Skip to main content

Open Beach

By



For the past three decades Vilnius has been emerging from its post-Soviet slumber to become a contemporary European city.  In recent months, the city has garnered international attention.  First, by creating a Drive-in movie theater at the closed airport in April, where it cleverly staged its Spring film festival.  Second, by announcing that it would give restaurants and bars free space in the downtown by closing off several streets and opening up its plazas to create the largest open-air cafe in Europe.  It took a while for this to happen as the weather wasn't cooperating, but now in the heat of summer thousands of young people have turned the downtown into a lively urban center once again.

However, the mayor appears to have taken this transformation a step too far by creating an "Open Beach" in the historic Lukiškės Square, internationally famous for the toppling of the Lenin statue after the country declared its independence back in 1990.  The park had been a dead space for more than two decades until the city remodeled it a couple years ago, but even then city officials had to stage events at the square to draw any people, like hosting open-air forums in summer and an ice skating rink in winter.

The idea for the beach appears to have been born out of Lithuania's entry in the Venice Biennale in 2019, which won the Golden Lion for its post-apocalyptic beach.  Unfortunately, this "Open Beach" appears to have no trace of irony, and as such has been subject to ridicule and scorn, much like the city's infamous g-spot ads from a couple years ago.  It's purpose appears to be to provide a sand lot for its citizens until the city finishes its long overdue beach volleyball courts at White Bridge, which were scheduled to open this summer.

However, turning the square into a play area was too much for many Lithuanians, who remember this square for being the site where many dissidents were tortured and killed by the KGB during the Soviet era.  The square has an even darker past stretching back to the Russian occupation in the 19th century when it was used to hang insurrectionists like Konstanty Kalinowski, earning the Governor General Muravyov the nickname, "The Hangman."

You might say that the mayor was trying to re-appropriate the square as a public space, which historically it was used as an open-air market before Soviet occupation.  During the years between WWI and WWII Vilnius had been annexed by Poland and the area made into a formal square with a symmetrically arranged set of paths.  The Soviets plopped a statue of Lenin down in the middle to declare dominion over the capital, which they returned to the Lithuanian SSR.

Projects had been ongoing since the early 2000s to make Lukiškės square into a contemporary plaza.  I took part in the early workshops where we were encouraged to steer away from monuments and give the plaza a democratic sense of being.  The economic crisis in 2008 put everything on hold, but that didn't stop some enterprising students from creating a sand sculpture of John Lennon, mocking the statue of Lenin before.

There has always been a sense of whimsy in the city.  After all, Vilnius became home to the first sculpture of Frank Zappa in the world, not because he had any connections here, but rather a devoted group of fans petitioned the city to erect the bust raised on a pedestal back in 1995, two years after his death.  It was such a handsome likeness that the City of Baltimore asked if they could make a copy to honor their hometown musician.

So why not an open beach in the underused square?  Well, memories of the Soviet occupation are still fresh on senior citizens' minds, because many of them faced deportations back in the 1940s.  The first deportations came in June of 1941, so you can say that the grand opening of this beach was very bad timing.  Kind of like Trump staging a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth, when it was the site of the worst white on black violence in American history 99 years ago.  Add to that the interrogations that followed as Soviets tried to root out all the potential trouble-makers in the city, and you are going to make a lot of people angry.

However, the mayor is holding firm.  Despite pressure to close down the beach, he will only do so if the state parliament issues a law forcing him to comply, which the majority Green and Peasants Party has vowed to do this week.  This may be the last weekend to enjoy the Open Beach in Vilnius.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more