Baltic Imports

Baltic Imports Newsletter: Ornament Open House, Fall 2010

2010-10-09T16:31:00.001-07:00

BALTIC IMPORTS NEWSLETTER

www.balticimports.com Ornament Open House 2010

Members of the International Amber Association and

The International Conference on Amber and Archeology

Twenty Years Serving Our Community

"It is Peter and Paul's day, the stalk of the wheat is torn, and when the wind touches it, it undulates in golden waves… The great importance and distinction of bread makes it necessary that it shall be duly honored when still in the form of wheat, all the more so as the Creator Himself carved man's face on every ripe grain. " Viski, Karoly Hungarian Peasant Customs Dr. George Vajna & Co, Budapest 1933

I fall in love with the books of old Europe. I found Karoly Viski's book in the Antiquarian Book Shop in Old Riga in 1986. It was rare that it would be there. Few books in English were allowed, especially if they were not international and approved by the Soviet authorities. Karoly Viski was the Keeper of Public Collections, formerly Keeper of The Ethnographical Collection of the Hungarian National Museum, and he, like I, loved and remembered the passing agrarian world of faith, beauty, and custom. From August we have moved to the grace of Fall. From standing grain we have touched harvest and more. Soon we will be moving into the Time of Spirits and Souls. The Greening of the World has ended and the Winter King must come to topple the old Summer King from his throne so that winter may bring spring.

In discussing what to write for our little essay the beautiful women in my house suggested St. Martin's Day. A day shared throughout old Europe as the end of Harvest and the very beginning of Winter. Gathering my words, I remembered the small, perfect, little room, and the grandmother in it, whose grey-white hair was pulled back under her country scarf. She had brought out a bowl of windfall apples, just beginning to wrinkle, and had set them on her proud dark table in a Latgallian green ceramic bowl. It was she who told me that Perkons, the Balt God of Thunder, comes to Martin's Feast, hidden under Martin's cloak and that he, Perkons, brings to the celebration the gift of Winter Lightening. My life is richer for her being in it… and I imagine that Doctor Viski too loved as well, as often and richly, as he moved among a world where there was great formality in the exchange of important words, a great formality, and deep, sweet, open caring.

Here, at the store, we are moving into the Time of Spirits. We have gathered goods in amber, stone, ceramic, wood, linen, and wool to celebrate the world of grandfathers and grandmothers. We hope that what we have selected is as true as wind fallen apples, and as beautiful as a soft Latgallian bowl that blesses the world with a green that will never fail in its promise.

NEWS

20th Annual Ornament Open House Our Annual Ornament Open House will be on Sunday, the 10^th of October, from 11 to 3 o'clock, our normal Sunday hours. The Open House is an invitation for everyone to come see some of our new hand blown glass ornaments from Eastern and Northern Europe, and to purchase a selection of last year's glass ornaments at 20% off their retail price before we hang them on our trees. Other winter related items will also be on view and for sale… our Advent Calendars, German Winter Linens and Vintage Ceramic Steins, German Smokers, Victorian Winter Cards, Slovakian Nativities and Winter Embroidered Pictures, and Czech glass Friendship and Witch Balls, just to name a few. The Open House is a friendly get-together of hot cider and convivial talk with lots of staff to answer questions.

Travel Abroad
Ingrida and Sean will be in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and hopefully Northern Poland, the last weeks in October, bringing back winter amber designs and vintage masterworks. The store will send out an e-mail when the antique pieces go on display.

September found them meeting with the Siberians and bringing back fall Siberian Healing Gems, a new stone, Volga Septarian, and the perfect leather-wrapped pieces of our young female stone healer.

Ukrainian Glass Ornaments
Our Ukrainian Glass Ornaments are taking a little bit longer to ship and should arrive at the store around the 1^st of November. Please feel free to check out product arrivals on our fun Baltic Imports Facebook Page.

NEW PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS

Our New Siberian Healing Gems for Fall and Winter
are being put out this week and I must say we are very pleased with their quality. We bought new pieces of every single gem as we sorted for hours through the Siberians' gem collection for a variety of sizes and shapes. Very bold and distinct Sun Pillars of Charoite, long vertical rectangles of the Transformation Stone, are among the most dramatic and rare cuts of the gem that we have seen. We took the 3 that the stone master had cut. A new vein of very rich Eudialyte, the Stone of the Heart, has been found and its dark, dark - almost violet - reds and crisp pinks are as visually subtle as they are compelling. The new pendants are really the very best that I have seen so far. Ingrida and I spent hours picking small tear
drop pendants of Seraphinite, The Great Healer, each of which contains an unblemished single bloom of a shimmering angel's wing, pointing up, pointing down, pointing to the east or west. Struggling to find a perfect heirloom gem that is affordable to everyone, and which can be given as a spontaneous act of love and concern by any of our customers.

