The flower pillar...

... and various other floral arrangements. The top one is a temporary arrangement (in everyday life a hatstand!), the next one the real thing! Below are 2 different mini-gardens.

Inside the museum

These pictures from the inside are of mixed quality, due to the lighting conditions. But some of the feeling of the memorial aworks of art and the mementoes are maybe conveyed below.

In the fort

Some shots from inside the fort, showing both the defensive use and the prison use. Gloomy damp place for soldiers and prisoners aside, I say.

Jewish memorial

Visiting sites of such dark and violent history is always an eerie experience, I find. Not least because the calm and beauty of them contrasts so sharply with the events you know took place there and trying to imagine them becomes so unreal but still present.

There are several monuments erected to the victims, in different times and by different groups seeking to honour them.

Kaunas Fort IX

Passing Kaunas we stopped to see Fort IX. Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania between the two World Wars, when Vilnius was still under Polish rule.

The fort is one in a series of ten built for the defence of the town, but later used as a prison, both by inter-war Lithuania and Soviet occupants in 1940-41. Later during German occupation it was the site of large-scale executions of the Jewish population of Kaunas (read Virtual Jewish History on this dark piece of history).

The two top pictures are of the actual fort, the lower one of the museum- The site now houses museums with material and information mainly relating to Soviet and to some extent Nazi atrocities in Lithuania.

William Dalrymple

Ever since first reading "City of Djinns" by a swimming-pool in New Delhi, I've always enjoyed William Dalrymple's books immensely. Recently, I read his latest, on the mutiny against British rule in India and the final downfall of the once-glorious Mughal dynasty:


(The picture shows the hard-back cover and links to the paperback version at amazon.co.uk .)

I really recommend this book. A Swedish-language review (Svenska Dagbladet) can be found here. It's on confrontation and victory more empty than meaningful and on the death of an era.

This week's reading

I have a feeling this may be quite extensive - my preliminary collection is quite full!

Let me start with some very unusual topics for this blogg, the voice of new African literature and the identity of the modern Indian man!

From the Swedish debate I would like to highlight a few points. This is from Expressen, on a documentary from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by a young man of probably quite ambitious cultural and political ideas, seeking to get away from being a "slave under occupation".

Another interesting feature is this, from Dagens Nyheter, on the danger of self-proclaimed experts crying "wolf" and "al-Qaida" at the first chance... and this Expressen op-ed on the education-level of terrorists.

On Turkey-EU relations and Turkey's grappling with their identity and future, this report was recently published. Carnegie Endowment released this on the need for economic reform in Arab world, always a very important and under-reported topic. Human Rights Watch called attention to the security forces behaviour in the Iraqi Kurdish region.

An essay from Svenska Dagbladet on Gertrude Bell and the fight for Iraq that she took part in.

Also on Iraq, the statistics for June speak of a death-figure not rising for the first time in months. It's still monstrously high, but let us hope we can later loook back at some point at think "there the tide turned".

After having linked the latest ICG report on Basra in a previous post, I'd like to show you this site especially focussed on southern Iraq. Norwegian historian Reidar Visser with a longstanding interest in Iraq and the Gulf there collects analyses, resources and even photo galleries. Visser also wrote this article in Middle East Report earlier this year.

Happy reading and hope you can surf to something you will enjoy!

Klaipeda

Some more shots of the Theatre square, including a parasol advertising my husband's favourite beer (Svyturys).

And, next door, the slightly anonymous Karlskrona square, named after Klaipedas Swedish twin-town across the Baltic, Karlskrona.

Alan Johnston FREE!!!!

BBC reporter Alan Johnston is free!

Let us however not forget those still in captivity, including Israeli soldier Shalit, who was also recently heard of, and others, less high-of-profile.

Evening update:
It seems the outcome tells us a lot about which control Hamas has over security developments in Gaza. I find this a very interesting and telling feature of this particular happy ending! Nathan Schachar of Dagens Nyheter comments this angle too in an informed way. Here Johnston in pictures after the release.

I only hope now that he can be reunited with his family in peace and relax from some of the outstanding knee-jerk professionalism he displayed in media contacts shortly after his release.

And some coverage from today below:
reactions from the BBC, Johnston's own reactions, discussion on the safety of journalists

Web-tv from Dagens Nyheter here, Swedish radio reports here and Svenska Dagbladet here.

