this part of the world which never fails to enthral me is exhibited in those houses/flats which are shaped like a letter ‘E’ turned on its side with the middle arm missing [photo 1].

Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman. A Cranz/Zelinogradsk house — **1: A typical Zelenogradsk (Cranz) dwelling**

The main structure of the house ~ the ‘E’ stem ~ runs parallel to the street. The two end arms are constructed usually of rendered brick, but the upper-storey sections are, in contrast, constructed of wood panelling with glazed units that run the length and depth of the three sides, usually covering three-quarters of the front [photo 2.1].

A house in Zelenogradsk, Russia. — **2.1: Plenty of history, little conformity**

Wooden design incorporated into Cranz/Zelenogradsk house — **2.2: Zelenogradsk (Cranz) house showing the design of the wooden compartment on the second floor**

Now, I think we can bet our socks that there is a many an erudite work out there ~ book, pamphlet, treatise, internet article ~ on the historical origins of this style and its architectural nomenclature, but for the time being let us just dwell a moment on the Romanticist, fairy-tale element inherent in this feature. Take a look at the photograph that I have provided [photo 2.2]. The carved, pierced and moulded decoration, sometimes referred to as gingerbread trim, is as fanciful as it is quaint, taken together with the contrasting masonry and wooden structure it transforms what would otherwise be a quite plain Jane into something as nice as a Victorian petticoat. The real belt and braces of this property is, as I have already nominated, not the bits that do fit but the pieces that surprise and do not, such as the Soviet asbestos roof and the pleasing modernisation of the entrance and porch, which has no claim aesthetically on the aged wooden compartment above it or for that matter vice versa [photo 2.3].

A tasteful and quaint room extension/balcony in a typical Zelenogradsk (cranz) house — **2.3: Old sits easily on top of new in this example of Zelenogradsk housing**

The next house to attract our attention on this same street had a tall tapering end section. It was not a tower exactly, but its tall perpendicular structure fulfilled the same cosmetic purpose [photos 3.1 & 3.2]. Note the broad arched window in the centre of two peaked-gothic windows, now filled in, and also, peeping through the overgrown bush at its base, a larger arched window with what could conceivably be the original German frames. The green paint peeling from the walls of this ground floor section also has some antiquity [photo 3.3].

Towards Gothic in Zelenogradsk — **3.1: Gothic & Art Nouvea features rub along nicely in this original -feature-rich home**

Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman looking at old houses — **3.2: Note the two pointed Gothic arch windows on the top storey, now bricked up**

3.3: Yet another original feature: large arched ground-floor window

Photograph 4.1 reveals an interesting stylised diamond carving above the front door that flows into the decorative stonework atop of the door frame in Art Nouveau fashion. Photograph 4.2 gives a closer view, with my wife having received permission from one of the house’s occupants to take a peep inside.

Zelenogrask stonework decoration architecture — **4.1: Stonework decoration above the front door**

Olga Hart Art Nouveau Cranz — **4.2: Stonework decoration melding with the stylised door surround ~ no, I am not referring to my wife!**

Photograph 4.3 shows a door of some age and quality. Note the carving to the glazing frames and the chevron effect to the base panels. The black and white diamond floor is typical of, and quite a universal feature in, European and British homes dating from the late 19^th century through to the 1940s. I suspect, however, that the municipal look inside the corridor, the bog standard (pun intended) two layers of paint, in this case green and white, sometimes blue and white (in old British toilets black and white) are in this case a Soviet makeover. However, photograph 4.4 depicts a handsome wooden staircase complete with a nice line in stepped skirting board, an impressive turned base rail and matching turn-stop, glimpsed on the corner of the first landing. I think we can safely assume that the lovely painting at the top of the first flight of stairs, with dogs scampering through a meadow and a girl gathering flowers, is a work of art of not–too-distant origin. A closer view is available in photograph 4.5. The cat on the windowsill is real! He told me so.