Dendritic Agates
Our largest selection of gems for fall are Dendritic Agates, The Stones of the Animal World, that are sacred to the Siberian shamans. We brought them not just for their cultural power but because the gentleness, purity, and grace of their beauty is remarkable. The older Siberians divide the high, gem quality, agates into 2 divisions, 1) Picture Agates, a beautiful world held in stone that you may offer to your totem or to yourself as a place of rest and peace… a pure world of nature, unspoiled and sublime, given back to us in stone by nature as a sacred gift. And 2) Writing Agates, the written words of the natural world caught in stone: the writing of the words of the Wind Horses; individual, powerful, and prophetic.

Each of our stones is a rare, remarkable gem: a picture of fog coming down the side of the valley, the trees darkened by its moisture, the grass transformed into a ribbon of green that looks like a jeweled feather; the first snow storm that touches the barren trees and makes their windblown branches look like they are suddenly filled with buds; the double pillar of a great horse word, echoing through time and wise beyond our comprehension.

Do come in and see them. Ingrida loves the Double Pillar of the World of Fall, its gentle burnt sienna bushes offering a place of rest for us and all the spirits that we carry.

Volga Septarian We have brought back a new gemstone for the store that is mined, along with rare hematites, on the sides of the Volga river about 600 miles east of Moscow on the Volgarian shelf that moves into Siberia. We first noticed it because many of the male miners were wearing it. The gem is made from the nodules of marine life that occupied the area millions of years ago. Interestingly enough, it is found in the layers of blue clay, the same clay strata that we look for when searching for amber. Composed from the shells of ammonites, it is a gentle transparent golden yellow edged with deep black and warm blue greys. In the West, Septarian is often called Dragon Stone, a gemstone for all aspects of Communication. The Volga miners are collecting a description of its traditional folk use and healing properties for us so that we can present the gem culturally, but with its amber-like transparent yellows and rich liquid blacks the gem will be bought for its beauty.

Siberian Gem Carrying Pieces
Looking for gifts for men who wouldn't wear pendants, we asked for more simple carrying pieces, that is, a sizeable piece of gemstone more naturally cut that felt good to hold and that was geologically interesting if placed on a desk or a curio cabinet. The Siberians responded with 15 Charoite disks the size of a 50 cent piece, that are the very best of the great stone and 20 disks of Shungite, the dark grey black grounding stone. They also shaped Septarian nodules into forms that could be held with the whole hand and used as massage tools, if desired. The carrying pieces are really wonderful, selected and shaped by the stone masters with great love and care, perfect for anyone who finds the lore of stones compelling.

Leather-Wrapped Guardian Stones
We always love to meet our young stone master who prepares guardian stones traditionally, wrapping them in braided leather bezels, for we love all the sensitive work that she makes, afraid in our hearts that such ancient work will simply fade away in our age of silver and gold. This year she set the stones in rich, soft, dark leather, the color of the heart of summer's night. From wonderful green serpentine to perfect agatized ammonite shells, she binds the stones in an ancient luck braid that is blessed by a flower of the sun… making with her own hands the amulets that her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother made before her.

The Feast of St. Martin: A European Thanksgiving

For centuries, St. Martin's Day, celebrated on the eve of November 10^th and/or through the day of the 11^th, has been one of the central festival days of old agrarian Europe. Celebrating the end of field work and the very beginning of winter, The Feast of St. Martin touched almost every culture in Europe and continues to do so today. Whether it is children carrying lit paper lanterns, the giving away of small bags of nuts and fruit, the baking of St. Martin's Bread or the preparation of Martin's Croissants; whether it is marking the calendar for the slaughter of harvest fed fattened pigs and beef, the start of the souring of cabbages, or the first day that new wine can be tasted; whether the celebration occurs in acts of mumming, ritual begging in the church, or people going door to door dressed as animals, this great Feast Day brings together two distinct calendar worlds, that of harvest and the first snows.

Here is the central point between that of the critical time of Souls and the great fasting of "Quadragesima Sancti Martini" which lasted 40 days and was later shortened and renamed Advent. Here is a cultural marker that signifies the economical end of "rich" autumn and the beginning of "lean" winter, between harvest's last possible end and the change of agricultural labor itself.

The great Feast Day is named after Martin of Tours who started out as a Roman soldier who was baptized in adulthood and became a monk. Kind, quiet, and preferring the simple life, St. Martin fled when he was asked to leave the life of simple quiet devotion and serve in the early hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Whether caught out by the cackling of geese in the goose pen where he went to hide, as folk custom decrees, stating that he roasted and ate the goose that betrayed his hiding place, or left the geese after great introspection, as the Church states, Martin became a devout leader and defender of the early Catholic Church in France serving as Bishop of Tours in the 4^th century.

Famous for his compassion, the critical story of Martin's riding through the city streets and his subsequent cutting of his Roman cloak in half during a bitter first snow storm to save a beggar is found in all the countries of Europe. To understand many of the folk traditions it should be remembered that in the story St. Martin was a horse rider, a converted Roman Knight, riding at a time when only the powerful rode, who turned away from power to embrace compassion, which he did so virtuously that he became the Patron Saint of Beggars. A great mounted rider, who comes with the first snows, bringing aid and blessings to those in need who are his "children," brings St. Martin in line with the old consciousness of mythic Europe and its pagan past, whose figures too acted as an aid in the changing face of the natural world.

