Dispatch from Kaliningrad 3: The Curonian Spit

You’d think you’d know it if you were on a mile-wide strip of sand with water on both sides. But the Curonian Spit is so heavily forested that you cannot see anything but trees when you drive along the main road.

The Spit is a geographical anomaly: it’s narrowness contributes to this, as does the fact that politically, it’s divided neatly in two, with the bottom half being in Russia and the northern half being Lithuanian. So halfway along the 98 km, you hit an international border (and in our case also a snafu involving undeclared cigarettes, but we’ll get to that).

View toward the Baltic from a lookout point on the Russian side.

Also interesting about the Curonian Spit is that it’s smack dab in the Baltic amber belt that runs down through to Poland and is centered on Kaliningrad, where some enormous percentage of the world’s amber is found. Kaliningrad, of course, was once East Prussia, and the Prussian king Frederick I built the legendary Amber Room, for his palace in Berlin, from the great stores of succinite (the scientific name for Baltic amber) found along his shores.

The stolen Amber Room (replica)

Peter the Great of Russia, on a visit, said sotto voce that he liked the room a lot, so the next king of Prussia, Frederick William I (Fred One’s son), made him a gift of it in 1716. Peter installed it in the Winter House in Saint Petes, and Tsaritsa Elizabeth moved it to another palace in nearby Tsarskoye Selo in 1755, where it remained until the mid 1980s when it was bought by an American tycoon for display at the King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia.

Actually, that’s a complete lie (just the last sentence). Would that the story were so simple! In fact what happened, as far as anyone really seems to know, like, for sure, is that the Nazis dismantled the Amber Room in 1941, packed it into 27 crates, and hauled it off to Konigsberg where it was kept in the castle (the self-same one demolished in 1969 to make room for the monstrous House of the Soviets).

Nobody’s seen the Amber Room since (though a bona fide wall panel turned up in 1997 in Bremen), and there’s an industry of treasure hunters who devote their lives to seeking it.

Amber’s natural beauty rendered tacky by the hand of man.

Leonid Sokolov, the bird man of Curonia.

The Curonian Spit is on a migratory path of zillions of birds. A Soviet ornithologist set up an avian monitoring station there in the mid 20th century. The station is a set of enormous funnel-shaped nets that the birds (lured by squeaky animal toys that sound like food to them) fly right into the gaping, benign mouths of.

The birds keep flying along till they’re trapped in a cage at the end.

Then someone like Leonid Sokolov or one of his colleagues removes the feathered friend from the trap and takes it inside a shack to type it, weigh it, slide a ruler under its wing, record the data, and clap a tiny coded ring onto the bird’s now quivering-with-deathly-fear leg.

“How long does it take,” I asked Leonid, “to get a bird out of the nets, do your thing, and send it on its way again?” Usually about 30 minutes, depending on traffic. “So it’s quicker to clear Russian customs as a bird than as a human! And how many litres of vodka can he bring with him?”

Me being bird-brained.

Ironically, on our way out of Kaliningrad, just as on our way in, we had another encounter with a female border guard. This time she was Lithuanian and not so boisterous, although she got very happy when she found 12 too many packs of those Belomorkanal ciggies in the boot. (EU law permits you to bring only two packs of unfiltered cigarettes across a land border. Not two cartons, two packs). The required duty was 10 times the retail price of the cigarettes, but we paid it without argument and got on with life.

Heading back out onto the highway, I deemed a Blues Brothers reference in order: “It’s 350km to Vilnius, we’ve got a full tank of petrol, 14 packs of cigarettes, it’s getting dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

Nobody in the car even cracked a smile. Was Belushi not big in the Baltics, too? I can’t believe that….