Will Mawhood
@viljamsmauhuds
Person who says 'no, you're thinking of the Balkans' a lot. Also Deep Baltic editor, and occasional writer of stuff. Ik pa laikam arī tulkotājs.
This is still factually inaccurate though. I'm not wrong about that at least
A brief exchange on Facebook later and I'm confronted with this chilling vision of the capital of the Manskaya SSR (where Russian has obviously come to dominate as the language of inter-isle communication). Perhaps AI isn't all bad...
Take away the signs for Costa and WH Smith and do something so the scale isn't so obvious, and I reckon you could convince people that the Douglas ferry terminal (on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea) was some mad mid-Soviet colossus in Yerevan or somewhere
Ok, on the off chance any of my latgalīšu draugi are reading - do you know this word? I thought it was "dzyntars" in Latgalian
Not the greatest joke perhaps, but hard to argue with Baltic studies not really known for its levity
Have said this before but continentals will never understand how strange it feels to be able to just walk across a border And suddenly everything is incredibly Lithuanian
This is Samogitian, right? In Skuodas, far far NW 🇱🇹 Mentioned to a friend in Vilnius I would be passing through here today and he said "so you will get to hear their weird language which neither Lithuanians nor Latvians understand"
Interestingly, this is exactly the same as my experience with Latvian. The case system def challenging - but, well, it's a system and so you can memorise it. The sheer range of possible meanings verb prefixes can have, and how they often carry a perfective meaning - much tougher
Odd but nice event in the Catholic church in Alsunga - just called "friends of the Suiti", so there were local kids doing piano recitals but also professional musicians who had some kind of connection to the region (like this guy)
Finally, maybe you have to walk for hours and hours without seeing anyone to appreciate just how incredibly empty (but wonderful) central Kurzeme is - just forests and lakes for the most part
Last weekend, I walked for 16 miles through the forests to the lands of the Pope There's a tiny pocket of Catholicism in otherwise very Lutheran Kurzeme (western Latvia), centred around the town of Alsunga, originating from the marriage of the local landowner in the 17th century
In 2018, Darmon Richter and I stumbled across an abandoned Soviet-era amusement park in Elektrėnai, Lithuania. Think it was actually quite well known in Lithuania (now largely demolished), but it was a very strange place to come across unsuspecting. instagram.com/balticsundertheradar
And on the subject of Yakovlev and even Yeltsin being better thought of today in the Baltics than Gorbachev (because of the latter's opposition to independence and arguable complicity in bloody crackdowns), I took this last month on my trip to Tallinn. Hard to imagine in Russia
It's really striking how fissile and unpredictable Latvian politics is, significantly more than its Baltic neighbours (actually has been slightly less so this decade) - and how much more prone it is to parties suddenly appearing, achieving some success and vanishing
Quick and appropriate response to user complaints from Twitter dot com
Want to understand this endlessly fascinating tweet? Well then, you need to understand the Duchy of Courland
Don't think Bartosz is on here, but these are sane thoughts (originally posted in Polish) on the so-called "Narva People's Republic" in Estonia, and associated online hysteria - basically nothing which anyone paying proper attention to the region hasn't seen multiple times over the last decade or so
Wandering around in Voleri in the summer - like a lot of riverside/island Riga, a place where industry and almost rural landscapes exist in mildly surreal juxtaposition. For my project about the islands of Riga (especially Kundziņsala) which I hope will be done before too long
Pictures (and one video) of driving on Estonia's ice roads (jääteed) across the frozen sea near Haapsalu, courtesy of Adam Cullen www.instagram.com/balticsunder...
Perhaps not the best comparison in that Latvia actually had a reasonable claim to Ruhnu (Roņu sala in LV). But the decision of the then mostly Swedish-speaking inhabitants meant the country was left without a single sea island - Estonia has more than a thousand