The ancient pre-Christian traditions that existed before the veneration of Martin's day were well established in folk tradition and as the veneration of St. Martin moved from France, towards Spain and Portugal and on to Germany and the Scandinavian countries including the tribes of the Balts and Finns, onward across the fields and rivers of Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary, and stretching through Catholicism until it enfolded Slovenia, Croatia, and Malta, the veneration often became a symbiotic calendar date that often had little to do with Martin other than a name.

Everywhere it goes, previous pre-Christian folk tradition adds a bit here and there. Aistaeus, of Greek myth, who discovered the pruning of grape vines, becomes an aspect of Martin. Martin the Rider is easily introduced to Latvia whose Sons of God ride to the great calendar feasts, and the blessing of the horses and the marking of the horse troughs with cockerel blood go on under Martin. The ancient traditional cockerel of the sun becomes the very blood of Martin's blessing and the food of the Martin Feast.

The great White Horse of Martin brings snow. If no snow comes then the great horse brings Martin's Little Summer, the horse reminiscent of the white horse of Frey and Odin.

In many countries goose is eaten to remind one of the geese who gave away Martin's hiding place, but the ancient symbol of prosperity is also a blessing to sustain the household through the fast of Advent and the hardship of winter. If the goose's cooked breast bone is fair, winter will be cold and full of hard frosts, if it is dark, then the winter will be full of rain and sleet.

In Ireland, where the four corners of the house are traditionally marked with cockerel blood and no wheel can be turned on Saint Martin's Day, the old prohibitions against spinning were written down in Church ledgers.

And his great Feast is best begun on the 11^th minute, of the 11^th hour, of the 11^th day of the 11^th month.

So why have we bound this simple generous Saint with an ancient world of sacrifices? Why have the old world and the new world come together in that great collective consciousness that we each are culturally bound to? Why, in this world of technology and communication are there still the 1,000 year old horseshoe-shaped cookies of the Polish children, and the ancient chestnuts, a traditional food for the souls of the ancestors, in the Feast of Holy Martin.

Nothing is simple. Culture is often a host of contradictions that are layered one upon another. Each true for their time. But I think one type of answer lies in the Estonian children who sing from house to house to be let in for "Dear Mardi's fingers and toes are freezing in the cold." With St. Martin's we pass from a world almost in control to a world that isn't. And we, like children, carry that anxiety with us, even more so, in those pivotal times of nature's winter change. Throughout Europe, a world of adults tells the children that it is alright, that together we are more and stronger, and blesses that telling with a gift.

Another, I think, is the cultural importance of the constant retelling of compassion stories, compassion being a human trait that must be taught and learned, just as we must learn the concept of mercy as regards strict justice. The cutting of a cloak, the gift of a penny, the fires on St. Martin's along the Rhine and the Mosselle, where you rid yourself of that which you have done to your regret and shame, all move us towards that which is the better part of the human spirit and so keeps the larger society valuable for the individual.

And lastly, perhaps there is an additional answer in the human need for celebration in this short world, celebration and an acknowledgement of gratitude for what has been provided so that we may see the greater world in the work of our hands and the food we bring to our table. Sharing our union with nature with our neighbors in peace and thanksgiving lightens the spirit for the failing of the day's sweet light.

The French traditionally launch their Beaujolais Nouveau on St. Martin's Day, since he is the Patron Saint of Wine Growers and Tavern Keepers. This year, as in all the years before, the Catholic devout throughout the world will offer thanks for the Intercession of the Saints and honor a quiet simple ancient bishop who teaches through word and actions. While in Latvia the great season of ritual mumming will start and last through the Winter Solstice.

I, here in my little house, far away from the beautiful sea, will celebrate for the simple joy of celebration, and devoutly thank the world of God and Nature for its constant bounty. In gratitude, I will cut a cloak in half and share it. In acknowledgement of the coming night, I will mark the four corners of my house in ancient pattern. Missing the neighbors who do not come marching and singing here, I shall lay pennies in my fallen garden as a promise… and I will pray in a thousand ways that the beauty of this human heritage of stories and actions will not be lost.

Together with Ingrida, we will set out a Latgallian green bowl that is marked with the earth and sun, filling it with farm apples, and we will tell stories to our children about a gift of winter lightening and the blessings of God, nature, and good people.

For Recipes and Additional Customs for St. Martin's Day Please See Our Facebook Page in November and Directions to Our Blog.

Do feel free to comment on the Newsletter on our page as well.