Cranz front door. Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman — **4.3: A door to be proud of**

Staircase in Zelenogradsk (Cranz) house. Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman — **4.4: A fine old staircase**

Wall art Zelenogradsk house. Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman — **4.5: This carefree painting would complement any nursery . The sleeping cat makes an excellent prop!**

Thank you to the person who allowed us access to this wonderful old building!

Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman — **5: A real character!**

It was the intrusive electric cabling that drew our attention to the next abode, which, together with the many other discordant add-ons and workmanlike ‘improvements’, epitomises the changing times and fortunes which these houses and the people who lived in them experienced. The carelessly non-matching extensions at either end of this particular house [photo 5] have an architecturally masochistic appeal for me. I particularly like the blue and white brickwork on the left which gives way to a dark blue metal superstructure, as if Tim Martin of Wetherspoon’s fame has asked his designers to create a distressed effect, but which I am almost certain, without being absolutely sure, is the consequence of demand supplied in the absence of viable alternatives. The roof, by the way, is once again ubiquitous postwar asbestos. The washing lines, strung between the two extensions, have that real-world feel to them, the one I knew as a child, and thank heavens for the roadside foliage and unpretentious tree.

Zelenogradsk (Cranz) a building of all periods — **6: The accumulative effect of time**

The little dwelling in photograph 6 might, for some people, be nothing more than a cursory example of Roger the Baltic Bodger inimitably at it again, but I like it. The layers of history added are there to be peeled back. Young faces have no story to tell, because they are waiting for life to write its narrative on them, whereas old faces are many stories combined; they tell of the difficult journey from cradle to grave and wear upon them every knock and scar that ever befell their owners.

Gothic revival house in Zelenogradsk, Russia — **7.1: On the same street but a different level**

Hobnobbing from an inverted snobbery perspective is this NeoGothic scintillation [photo 7.1]. It stands without detriment or, in my mind, exclusivity to its older residents, as, like them, it, too, is no less a descendant of this region’s ancestral heritage, and whilst it may be young and brash (or it may be a bold restoration?), the fact that it respects its elders and knows its place in the history of this land is obvious from the deference that it shows to architectural concepts steeped in Germanic origin.

Gothicised house in Zelenogradsk, Russia — **7.2: Gothic revival with magnificent finial, mermaid bas-relief & crenellated window surround**

I am a tower and turret man myself, so need I say more. Although I must, since I cannot pass without showing my respect to the magnificent Gothic finial adorning the turret on this property, the mermaid bas relief on the street-facing wall and the stepped crenellation crowning the ground-floor windows. The effect is impressive-conservative with just enough and not too much to render it late-Russian capitalist.

Whether it is offended in having no option but to reside in the same street as the structure in photograph 8 is debatable, but the fact that it does is undeniably wonderful, in an eccentric kind of way.

This grey-brick shed built by someone I know from Peterborough, who must have slipped into the Kaliningrad region during Soviet times to demonstrate the not-so-noble art of bodge building as counter-intuitive to the bourgeoise dream, has fallen further from grace but made no less interesting by a good dose of ‘urban artwork’. You will observe, I am sure, the give-away clue from which part of the world this nasty urban trend derives. I leave it to yourself and to your conscience to decide whether this deserves the name of street art or is simply a piece of vandalism daubed on a wall by a simpleton. Street art or street arse, you decide?

There were other interesting houses and other houses with interesting and eccentric features on this street, but I will close this post with a view of and on this building [photo 9] which, standing as it does dead centre at the end of the street, the road curving round to the right, said two words to me (and those as well!), ‘block house’.

Zelenogradsk where architecture knows no bounds — **9: It’s all happening in this picture …**

It is a big solid structure with no frills and fripperies; another one of those buildings not unusual in this region that have been knocked around so much that it is difficult to say where exactly they come from and if they will ever be accepted ~ the architectural equivalent to a boat load of third-worlders lacking documentation.

