26 December 2007

The Amber Road


Palace of the Soviet, Kaliningrad Oblast

Maps lie. What appears to be true on a flat surface is not what exists on a round world. Mostly it does not matter, since we are limited to views of trees here, but as you climb up the flights of stairs in Big Pink, the truth beckons.

From the roof you can see the line of tall buildings that edge the half diamond of Arlington County, discernable because of the carnivorous zoning practices of the nefarious Fairfax County Planning Board to the West. It makes the boundary of the jurisdiction precise, marching across the eye to the green water tower that stands over SW 8, the eighth boundary stone placed by the original surveyors of the Federal District.

There are so many layers of lies it is almost impossible to know where to being. The physical level of deceit is the most difficult to get past. The maps we normally accept here have the good 'ole USA right smack in the middle.

That makes the distortion the smallest in the area we care about the most, which is good, but look at what it makes of Greenland, and the absurdity of the two polar regions that assume the aspect of decorative fringes.

The realistic depiction of the land forces a projection that sunders the seas, and leaves the world as a splayed orange; absurd, but truthful in its way. Even the orientation of the traditional flat map is arbitrary. Why should north be at the top?

I had a Chilean friend who used a map of the Pacific Ocean, viewed from Valparaiso, which looked southwest, in the direction of the Antarctic with Great China to the right, since that was useful for his purposes. It was very disorienting.

There is truth that can be seen from above, as any aviator can tell you. From the perspective of a little private aircraft in day VFR conditions the earth reveals herself in contour and gentle perspective; from jets you can see the vast continental mass.

I spent a lot of my life looking down at the earth's surface through the soda-straw view from space. The people at whom we were looking tried to deceive us through manipulation of objects. One of the places they did that was in the Kaliningrad Oblast, which was headquarters of the Soviet Baltic Fleet.

They did not want us to have too accurate an idea of what they were up to, which is understandable, since the whole notion of Kaliningrad was an invention, a pack of lies.

Kaliningrad was a masquerade for a place that had been Koenigsburg, a German place, which in turn had been imposed on some proto-Lithuanians by heavily armed Teutonic knights nearly a thousand years ago.

It is all a curious story. Kaliningrad was once a part of the Amber Road, which was a migration route by which the semi-precious stone found in great abundance on the Baltic Coast found its way to market in Tieste and Rome.

Amber, luminous and warmly yellow, has been found in the tombs of the Pharaohs. Lumps of it sometimes contain the perfectly preserved remains of pre-historic insects, captured in the ooze of pre-historic sap.

In the days of the Amber road, south would have been at the top of the map, had any existed. The Teutons would have faced northwest, like the Chileans, looking back to the gray Baltic from whence they came.

As things are now, today, Kaliningrad is the westernmost piece of the Russian Federation, though it does not connect to any other part of Russia. It is the most heavily militarized part of Russia, though it stands alone, now surrounded by the NATO states of Poland and Lithuania.

Ground travel to the rest of Russia is only possible by sea or air, which means that the mostly Russian population looks up, or to sea for succor. Königsberg was once the major city of a mythical place called Prussia, and was the capital of its vanished eastern province.

By number, the population is nearly 80% Russian, followed by Ukrainians and several other ethnic components of the old Soviet Empire. Interestingly, Ukraine is the other place in Europe where amber is found, at the southern end of one of the Amber trails that leads to Black Sea.

Less than one percent of the people in the Oblast are ethnic Germans, which is indeed a curious thing for a place that was so emblematic of the essence of the old German State. A great eraser was scrubbed over this place, and everything was altered.

The maps were all changed to reflect the new story that is told today. Perhaps the ugliest building on earth, the Oblast Hall of the Soviet, now stands on the place where the Konigsberg Castle stood for five hundred years.

They had problems building it. There is said to be a vast maze of underground chambers below the soil, left intact but sealed when the Red Army closed the ruins and dynamited everything on the surface.

No one who lives there now knows why. The fabulous Amber Room of Peter the Great was created right here from the native yellow stone. Six tons of amber was carved by master craftsmen over a full decade in astonishing intricacy. It was   to make what was said to be the eighth wonder of the world.

More than sixty years ago it was plundered by the Nazis as they arrived in Leningrad, Mr. Putin's hometown.

It might be down there yet, the Amber Room returned to the start of the old Amber Road, carefully packed away in crates by the Nazis. Or maybe the room was destroyed by the Reds accidentally when it stormed the city and put it to the torch, driving the civilian population before it.

The dynamite at the castle might just to ensure that the real story could never be found on the map.

There are several stories to be told about that. I hope you have a chance to join me in the Oblast.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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