Sources

Grins and Grina, Latviesu Gads, Gadskarta un Godi American Latvian Association 1987

Trinkunas, Jonas Ed. Of Gods & Holidays Tverme Lithuania 1999

Spicer, Gladys Dorothy The Book of Festivals The Womans Press 1937

Russ, Jennifer M German Festivals and Customs Owald Wolff 1982

Fish Eaters http://fisheaters.com

Amber Sale Newsletter August 2010

2010-08-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

BALTIC IMPORTS NEWSLETTER

www.balticimports.com August Amber Sale 2010
Members of The International Amber Association and
The International Conference on Amber and Archeology
Twenty Years Serving the Amber Community

“Theomenes says that near the Greater Syrtis are the Gardens of the Hesperides, and Lake Electrum: on the banks, he says, are poplars, from the summits of which amber falls into the water below, where it is gathered by the maidens of the Hesperides.”
The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geographical Discovery of the Eastern Baltic Arnolds Spekke

“Pārvedu brālim/Dzintara sievu. Viss māršas pūriņš/Dzintariem vizēja Tēvam iedeva/ Dzintara kreklu; Mātei uzsedza/Dzintara sagšu; Brālim uzkāra/ Dzintara dvieli; Māsai uzlika/ Dzintara vaiņagu.
Daina 13282v.6

“I brought my brother an amber wife. Sister-in-law’s entire dowry sparkled with amber. Father received an amber shirt. Mother was covered with an amber shawl. An amber towel was hung for brother. An amber crown was placed on sister’s head.” Latvian Oral Tradition Daina 13282version6

August is a perfect time for our Annual Amber Sale. As the month brings its rich light to our changing world, we at the store will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of our business. In the old agricultural world of Northern and Eastern Europe long August was the ending of “haytime”, the season of sun and hard work, where open “courting” would occur and the young men and women would prepare for the blessings of the Earth and the weddings of fall.

Here, at the store, we have set out the new amber that we have gathered in our summer travels. If there is a predominance of perfect clear golden amber, then blame it on the beauty of summer’s light and the blessings that were given, again and again, by the sweet summer Sun.

NEWS
20th Annual Amber Sale Our Annual August Amber Sale will start with the Pre-Sale, on Tuesday, August 10th and continue through Friday, August 13th. As always, it is a time set aside for our newsletter clients and amber collectors to purchase from all of our stock before the public sale begins. The Sale to the Public will begin on the 14th of August and run through Labor Day, September 6th.
Please do not ask to have amber set aside prior to or during the sale. During the amber sale the store has pledged to have all its amber open for purchase. All amber sales will be considered final sales.
Amber Pre-Sale Coupon An amber pre-sale coupon is included at the end of this newsletter for a 25% savings off any of our amber products during the Pre-Sale. The coupon may be used for a purchase of multiple items of amber. The Pre-Sale is our way of saying thank you for your support throughout the year.

Neighborhood News
A number of special events from Dog Parades to Special Lectures are constantly happening in our Northeast neighborhood. For current neighborhood news, Internet links, and unannounced sales, go to our Baltic Imports Facebook Page. Two up and coming special events that Baltic Imports will participate in are The Polish Festival on August 14th and 15th that will run along the Mississippi riverfront on Main Street, just down from our store, and the Kielbasa Fest at Kramarczuk’s on September 10thand 11th. The Polish Festival is a great family event and the 1st Ever KielbasaFest will feature European beers and, of course, plenty of Kielbasa.
On August 30th, the series“Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins” from the Food Network will be airing a show about Kramarczuk’s. It was quite fun watching the Star of the show slam the door of his car and say through 20 takes, “We’re here in Northeast Minneapolis, or as the locals call it, NordEast.”