Look at the windows ~ no, not in the boat ~ in the house. It is definitely a case of all shapes, sizes and co. Wood and plastic coexist here simply because they have no choice, a bit like British diversity. Any planning that may have led to this result has been cunningly concealed, and you must ask yourself whether living in it you would be living in harmony or would want to live elsewhere? The exterior has been clad. It is a cover-up, and the confusion of metal flues sit rather awkwardly with the traditional, conservative, red- brick chimney. Nevertheless, as an interesting experiment it is an interesting experiment, although I would strongly advise against the open-door policy as we all know, only too well, to what disaster that can lead!

This review has drawn for its inspiration from one street out of the many historically evocative examples with which Kaliningrad and its regional towns are invested. Stepping back in time has never been simpler and more compelling, so if you do get the chance to follow in my footsteps do not let the moment pass you by.

🚗👍Recommended Tour Guide for Russian & English Speakers: IN MEMORY of OUR GOOD FRIEND STAS

Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons Zelenogradsk

Skeletons in closets and more …

Published: 15 January 2021 ~ Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons

To see it, especially from a distance, you would think that it was just another modern apartment block. Besides, your eyes would be led away by the nearby proximity of a far more interesting building ~ the Zelinogradsk (formerly, Krantz) water tower. Only when you draw closer do you get to see the hotel sign, as large as it is. This is the intriguingly named Boutique-Hotel Paradox; the first paradox being that entombed within this building lies the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons; the second, that it is not really a museum at all but more like an art centre, or exhibition centre, of skulls and skeletons. But you won’t know this until you get inside.

Once on the forecourt shared by the Boutique-Hotel and water tower, you will be unable to miss the directional sign for the museum. It is a large ~ larger than life ~ skeleton made of metal, steampunk style.

My wife, Olga, and I visited the museum on the 21 December 2020.

Here is an extract from my diary:

As we climbed the steps to the entrance of this building, the thought materialised that it was an odd building in which to have a museum. For a start, it was plainly modern, and for a second and last it was more or less nondescript, looking like a large block of flats with one of the lower walls in glass, through which it appeared was a bar or restaurant.

The entrance led us into a foyer, which, in keeping with the building’s general appearance, was office-like. Olga paid the girl sitting at the desk in one corner the skelet museum’s entrance money, and off we went, through some large glass doors and up a staircase, which was, well, office-like. And when we emerged into an identical landing on the second floor, where there was a long counter/reception desk, it felt as if we had come for a job interview.

To our right, there were two large, double, glass doors, and it was in here where the skeletons were lurking.

I am not exactly sure what it was that I had been expecting. Olga had spoken of the museum a year or so ago when she visited it whilst I was in England, and we had posed for a photograph next to the metalwork sculpture of a skeleton outside the front door on the concourse one night last year [2019]. This particular skelet had a bronzed, distressed finish, classifying it in my mind as steampunk, so I imagined that this was how the rest of the museum would be. I did not expect it to be a museum in the traditional sense, full of dusty, old, real bones, which was good, as it was not like this at all. No, Zelenogradsk’s skelet museum is, in fact, a brightly illuminated showroom containing a vast number and range of skelet art pieces of all shapes and sizes made from lots of different materials.

Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons, Zelenogradsk

The desk to the left of the entrance, the shelves behind and other surfaces and the display units to the front and side were bristling with every conceivable skelet artefact in miniature or medium. On, within the glass-frontage and around the desk, the smaller items were souvenirs, waiting to be bought as mementoes of your visit. In front of you, and in the centre of the room, there was a large motorbike, possibly a Harley ~ they like Harleys in this part of the world ~ complete with flag, possibly one with a skeleton imprint ~ on which one could sit and have one’s photo taken. In fact, Olga suggested that I do just that, but I declined on the basis that I was not a motorbike sort of person.

I was, however, the sort of person who would be quite ready and willing to stand next to a ‘vintage’ wardrobe containing various skeleton pieces and which spoke to you in English when you opened the door. Olga snapped off three or four pictures of me in front of this, including a most arty-farty one, in which my face appears in the inside door mirror looking quizzically at a white bust of Putin.

