The first days in August mark Kaliningrad’s big summer event: The Don Chento Jazz Festival.
Hmmmm. Remind me. Don Chento? Didn’t he play bass with Count Basie? Or, just a minute, wasn’t he in Duke Ellington’s horn section?
Er, no. Don Chento is the adopted name of Kaliningrad pizzeria magnate, Vladimir Katzman. There’s usually a Don [...]

Above, the sailing ship ‘Lovis’. Below, the former Soviet sub B-413. Location, the Port of Kaliningrad. The connection is an environmental happening called Moving Baltic Sea, a kind of travelling circus seashow.
Propped by films, fun and festivities, Moving Baltic Sea promotes creative strategies for cultural and environmental co-operation between countries that share the same ecological [...]

This is Kaliningrad cathedral, sometimes called Kant’s cathedral, since it houses both his tomb and a museum dedicated to the city’s most famous son. (There’s even been a lobby recently to change the name of Kaliningrad to Kantograd.)
When you want to get close, some buildings are just too big to fit in a regular [...]

As you can see, it’s aimed squarely at the third floor of an old Prussian house, but stops a few metres short.

…It’s Kaliningrad’s ‘Bridge Too Far’ - too far from any roads at either end to be of any practical use, just a concrete relic of some grand plan long forgotten.

It’s great to be back in Kaliningrad/Konigsberg. Being a schizophrenic, I love the fact that it can be a Prussian town one day, Sovietopolis the next - depending where you walk and how you’re feeling. In the same way, it can be turn of the century or 1970s. (Though not much later. Laugh.)
But anyway, [...]

The Missile Defense Shield (MDS) is back in the news.
As we all know, this is the Bush Brainwave that threatens to put Russian and American missiles on a collision course somewhere over Eastern Europe.
It’s always baffled me how Poland could have been remotely interested in the first place. Although the Red Army has [...]

Curonia! What kind of Edward Lear place is that. Sounds like somewhere the Jumblies might live. They might as well, since no one else lives here.
This ‘nature conservation area’ of the Curonian spit (Kurshskaya Kosa) is notable since it’s the one region of Kaliningrad Oblast where the militsi don’t jump out from behind trees with [...]

In some parts of Kaliningrad, with selective vision and eyes half-closed, you can imagine you are back in the old Konigsberg.
This bridge house and the little terrace behind it somehow survived the terrible firebombing of 1944.
Purists may quibble about the restoration of the bridge house. No, the roof isn’t tiled, it has the new ‘Prussian [...]

Panzer motorhomes massing in Northern Poland

I noted earlier that wiping Prussia off the map in 1945 was always wobbly in International Law. Many recommendations of the Potsdam Conference - which itself had no license to give away a quarter of German territory - have never been ratified. The border around Kaliningrad is just [...]

There’s a lot of Sovietica to trip out on in Kaliningrad. Something that does it for me are the iron and concrete roadsigns.
Make no mistake. This is art and not to be confused in any way with functional industrial design. For a start, the signs are neither illuminated nor reflective and they only work from [...]