NEW PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS
A number of special products have been brought back to the store from our travels. Among the most spiritual are the Exceptional Hand Painted Miniature Icon Paintings by one of Russia’s greatest artists, Andrey Kotukhin, a registered artist from the famous village of Palekh. Small handmade papier-mâché lacquer forms, traditionally made with horsehair and powders, have been shaped into Orthodox crosses and medallions and painted on. The traditional Byzantine iconography and gold leaf on such a small form is instantly compelling. Through the years we have brought many of the now famous contemporary iconographers to our store. Kotukhin’s work rivals the best we have ever brought. Please come in just to see the small masterworks. Their beauty and spiritual authority creates a sense of reverential awe in the observer as if we are looking through a window onto a faith and a time that is pure and unsullied. In 1990, Baltic Imports supported the reformation of the Novgorod School for Traditional Iconography in the soon to change Russia. In 1992, we supported the creation of a three- part miniature triptych made by A. Kotukhin for the ancient Church in Palekh. We have been in love with the work of this 5th generation Palekh painter, and his family’s, since the beginning of our store.
Along with the hand painted icons, we found a small selection of vintage, the older forms, of Rostov Enamel(also called Finift) Icon Medallions for the store, that are patterned on Russian Orthodox religious imagery popular in the 17th century. Rostov enamel jewelry, finift, is created by layering enamel powders on metal, usually German silver, and heating it to temperatures reaching a thousand degrees. The small paintings on the forms are famous. The vintage icon medallions are important for they show the old mastery of the form and contain much more difficult detail and Orthodox imagery than the contemporary. I love the little Guardian Angel in the vintage case. The filigree silver has darkened on its edges but the simple sweetness and tenderness of the hand that wrote the image can be felt today.
The ancient lyrical patterns of the Sun and the Moon grace the cut and layered Large Karelian Birch Bark Barrettes that Ingrida fell in love with. It feels like a hundred years since we left the beauty of the forests and walked along the dirt and gravel roads to the market and that little store in Latgale, to buy root crops from the men in horse carts and simply talk to the women who had their hair carefully braided or pinned back with blessings, while the yellow birch leaves of fall shook on their tall trees, shaking with beauty before they would fall. The birch is the gentlest tree in Northern and Eastern Europe. Not strong like the Oak, not as feminine as the Linden, not as unreliable as the Alder, not as great a guardian as the Mountain Ash. It lives with us during our lifetime. And, like our lives, it often falls when we fall. It is the tree that we cut a cross upon when someone in the village passes. It is the tree that one binds back their hair with, in their youth through their old age, so that they too may live and pass in beauty. Perhaps that is why Ingrida loved them, old-fashioned as they are.
The last of the many new products that we have gathered and would like to introduce is a very rare Steel Grey/Black Stone called Shungite. At 2.5 billion years of age, this carbon ferrous rock is one of the very oldest stones in our world and is being mined in Karelia as a sustainable community resource. We’ve obtained it from the Siberian Mining Guild who is helping them organize. The surprisingly light stone for its size has moved through Europe as the new grounding stone, 10 times more effective than Hematite. In addition, the ancient stone is being labeled as producing medicinal waters. Many documented studies by Russian scientists conclude that Shungite dissipates the harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation. For the Karelians it has always been their very own amber, that is, a healing stone and a great guardian.

AMBER HIGHLIGHTS
For our 20th Amber Sale, Ingrida and I searched for the very best amber we could find. Any shopping outside of the studios that we have known and supported these past twenty years, even as knowledgeable as we are, was very difficult. 85% of the amber available in shops, markets, and amber factories was manipulated or made from amber that was fused into a block and computer cut. Green amber with no gem value was everywhere, along with dyed red, lemon, and rose. Often we found ourselves seduced by the beauty of a setting only to find that it hid skillfully manipulated amber. Every little piece that we bought was checked by both by Ingrida and me as we laughed and shared and talked our way through the hot days and still nights, looking for beauty.
One of our missions was to find reasonable pendants, earrings, and rings for the last festivals of summer and the changing colors of fall. Among my favorite pendants are the Ice Amber Sun Axes, made from water-clear amber that has filled with gasses. The silver bails on the ancient forms are simple and deeply thoughtful, making the old Indo-European migration axes look like modern, perfect, curves of rare amber.
The small, gentle, Polish Golden Leaf Pendants are made from naturally shaped small sea pieces of golden amber with the rind only slightly buffed. The little handmade silver flower and leaf bails hold the amber within them and offer an ancient symbol of renewal reminding one of the promises of the Tree of Life.
The Silver Bound Heart with Tear: a Symbol of the Soul amber pendants are made with the most beautiful amber, from white and pearl to opaque yellow and traditional cognac. Here again, with modern design we have taken a medieval concept and made it visually striking and contemporary. The shining beauty of each little pendant tells the story of when the symbol of the heart was not simply “love” but the image for the seat of the soul, where the qualities that could sustain love sat, perseverance, courage, and the tear of compassion.
Since all of our pendants, earrings, and rings are one of a kind and made with natural amber, they all differ. In addition, the studio production that produces them never produces a lot. Of our fine pieces we may have only 1 or 2 in a series. A large series for us is perhaps 6 different pieces made by one master.
We’ve brought a large number of new amber rings in many designs and colors. Our Deep Cherry Oval Amber Rings are quite dramatic and going quickly. Among our favorite rings are the Ancient Amber Sailor’s Rings of the Sun and Ship’s Wheel which offer protection on land or sea for the traveler. This 1st century ring has a sun of amber set on a silver spoked wheel. On the clear golden amber rings you can see the wheel shining beneath the amber. The Silver Master Bands of Inlaid Amber are appropriate for both men and women and preserve the folded silver work and cut circles of the old great studios.
Of the many earrings that we returned with, some of the most distinctive are the Old Fashioned Slab Cut Earrings, made by the older Latvian masters to stress the natural form of the individual ambers. They are visually rich in both amber rind and in the colors of their inclusions. The Double Sun and Moon Earrings in White and Pearl Amber are marked by the thick sterling silver work that binds each of the 2 rounds of amber. The Hand Pounded and Rolled Sterling Amber Earrings that hold the amber in a cornucopia form are outstanding in their workmanship and are perhaps the most elegant earrings we have in the store.
My favorite necklaces are the Two Stacked Multicolor Sun Disk Necklaces hand tied between each bead. The colors of the older and newer ambers & the opaque and transparent ambers create a stunningly beautiful and immensely feminine heirloom masterwork that is elegant, classical, and timeless. But looking around the store there is so much that is beautiful: the little ice amber necklace with a perfect cherry amber sun tear, the knobby golden sea amber necklace that comes brilliantly to life when it is placed around the neck, the long, 22 to 24 inch, strings of hand rounded beads, the little necklace of čūska, the grass snake, whose layered diamond form goes back to ancient Balt mythology and represents Knowledge, and the multicolored amber guardian moon necklaces. Come in and meet with our knowledgeable staff and find a perfect piece, full of meaning that holds your heart.