President Putin in the wardrobe — Hello, fancy meeting you here

Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons Zelenogradsk

The next experience was an unlikely one for us and one, moreover, which Olga placed great symbolic store on later. At the side of us, next to the wall, there was a doorway with multicoloured plastic streamers hanging vertically from the ceiling. A couple of yards away to the right there was an identical door furbished in the same manner. Above each door, on brightly coloured card, I was able to read, in Russian, the words ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’. I asked what this was, and Olga said it was a maze.

The maze at the Museum of Skeletons in Zelenogradsk — Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons Zelenogradsk

“A maze!” I snorted.

I just had to step inside and in so doing was immediately and utterly overwhelmed, smothered by the sheer volume of the multi-coloured hanging plastic strips. I pushed my way through them until I reached the back of the cabinet. It must have been almost two yards deep. The density of plastic trailers made it impossible to see what exactly lay at the back of this cabinet, but I could feel a textile wall ~ and that was it. I felt my way back to the entrance, saying, as I almost emerged, “But there’s no way through; it is solid.”

“No,” Olga contradicted, “It’s a maze. It says so on the sign.”

I was just about to question the veracity of this statement when I realised that the vertical strut I was holding was not in fact adjoined to the outside wall.

“There,” said Olga at the same time as I discovered it, “is an entrance.”

Indeed, there was. It was narrow, about one slim person wide, tall, obscured by the crowding nature of the hanging tapes and the dark interior beyond but most of all by the assumption that no doorway would lie at right angles to the entrance.

By now I was curious and made to move inside. Olga was nervous and attempted to hold me back.

“Come on!” I laughed. And off we went.

No sooner had we stepped inside than we were overcome both by the darkness, which was now black as pitch, and by the obstructive density of the dangling ribbons. We had not gone three feet, I imagine, before our voices lowered and our pulses began to race. I edged forward, feeling the wall as I went, until my hand dropped into space. Another right-angled turn. I urged Olga to follow me.

As I entered into a wider void, I heard Olga’s voice in the darkness call out, “Hold my hand! Hold my hand!” I did, pulling her gently behind me. I was feeling for where I suspected the next opening in the maze would be, but it was not. The ribbons seemed to be growing in profusion, but I found another gap and proceeded through it, a frightened Olga clinging to my hand and calling in an alarmed voice, “I don’t like it”.

Into the next compartment we went, with Olga calling, “Let’s go back.”

It seemed to me that this part of the labyrinth was larger than the previous, and when my hands hit solid wall, and with Olga crying to get out behind me, I must confess to experiencing a paroxysm of panic, quite foolish and illogical I know, but panic all the same. I was on the cusp of saying, ‘you’re right; let’s retrace our steps’, when a science officer Spock-like rationale kicked in. “Don’t be so silly,” said a still, calm voice, “you’re only inside a cupboard.”

[I have omitted the next paragraph as it contains the secret to identifying where the ‘doorways’ are, and I would rather you go to the museum and get lost in the maze yourselves!]

Applying this simple science, we did a quick sharp turn and there, lo and behold! through the ribbons that hung like fog, the lights of the larger room penetrated.

As we emerged, I had to laugh, both at our fears and our appearance. My hat was all skew-wiff, making me look like Captain Mainwaring in one of those scenes when the entire Dad’s Army troop cram into the verger’s office, and Olga was as red and dishevelled as a beetroot fired from a cannon.

The difference was that whereas I had enjoyed the experience, she had not; and whereas I recovered instantly, she did not. She was still talking about how much it had disturbed her on the way home and, in fact, throughout the following day.

Made of sterner stuff, however, including a built-in denial system that allowed me to bury quickly any further thought of the spasm of fear experienced and certainly not to discuss it, I moved on to the exhibits, which were many and varied and laid out in large shelving units glazed front and back. My favourite was the excavation scene: a skeleton lying on its side in a shallow hole, its legs bent at the knee and one of its bony hands clutching an empty bottle of vodka. The red earth around the skeleton was caked, cracked and littered with the detritus of our modern age, suitably weathered and tarnished as though it had been there for some considerable time. There was a battered coke tin, a scrunched-up plastic bottle, a squashed memory stick, part of an old music cassette, a CD, a shattered ballpoint pen, a condom (still in its packet, I am glad to say!), coins, a battered mobile phone and other bits and pieces testifying literally to life in the throwaway age.