And finally some comments on the freedom of expression-aspects of journalist field work - CPJ and RSF.

Theatre square in Klaipeda

Once we came to Klaipeda (historically Memel), the centre of town is still dominated by the Dramatic Theatre. Klaipeda has a history sort of separate from much of the rest of Lithuania, with probably a must closer relation with Kaliningrad (historically Köningsberg), including also the Curonian spit, not very far to the south. Klaipeda was conquered by Lithuania in 1923 (after it's independence) but later taken back by Germany in 1939 (?) and was German during much of the Second World War.

From the centre balcony in this building however, Adolf Hitler once spoke to the local masses (filling the square, out of a town of approx 50 000) against a background of a photo of himself during a 1939 visit - you see the location best in the top photo. (We found this documentary partly depicting the event on youtube.) Out of this German-speaking population, only a handful (6 or 7, reputedly) at all survived the war, and the current population are native Lithuanians from other parts of the country.



This is a sort of modernist (Soviet-era?) wing of the theatre to the left of the main building.

The main theatre building, from 2 different angles.

More lagoon life in Nida

As I previously mentioned, the lagoon side offered more in the way of shore-life - boats and fishing, for example.

A trip to Kars

This whole blog is intended as a travel chronicle, but I guess the style is more "stream of consciousness" than anything remotely structured. Here is a more essaistic and verbal attempt to describe what has already been documented in picture. You may recognize the photos!

Alan Johnston developments

Some arrests have been made in Gaza from the group claiming to have the missing Alan Johnston. It is now 16 weeks since he was last seen.

Tuesday update: the petition has reached 200 000 on this 113th day of Alan Johnstons captivity.

And more woods again

I hope I'm not giving you doubles of photos I've already shown now - I wanted to point to the variety of the landscape. All of these, heath, dunes and woods, were found within a few hundred meters (maximum!) of each other on the southern outskirts of Nida.

In the woods again

More images from the woods around Nida. We walked through these to and from the beach on the sea-side of the spit - a very peaceful and beautiful 1 1/2 km walk.

Birds in the lagoon

Nida faces the lagoon side, where the boat (more to come later) and the bird life is found. Being Swedish, the feeling of the Baltic side, with no life outside the coast, no boats, no islands, no people was a bit drastic, the lagoon side was more alive. But I wouldn't swim there (I did dipp my toes once) as they said the Kaliningrad sewage went straight out into the water... but no real visual trace of that could be seen though.

These pretty birds hung out though and looked well enough.

Thomas Mann

The German author Thomas Mann bought this house in 1930 and in subsequent years, he and his rather large family spent their summers here. You could easily understand why, standing there! Now the house is a museum. Nida was Nidden in German, by the way. At the time, you could see from family photos on display. there were less trees and the house stood more or less on the dunes.

The top picture shows the view and the others are of the house itself from the outside.

Trees on the dunes

Considering the sandy soil that the dunes must have given, it was a miracle that anything grew on the spit. I think we all had a vision of only sand before going, at least. But in fact, 70% of it is covered in trees, like these.

Red red roses

The tiny gardens of Nida were full of lovely flowers and and beautifully tended, despite the probably quite harsh climate. It felt like a small-town idyllic place.

Summer reading

Well, I have almost 40 degrees here and I guess I am not alone in it... :-) But maybe you will find something worth reading among these links anyways.... between panting and trying to cool down.

Most of these links are from swedish media this week.

One of my favourite Middle East journalists, Swedish Radio's Cecilia Uddén, has had a full four days of broadcasting her own afternoon talk programme on current affairs. You can find all of them here, to listen to on the web.

Also in Sweden, representatives of the government coalition parties have debated Middle East policy. You have examples here and here.

Svenska Dagbladet had this editorial on the "face of Muslim rage" where the same "angry young man" appears in photos in several angry protest of the past few years. The pertinent question of whether the few should represent the many is asked.

ICG has issued a new report on Iraq - centered on the dynamics in Basra, which is seriously underreported in international media (at least the media I read regularly, that is).

These pictures come from the BBC on the fuel unrest in Iran this week.

On the more cultural side, the press for an important archaeology find in Egypt, is presented by Dagens Nyheter. You can read about it in English from the BBC here.

Saturday update:
Newsweek had some interesting material this week, on Iran for instance and some extra webmaterial (which I haven't read yet myself). Also an article on radical islam and Martin Indyk on Hamas.