White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border

July 6, 2010 7:07 AM

White Sea Black Sea – travels on the Border.

The two festively dressed gents on the quay look surprised as a half-naked man who has just climbed out of a motorboat dances around them with clenched fists. They try to ignore him, but it’s no use. He won’t give up. Finally, one has had enough and beats him to the ground with several quick blows and a well-aimed kick to the head.

Photographer Jens Olof Lasthein writes about travelling through Eastern Europe. The wide-format photographs that accompany the text are quite nice.

posted by chunking express (5 comments total)

Nice indeed! Good post.
posted by XMLicious at 7:14 AM on July 6, 2010

First class FPP.....can't wait to look through more of his work!
posted by gigbutt at 7:33 AM on July 6, 2010

That's great, and it gets better as it goes along. A sample:

Stolnitsy was once an ordinary Hungarian-speaking village under the dual monarchy. Then came World War I, and Stolnitsy became part of eastern Czechoslovakia. Nothing strange about that; borders in this corner of Europe have been moved fairly often during the course of history. But things got more complicated by the time World War II was over. The village was still Hungarian, but the Yalta Agreement gave the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. Stolnitsy was split down the middle, right over the main street, with barbed wire, mine fields and a guard tower.

And that’s how it remains when I come to visit Alisa. The mine fields are gone and the old guard tower stands empty, but the cruel wire fence is still there, patrolled now by Ukrainian border guards on this side and Slovakian EU soldiers on the other. So when Alisa wants to have a cup of coffee with her nearest neighbour, they stand on either side, giving the wire a respectful distance, shouting and gesticulating, both of them speaking Hungarian.

Thanks for the post!

The two festively dressed gents on the quay look surprised as a half-naked man who has just climbed out of a motorboat dances around them with clenched fists. They try to ignore him, but it’s no use. He won’t give up. Finally, one has had enough and beats him to the ground with several quick blows and a well-aimed kick to the head.

And that man was... Harlan Ellison!
posted by languagehat at 8:42 AM on July 6, 2010

Languagehat, consider the problem that villages like Stolnitsy make for amateur genealogists. Every program, every website I use expects that people were born in a particular country. Some of my relatives were born in places that no longer exist; others, like those Hungarian-speaking villagers, stayed in one place while borders shifted around them. So were my relatives born in Austria or Russia? Russia or Poland? Hungary or Ukraine? It's not a trivial matter to me, because it changes the way I think about them, the mental groups of relatives with which I associate them.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:50 AM on July 6, 2010

photographer's (Flashy) site: http://www.lasthein.se/
posted by noway at 4:07 PM on July 6, 2010