Remains of a skeleton amongst remians of modern life

This exhibit was not, of course, a shelf one. It was contained in and presented through a large flatbed cabinet, tilted at an angle and raised on supports. It stood in front of a window, the closed strip blinds of which had one edge stencilled with the image of part of a skeleton, connected visually to the rest of its skeletal body, which was solid state, pinned above the blind fitting. Two similar designs were repeated in the second half of the room: one, with the skull and two hands of a skeleton mounted above the blind rail and the complete body of the skeleton stencilled beneath it; the other, one side of a skeleton in solid state with the skull, rib cage and one arm stencilled onto the fabric.

In the centre of the room where I had been studying the excavation scene, there was a table-mounted stretcher, on whose surface lay a skeletal leg and, standing next to it, a skeleton doctor, dressed in a white coat with a stethoscope around its neck. Hmm, not only was he not wearing his muzzle (mask), but he had also forgotten to put on his trousers.

The glass-fronted shelving units contained a profusion of artistic sculptures all designed around the theme of skulls and skeletons. My favourites consisted of: (1) a ‘giant’ Zippo lighter, with two skelets standing nearby, one holding the body of the lighter and the other supporting its top; (2) three skeletons together on a beach with a large jug of beer next to them, one of the skeletons is lying drunk on his back and next to him is the proverbial tall story ~ a giant fish; (3) three different tray and skull designs, each profusely decorated ~ one in blue & white motifs; the other deep red with abstract, almost psychedelic ornamentation; and the third in traditional Russian lacquer-work. I also liked the open-sided computer tower with a gold skull inside, and the skulls with green moss clinging in patches to the side of them. One of these had a small graveyard scene modelled on the skull’s cranium, complete with tumble-down picket fence and skewed tombstones.

Of the numerous artefacts on display, if I was asked to choose my favourite, it would be without hesitation a figural piece, which was both touchingly symbolic and at the same time macabre. The composition is that of a long-haired female skeleton sitting on the knee of her skeleton male lover, the two are embracing and kissing, and the piece most aptly named, ‘True Love Never Dies’.

I would have purchased this without a second thought, but, alas, none of what we could see before us was purchasable. There were skeleton-themed items that you could buy, but they were cheaply made and overpriced. There were other pieces that I did not care for, mainly those skulls that looked as though they belonged to computer-game software and Halloween-type products: skulls and skeletons with glaring, gobstopper eyeballs. There was even a wall-hanging skeleton with the parched remains of brown flesh clinging to its bones. If this was available for purchase, would I have bought it and hung it on my wall …?

In the end, we settled for a skeleton pen, with two articulated arms. There are a couple of buttons at the back of these little devils and when you press them the arms move, as if they are boxing, oh, and the eyes light up.

I would have bought the skull lamp, but I thought it a tad expensive at thirty quid, and besides I was not sure whether our skelet, the one we have at home who is a member of the family, would be pleased. Skelets, like the human beings that they partly are, can be exceptionally jealous.

Essential details:

Museum of Skulls & Skeletons
Saratovskaya St, 2A
Zelenogradsk 238326
Russia

Tel: +7 (40150) 31053 / +7 (9520) 560992

Web: http://m-ch-s.ru/

Opening times

Monday to Sunday inclusive 11am to 6pm

LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES
ZALIVINIO LIGHTHOUSE RESTORATION
SCHAAKEN CASTLE
FORT XI (Fort Dönhoff)

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

A festive day in Zelenogradsk

Published: 24 December 2020

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

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

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

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

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

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

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

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

Bicycle Zelinogradsk adorned for Christmas

Zelenogradsk, Russia, Christmas 2020

Zelenogradsk New Sea View Apartment Blocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk with Bear & Beer

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 141 [2 August 2020]

Published: 8 August 2020

‘You ought to get out more!’ Since the birth of coronavirus, the intentional irony in this off-hand remark has taken on a whole new irrational meaning. We know that we want to get out more, but we are told that we should stay in more, and even a patriot like Nigel Farage, who does get out occasionally to do nothing more obnoxious than stand on a cliffside in Dover watching the endless flow of boats coming in full of happy smiling migrants destined for 4-star hotels (they do get free face masks as well), is castigated by the liberal press for breaking UK quarantine rules when they know full well he is not.