The Miniatures of Palekh
A folk art essay by Sean McLaughlin. Copyright 2010
The little essay that follows is a story of two revolutions and a village of peasants that grew to become some of the most recognized artists in the world. It starts in the seventeenth century, and climbs aboard the last Soviet Russian trains that would run from Ukraine to the Baltic Station in St. Petersburg, pausing in Riga late at night, to take on passengers. It goes on from there, both forwards and backwards, to the solemnity of a vow, and a man contemplating the history of his family. Like all good stories that pretend to be scholarly, or at least thoughtful, it starts with a quote.
“Could one have supposed that icon painting, the most conservative craft, might have enabled Palekh craftsmen to arrive at their present perfect mastery which evokes admiration… Palekh, its history is a striking example of how wisely the revolution can link the past with the present. Palekh will always represent poetic images of the people.”
Maxim Gorky
Palekh, before the Bolshevik Revolution, was a large trading village in Central Russia. During that revolution it was changed into one of the administrative centers for the Ivanovo Region, situated as it was on the slopes of two hills which are separated by the beautiful little river, the Paleshka. In the Russia of the Soviets the term Palekh was often used to describe a specific school of Russian art, most notably the elaborately decorated miniature paintings that graced the famous black lacquered boxes and fine brooches which were made by the “Old Style Guild” of the village Palekh.
It was these brooches and black lacquer boxes that Ingrida and I went to St. Petersburg to purchase on the last Soviet trains that would run freely, that is without border stops and customs, from deep in the Ukraine to the beautiful Baltic Station in St. Petersburg. Traveling without visa papers, our wonderful Latvian friend who had lived for years in St. Petersburg studying geology and underwater mineral excavation, pushed me into the corridor of the overly crowded train and told me in whispered Latvian to “absolutely not talk to anyone,” as he directed Ingrida to the hard sleeping palette and conversed in Russian with the other 4 people in the crowded little compartment.
St. Petersburg at that time was in shambles, still heartbreakingly beautiful, but like a city preparing for siege. The goodwill construction projects started by the Finns and Swedes were abandoned with fragments of framing wood still left in doorways. There was open water running down the walls of the Hermitage, behind the priceless dark Rembrandts. Even then, when we finally found the Palekh master boxes, we could not afford them and bought instead the small numbered editions of the last scholarly books on archeology and iconography, some only printed in the hundreds.
Palekh was to us, as it was to most of the people in the West at that time, so closely associated with the miniature painting that stressed the subject matter and themes suggested by Russian history, folk songs, legends and fairy-tales, that one was not aware that its rise, and very aesthetic, was based on holy iconography.
It was in the early 17th century that the Palekh peasants, serfs of Buturlin’s estate, took up various crafts and, in particular, that of icon painting. Working in a loose guild where different people took the responsibility of preparing the panel, priming it, blocking it, etc, with certain individual serf artists being responsible for drapery, landscape, and holy faces, the village soon gained a reputation as an Icon producing village. By the late 17th century and early 18th century, icon painting in Palekh attained the level of a professional art, with Palekh artists traveling throughout Russia on assignments for churches, monasteries, and nunneries. Indeed, The Church of the Raising Cross in Palekh was so full of icons that spanned Russian history that “the great proletarian writer”as noted by the State Museum of Palekh Art, Maxim Gorky, made a plea to the Soviet authorities in 1927, which, while still championing “ the new Soviet style of the creative awakening of the working masses” asked that “one of the Moscow museums collect pre-revolutionary Palekh works, icons executed in the Byzantine and European manners, and exhibit them side by side with the achievements of today.” Gorky’s plea was heeded, and The Museum of Palekh Art was opened in 1935 on the 10th Anniversary of the Old Style Guild.
The Icon painters of Palekh drafted into World War 1 came home to a changed Russia where iconography was neither sought nor permitted. Most had little option but to try to farm. Then in 1922, Ivan Golikov, a Palekh artist who had refused to stop painting, chanced to notice a painted papier-mâché box at the Moscow Museum of Handicrafts and painted a plate in a similar “modern” manner. But he would use the Palekh icon aesthetics of inverted perspective, highly ornamental treatment of form, two dimensional figures, conventional backgrounds of hills, grasses, and chambers, as well as gold and silver paint to do it.
By 1924, the demand for Palekh papier-mache was so extensive that Golikov, Marichev, and A. Kotukhin and I. Kotukhin to establish the new guild of artists which, because of their icon training, they called the Old Style Guild. Alexander Kotukhin, was elected its first chairman.
It was the revolution of 1990-91, with the fall of the Soviet Union, that allowed another A. Kotukhin – Andrey- a famous box painter, member of the Palekh Guild, and Registered Artist of the Russian Republic, to return to iconography. All that had been learned in the 75 years of painting miniatures, and all that had been forgotten… the patron icons of the Stroganov School of Tsar’s Iconographers and the Armory Chamber School, was there to be used. Like his father and grandfather he was ready to move into the future in a way that acknowledged his own past and the past of the village he cherishes.
We can remember the excitement that his first miniature icon triptych, which was placed near the altar in the church in Palekh to be sanctified, generated. For us, it is an honor to represent his work. For our customers, the Kotukhin name ensures a history of mastery and value rarely seen outside of Russia.

