Day 6: Veisiejai

You didn't miss a blog for yesterday, day 5: there simply wasn't much to write. I can summarise it as:

• Worked on a presentation in the morning, which I was going to give later that day. I've already given it twice before but can never stop myself from tweaking my work.
• Went to a presentation given by the friend, Gražina, about the creator of Esperanto and his ties to Lithuania.
• Headed back to my apartment to finish the presentation and pack some books into my backpack and a cloth bag.
• Decided that a) even though I was due to present at 3pm, and b) my lunch ticket was for 2pm, it wasn't worth the risk of getting the lunch I'd paid for: on the previous day my soup arrived at 2.40 and the main course at 2.50. I grabbed lunch in a nearby restaurant, and so was in the unusual version of being 20 minutes early for something!
• Gave the presentation. It went very well! And people enjoyed a quick contest to get some books at the end!
• Went into the book service and recognised somebody I'd been unpleasant to on Sunday, and who I'd been looking for since to apologise. Got that out the way, had a chat with him for half an hour, and bought a couple of books. One of those is in Lithuanian, a language which I don't speak. This isn't the first time I've done this!
• Back to the apartment for some rest and to work on a cover for a book we need to publish soon.
• Booked a hire car for the next morning.
• Back out to see the end of a concert. I arrived when everybody else was vacating. Whoops!
• A quick drink with a Korean lady, who was a fellow student with me in Poznan.

Where everybody else should have gone on Excursion Day

Hold the phone – what's that item third from bottom? Booked a hire car for the next morning.

This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision: since booking my place here in January I've had the intention of visiting a village called Veisejei, not far from the border with Poland.

Leading up to the event I hadn't seen a mention of it as an option for Wednesday which, as in other large Esperanto events, is a day for excursions. There were some spot excursions on offer in the reception area when I registered but this wasn't one of them. And so I looked into options by bus and train. There's a train once a day, which stops about 30 miles away, and so would involve a taxi for the rest of the journey. There were buses but for my days in particular I think I would've been leaving on the same bus I'd come in on. 

There's at least one hotel within a mile of the village but I knew that I couldn't go in on the Tuesday because I was presenting at 3pm, and I'd end up coming home on the Thursday afternoon for a several-hour journey, wiping out all of that day. And so I looked for hire cars, and was pleased with the results. So I booked it. And I happened to mention it to Gražina, who has always wanted to go to Veisiejai but, despite living in Lithuania, has never visit the village. And so she asked whether I would mind her coming along. And since I was perfectly happy, she asked whether I'd be open to more people. Absolutely fine by me: I like all of her friends.

Why Veisiejai?

At this point I think you're perfectly entitled to ask why I'd be so motivated to put so much effort into a place with barely 1000 inhabitants. And here's your answer: Ludoviko Zamenhof lived here for four months in early 1885, polishing Esperanto to the point where it was ready for publishing, and getting engaged to Klara Silbernik, some of whose dowry would go to publishing the first booklet in the language. And there are photo opportunities there for any Esperantist fancying a pilgrimage!

Taking possession of the car wasn't as easy as I had hoped. It turns out that though there are plenty of firms operating from the airport in Kaunas, the one which I had booked with (plus several others) all used enterprise's desk. I joined an already long queue and needed an hour or so to get to the front, a very frustrating experience since three other booths were open with very bored staff having nobody to serve. I came all prepared for a very prompt turnover but was intercepted by a surprise: I could either pay 15 € to have the car cleaned after returning it, or clean it myself ... but risk a 30 € fine if the car were not returned in precisely the same condition as it was when I took receipt of it. I stuck by my guns, as always, when put on the spot. The person behind the desk – who was actually from Veisiejai! – did his best to help me make the correct decision: So, you're going to clean up absolutely everything? Return the car in precisely the same state? Not leave even one insect on the windscreen? I foolishly stood my ground, not liking the additional cost being extorted out of me! I also picked up a satnav, which I had not stubbornly taken up when it was an optional extra to my booking but which I would clearly need.

My heart sank when I saw the insides of the car: everything was immaculate. It had been vacuum cleaned, with not a speck of dust lying anywhere. And it had just started raining, so the soles of my shoes were wet. I was never going to be able to return the car in this condition. I should've paid the 15 € to avoid the inevitable 30 €. And to cap things off, the satnav didn't work: the battery was entirely flat. Even when I'd given it an opportunity to charge up, just touching it would bring up a message in Dutch saying that the power was disconnected.

Our first Zamenhof sightings

I was 85 minutes behind schedule at the point I collected Gražina and two of her friends, Paulo (from Spain) and Franciska (a French woman resident in Australia). And so we were off on a journey which would take around two hours, with Gražina (and her phone) standing in as satnav. (It would've been a quicker journey but Lithuanian speed limits seem slower than ours.)

It was a very relaxing drive. The scenery – flat, woodland, sparsely populated – is lovely, and the conversation was interesting to me: how often am I in an environment with fluent Esperanto-speakers who have totally different experiences to mine? And so it didn't feel like a couple of hours had passed at the point we passed the sign telling us that we were now in Veisiejai. (No photo, unfortunately: it snuck up on us.) 

An info board showed what a small place it is:

We had parked outside the post office, in front of a park.

Right behind our car was a gateway with a style of its own:

They didn't scare me, thought, so I popped right through!

There were plenty more were those came from, including this one: the Leaning Pillar of Veisiejai:

It looks normal from the front:

This is a fairly new addition to the park, put there to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Veisiejai. (It's actually much, much older than that, its name coming from an extinct Baltic language called Sudovian, also known as Yotvingian.)