That’s quite funny, isn’t it? One Englishman pursued doggedly by the UK’s liberal media for travelling down to Kent, whilst hundreds of migrants from every corner of the globe you have never heard of, and don’t particularly want to, are pouring into the UK like, er let’s say hard water through a Co-op tea bag, and on arrival, having been duly welcomed by our British Polite force, are then bussed to British hotels to reside in non-social distancing proximity at the expense of the British taxpayer. Hmmm?

Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk with Bear & Beer

Safe in the knowledge that, to use Mrs May’s expression, it was ‘highly likely’ that there would not be a train of migrant boats being dutifully escorted to the shores of the Baltic Coast, I decided that a second trip to the coastal resort Zelenogradsk was needed before second wave coronavirus potentially washes us back over the isolation threshold.

From Kaliningrad by car, the journey to Zelenogradsk takes between 20 and 30 minutes on the region’s modern road network (providing the crowds are not out!). As we zipped along in a friend’s car, I reflected on how long and cumbersome the same journey used to be just after Perestroika, bumping and pot-hole dodging the old German road within its crash-insensitive avenue of big gnarled trees.

Ahhh, Kaliningrad’s new generations do not remember those times, but for those of us who do, we are able to appreciate just how extensive and beneficial improvements in this region have been over the last 20 years.

Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk with Bear & Beer

It was another beautiful day in this priceless exclave of Russia as we drew in at the side of the road close to the bus park and rail station.

We had been forewarned by Zelenogradsk residents that we would find the resort exceptionally busy, far busier than it was when we last visited three weeks or more ago. To some extent, this was to be expected, as we were now further along holiday-period road, but our sources informed us that the tourist population had swelled as a result of the Russian government’s incentivisation to boost domestic tourism, which, with international travel limited and some of the borders still closed, appeared to be doing the trick. Apropos of this, I prepared myself for the game of spot the Muscovite on holiday. What I was not prepared to find was that bears (meeshkee) would also be taking advantage of the relaxed self-isolation rules.

There was one standing by the side of the road as we alighted from the car. Just to prove the western prejudice that bears really do walk the streets of Russia, I asked him nicely if I could have my photograph taken standing next to him. As you can see from the photograph, he was only too happy to do so.

As I walked away, however, I sensed that this particular bear was becoming increasingly grizzly. “Anglichanin! Anglichanin!” he growled (Anglichanin meaning Englishman). Looking back, I saw that he was standing with his right arm extended. His palm was open and he was repeatedly scratching it with his claws in a gesture that could only mean that he had a terrible itch. Poor bear, I thought. And then the possibility dawned on me that perhaps non-isolating meeshkee who consented to have their photograph taken expected to be remunerated.

Having crossed his palm with rubles, we dropped our travelling bag off at the dacha kindly lent out to us by a friend, and took a walk along the prom. Yep, the news was spot on, both the prom and beach were busy.

The frontside bars and restaurants were also busy, not full but far from empty. For the first time I caught a whiff of nostalgia. If anybody had told me six months ago that I would be shunning these essential establishments for health reasons I would have laughed at them. More shocking came the realisation that this was possibly the longest continual period in my life, at least from the age of 14, that I had not frequented a pub or bar.

To take my mind off this reprehensible milestone, we decided to take a brief excursion into the backstreets of the town.

What a delight these streets are. Architecturally, they provide the onlooker with an historical snapshot of the region’s social history, an evocative diorama depicting life from pre-war Germany, through the Second World War, across the Cold War period and into the present day.