Sources
Ancient Palekh Icon Painting, Mural Painting Vitaly Kotov and Larisa Taktashova Moscow 1981
Palekh The State Museum of Russian Art Moscow 1990

CUSTOMER APPRECIATION COUPON
25% Off Any Amber Purchase

Store Hours
Monday 10:00-4:00
Tuesday-Friday 10:00-6:00
Saturday 10:00-6:00
Sunday 11:00-3:00

Coupon valid August 10th – September 6th, 2010

A Quick Guide for Ukrainian Egg Symbols

2010-04-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is among the best quick guides for approaching Ukrainian Egg symbols that we have found. It’s a wonderful introduction to the classification of symbols and how one might start that process. It’s at Tripod.com. As in the history of all symbols it is important to realize that they are rarely static and that being definitive about any single cultural symbol is generally a problem. But with that said, “Enjoy!”

--Sean

AN INTODUCTION TO CLASSIFICATION

In the folk life of Ukrainian people, the pysanka possess talismanic powers. Receipt of a pysanka is not only a token of friendship or esteem but also brings with it protection from harm. Ukrainian ancestors believed that pysanky in the home would bring good fortune, wealth, health, and protection from lightning and fire. Pysanky are said to possess curative powers for both men and animals. With the acceptance of Christianity in 988 A.D., the pysanka has been part of the Christian tradition and Easter ritual. The pysanka came to symbolize the rebirth of man, as represented by the Resurrection. Beeswax was considered as a magical ingredient of the writing process. This was entwined with the sun cult. The wax was made from honey; the honey was collected from flowers; flowers grew because of the sun.

Symbolism of design... The most ancient symbols are of geometric character. Geometric ideograms consist of the simplest design elements. Each has its own meaning.

Solar symbols include variations of the circle, swastika, tripod and star or rose. The sun and cosmic symbols signify happiness, prosperity and good fortune.

	*Circle.* It represents completeness, continuity and the cyclical nature of the universe. The pre-Christian interpretation denoted the sun as the center of the universe, the giver of fertility, the victory over evil and darkness. The circle containing a dot is said to represent the moment when the earth receives the light of the sun and comes to life in the spring. In the Christian tradition, the circle may be associated with God because of its perfection and its ability to unite. A circle enclosing the cross represents the millennium, the center and four directions of the universe. The circle cut in two represents polarity such as night and day, summer and winter, life and death. A circle within a circle is said to denote androgyneity. The circle depicted as the poppy denotes consolation, oblivion or sleep; as a spider, the rays of the sun or human frailty. Pre-Christian representations of the circle with symbolic meanings were also seen in the round dances of the spring festivals.
	*Swastika.* Is a symbol of happiness, blessings, good fortune and goodwill. The swastika is often seen with rounded corners or in the form of the windmill or Maltese cross. The hooks are sometimes stylized to form leaves. *Tripod* - a three part swastika is known from Trypilljan times. It reflects the significance of the magical number three.
	*Star or Rose.* This ideogram is most commonly found in its eight-pointed form. It is one of the most beautiful and versatile of the geometric representations and is said to signify purity, life, the giver of light, the center of all knowledge as well as beauty, elegance and perfection. In the Christian context, the star or rose becomes the herald of Christ's birth, a symbol of God's love toward man.
	*Dots.* Dots of all sizes represent the stars in the heavens, tears or fixed points that have no beginning or end. They may represent a cuckoo's egg, which is a symbol of spring and carries with it the magical powers of predicting the future. A dot with a circle enclosing it represents the axis of the universe, eternity seen within an egg.
	*Triangle.* The triangle is a very basic ideogram and, like the tripod, always signifies a trinity. In pagan times, the trinity represented was the elemental air, fire and water or the heavens, earth and air. In Christian symbolism, the Holy Trinity is most often represented.