And then I crossed in front of the post office, on which the national, regional and local flags were flying. Clare would particularly like that Veisiejai's emblem features three ducks!

And just like that I was in the other half of the park, which was very reminiscent of the first bit:

And it provided us with some very useful information:

But we went in the opposite direction, saving the best till last!

Instead we went to the local museum. Tickets were 1 € apiece for Gražina, Franciska and Paulo. As the baby in the group, my ticket was twice as much ... or would have been had Gražina not insisted on paying for it!

Opposite it were some striking houses:

But on closer inspection, these proved to be boards placed over the original walls:

I particularly liked the two cats painted onto the wall outside the green house:

I'll see my own two in a few days!

The museum was only small, containing a modern figure in national dress:

plus an example of the interior of a traditional house:

They weren't the reason we were here though. This name appearing on a display was:

It wasn't huge: there were a couple of similar displays for other people. But let's not complain.

While the others were speaking with the guide, I popped out. I knew that Veisiejai was predominantly water, and I wanted to get some photos of it. It took not even five seconds to reach the bridge.

Water abounds

Even on a gloomy day like today, Veisiejai is beautiful because of the water which surrounds it:

The south has a narrow neck but is a much larger section of the lake:

It still gives an idea of size when viewed from the banks:

This would have been Clare's favourite side, I think, because it had a large community of ducks nearby:

The northside is where Zamenhof lived. If you follow my finger, you'll see where his house stood on the other side:

On Zamenhof's trail

While I was taking photos, the guide had informed Gražina of a lady who lived nearby who would apparently be very happy to take us to the spot where Zamenhof lived during his four-month spell here. I didn't know this, so followed, taking photos as I went, and thinking to myself that even if it wasn't the same back then, it must've been a lovely, relaxing place to reside.

Within a couple of minutes we'd reached another Zamenhof Street!

Not coincidentally, that was the one we needed to walk down:

There were a couple more signs on the way, including this one.  Gražina is the woman in the middle, flanked by Paulo and Franciska.

We passed some novel birdboxes:

and reached the end of the road, where a very large house now stands.

You might have noticed the name chiselled into that stone on the left. There are actually two together:

If you squint really hard you might just about make out the name at the bottom of the smaller stone:

The larger one is much easier to read, especially for me: it's in Esperanto rather than Lithuanian!

Well, “Esperanto”. There are a few mistakes in there, not least the years being totally wrong. (He lived there from February to May 1885, not in 1886 and 1887.)

The house burned down around a century ago. But it's not hard to picture that Zamenhof lived very close to a beautiful lake. Wow!

What a lovely area!

The main event

As I said earlier, we had saved the best till last: a monument to Zamenhof. Even though we were on absolutely the wrong side of Veisiejai, the place is so small that we walked to it in a few minutes. It's situated within a park:

And there it was!

He's sculpted here as he was in his older days, but he was in his mid-twenties when he lived here, having finished his medical studies in Warsaw, which he had earlier started in Moscow. His sister Fania lived in Veisiejai. Presumably through her he heard about the retirement of the village's only doctor. And so he he came, setting up his first surgery. (I've been calling Veisiejai a village rather than a town since that was Zamenhof's word for it, and there twice as many people living there then than now!)

There weren't any Esperanto books that size during his lifetime. The New Testament was published a decade after his death, and the two-volume Encyclopedia came in the decade after that. Still, if he'd been sculpted with the 40-page pamphlet which was his first book in Esperanto, then the effect might have been rather unimpressive!

Vejseje, as he called it, is the place where he's considered to have polished the language. The idea was born in  Białystok, the language created in Warsaw, and it's here where he told his fiancée that it's ready to be published: he just needed to find the means to do so.

Those means came via his future father-in-law, who was enthused by the idea to such a degree, that he gave him permission to use part of his daughter's dowry to finance the publication. It wasn't quite as straightforward as that, though: although he liked Zamenhof, Sender Silbernik originally declined to give permission for him to marry his daughter. Zamenhof was acting as a general practitioner in Veisiejei, as he had studied to do, but found that he couldn't cope emotionally with parts of the job: he took it very personally when he was unable to save somebody. The death of a young girl was the final straw, and he jacked in medicine. Once reinstalled in Warsaw, he choose to specialise in opthalmology, which would necessitate further study there, opening his surgery in late 1886. Silbernik initially felt that this man giving up his career promised a less than an ideal future to his daughter, though later relented.

Zamenhof later credited the tranquility of Veisiejai and the reflection it inspired with a profound change in his outlook: “Gradually I came to the conviction that Zionism was a beautiful and impractical dream; that it would never solve the eternal Jewish question. The solution must be sought along other lines. You may imagine that is was with no little grief that I decided to abandon my Nationalist labours.  But thenceforth I was to devote myself to realising that non-national, neutral idea which had occupied my mind of my earliest youth – to the idea of an international language.”

In other words, the Esperanto which we know today required Zamenhof's four-month spell in Veisiejai. His priorities lay elsewhere, until the peace and tranquility of this village revitalised the aspirations which had enthused him in his youth. 

And that, dear readers, is why I went out of my way to go this distant village, which even some of the most fervent Lithuanian Esperantists haven't visited. No regrets, not least because Paulo insisted on paying for everybody's meal in the restaurant a minute's walk away, and the three gave me no choice in splitting the costs of the hire car between us all ... even accounting for the 30 € cleaning charge accrued when the rain meant that the car – inside and out – was now caked in small leaves and seeds which I'd never have been able to remove if I'd spent several hours trying to.