Nostalgically, this pre- and one ardently hopes never-to-happen gentrification, echoes, for my generation at least, a time of natural realism now forever lost in the UK, but preserved in Kaliningrad and in its surrounding towns and villages in the overgrown verges, rough tracks, a seemingly inexhaustible inventiveness for recycled car and lorry tyres, vegetable plots neatly honed, vibrant cottage flower beds and an astonishing medley of makeshift sheds, lean-tos and little old barns. (See my later post, which I haven’t written yet.) I cannot remember the name of the street ~ I think it was Memory Lane.

From this enlightening excursion, we ambled back to the dacha, stopping on the way for some edible provisions and, naturally, a couple of bottles of beer. We were going to divvy up the grub and, making a picnic with it along with one of the bottles of beer, head off to the beach.

We had decided to walk away from the nearest, the most central point of the beach as this was where people would naturally be most concentrated, thus availing ourselves of a quieter spot whilst fulfilling our social contract to observe the one-metre rule.

Our plan paid off. We found a nice, white sandy stretch of beach with a convenient barrage of sea-breaker sandbags against which I could rest my back as I drank my beer whilst my wife, Olga, went for a swim.

Mick Hart Chilling in Zelenogradsk with Bear & Beer — Mick Hart chilling on Zelinogradsk beach, Baltic Coast, Russia

The water was gloriously warm, Olga informed me later, and my beer, which had been well-chilled at the outset, kept sustainably so parked between the sandbags where I had placed it at ground level. We were each so comfortable in our own right, according to our own pursuits, that we stayed put until evening and by so doing were granted a first-rate view of one of the Baltic Coast’s legendary sunsets ~ sublimity at its best.

Zalinogradsk Baltic Coast Russia, Sunset August 2020. Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk — Zalinogradsk, Baltic Coast, Russia, Sunset August 2020

Making our way back into town, we spent another lazy hour sitting on one of the benches along the central promenade playing spot the Muscovite before returning to the dacha for a nightcap with a blue elephant.

No, this is not the name of a Russian beer (as far as I am aware), and neither have I reached the intoxication level whereupon such manifestations are commonplace to me.

The blue elephant in question was a little elephant made from Plasticine. On our way back from our street tour earlier, we had stumbled upon some young entrepreneurs selling Plasticine models on the edge of the sidewalk.

We bought the blue elephant from them, upon which one of the boys exclaimed excitedly, “Great, we’ve now got enough money for three ice creams!” and when I asked them if we could take their photograph they were even more excited, “Enough for three ice creams and our photograph taken!”.

Olga Hart buying a Plasticine elephant from young Russian entrepreneurs Zelenogradsk — Olga Hart buying a Plasticine elephant from young Russian entrepreneurs, Zelenogradsk

I think when I get back to Mick’s Place (Attic Bar) I will allocate a special spot for this new drinking partner of mine, providing he keeps a metre apart and always wears his facemask.

Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

An Englishman's Experiences of Life in Kaliningrad

Tag Archives: Mick Hart in Zelenogradsk Russia

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk Wired for Quality

Over the wire the buzz word is Telegraph

The Telegraph Restaurant

Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony

Balt Restaurant Zelenogradsk Review

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT

💚 Around the Kaliningrad region

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize

Zelenogradsk ~ streets ahead with imaginative decorations

Zelenogradsk Christmas Decorations Win First Prize

Some relevant links

Architectural Surprises on the Zelenogradsk Coast

Surprising but true

See: An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

Architectural surprises on the Zelenogradsk coast

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

Seeing the sites in sight of the sea in Zelenogradsk

Preface

August 2020

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

An Introduction to the Zelenogradsk Coastal Route

Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman

Down a Zelenogradsk Backstreet with an Englishman

Loud scream across the empty void of time!

🚗👍Recommended Tour Guide for Russian & English Speakers: IN MEMORY of OUR GOOD FRIEND STAS

More posts on the Kaliningrad region:

Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons Zelenogradsk

Skeletons in closets and more …

Amazed at the Museum of Skulls & Skeletons, Zelenogradsk

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

A festive day in Zelenogradsk

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree

Zelenogradsk! Lit up like a Christmas tree