Lines. Formed by a series of dots, there are many linear variations:

	*Straight Line.* The straight line encircling the egg symbolizes eternity or the continuous thread of life.
	*Ribbon or Belt.* This motif symbolizes eternity and is almost always seen in unbroken form so that the thread of life will not be broken.
	*Embattled Line.* This variation signifies a forest or enclosure, something to be contained.
	*Engrailed and Invected Line.* This suggests a place of meeting of union of opposites such as land meeting water.
	*Indented Line or Saw.* This is a common line variation indicating fire as the symbol of the sun or life-giving heat. It may also represent water or waves with its growth and cleansing properties.
	*Meander.* This ancient form of the line is popular in all regions of Ukraine. This motif emphasizes harmony and motion depicting infinity, waves and immortality.
	*Gypsy Roads.* The meander is a continuous route between two colored fields. Evil is, therefore, unable to find its way off the Gypsy road and harm the recipient of the pysanka.

Variations of the Line:

	*Sieve.* A very common motif on the beautiful Hutsul pysanky. Is a symbol for dividing good from evil.
	*Basket.* This ideogram suggests contained knowledge, motherhood as well as the giver of life and gifts.
	*Ladder.* A motif taken from everyday agricultural life, the ladder is symbolic of searching; rising above the petty problems of life.
	*Comb.* This motif is sometimes classified as a sun symbol because of its teeth or rays. It may also suggest the putting of things in order. Three teeth or rays may symbolize the Holy Trinity in the Christian tradition or the three major stages of life: birth, adulthood and death.
	*Rakes.* Similar in meaning to the comb, rakes have the additional reference to the harvest.
	*Bends.* Signify defense or protection.
	*Spirals.* The mystery of life and death is portrayed by spirals since they denote divinity or immortality.

Cross. Even in ancient times amongst the Ukrainians, the cross was revered as a symbol of life. There are many variations of the cross in pysanka design. They are always symbolic of the Christian faith.

Two Line Cross. The simplest form of the star, this cross represent four cardinal points of reality, or the four ages of the world; child, youth, man and elder. The Maltese cross is another variation of this motif.
Standing Cross. This motif was found even before Christian times in some areas, as a symbol of clan worship, and later incorporated into the Christian context.
St. Andrew's Cross. Because St. Andrew was the patron saint who preached Christianity in Ukraine, his X-shaped cross became a popular pysanka motif.

Churches. The Church also appears at the time of the acceptance of Christianity. The basic outline depicts stylized versions of the beautiful wooden churches of the Carpathian mountains, with their characteristic triangular roofs. This motif appears only in western Ukraine. The sieve motif within the outline represents the Church's ability to separate good from evil. The motifs used are symbolic in nature; a combination of crosses, triangles and quadrangles, more rarely seen are the partial representations such as widows and belfries.

Plant motifs. Compositions in which plant motifs predominate fall under the category of spring, symbolizing the rebirth of nature and life. These designs reflect the unrestrained longing expressed by the dormant plants. These pysanky are talismanic not only for the growth of plants but for the general well-being of humans as well.

	*Pine Tree.* This motif was known in the Trypilljan culture and is common to most parts of Ukraine. Its qualities of permanent greenery and endurance symbolize strength, boldness, growth and eternal life.
	*Broad Leafed or Deciduous Tree.* Known as the tree of life, this design is a symbol of renewal, creation and organic unity. It is usually surrounded by stags or birds, often both. Common to many cultures, this representation is seen throughout the world.
	*Apple Tree.* This is a beautiful example of stylized plant representation. Very contemporary in design, it is, nevertheless, a pre-Christian ideogram. Other orchard trees such as the pear or plum are occasionally seen as well.
	*Willow Branch.* In the Ukrainian religion, the Willow branch is traditionally blessed on Palm Sunday. There was an ancient belief that the sun was held in the sky on a large willow.
	*Grape Wine.* This motif symbolizes continuity, good fellowship and strong, loyal love. Representing the wine of the Holy Communion, it also denotes the love of God and of Christ for mankind.
	*Apples or Plums.* These orchard motifs denote knowledge, health and wisdom.
	*Three Leaf.* This ancient symbol denotes immortality and eternal love. The plant most often stylized is the periwinkle which forms an integral part of spring and wedding rituals. The traditional wedding wreath is fashioned from the periwinkle plant, the sacred plant of Venus the goddess of love. Like the evergreen, it retains its green color year round. From the Christian viewpoint, it symbolized pure love and the eternity of the Holy Trinity. *Oak Leaf.* Many regions of Ukraine display a version of this ideogram. Highly stylized, it signifies strength and persistence. As the leaves of the oak tree die in the fall only to be replaced in the spring, so are humans caught up in this cycle of life and death.
	*Rose or Star.* Used interchangeably with the star motif, the rose is a predominant floral motif and occurs in many varied forms. Some variations are highly stylized and abstracted. This ideogram is symbolic of the female principle, wisdom, beauty and elegance. *Lily of the Valley.* An early spring flower, the lily of the valley suggests purity and humility as typified in the young bride. *Sunflower.* An ancient floral symbol denoting the sun, this symbol signifies the love of God because of its intense love of light. It is allied with the concept of motherhood and, therefore, becomes a life symbol. *Vase.* This is a striking floral design predominantly from the region of Sokal. This region also displays characteristic floral representations showing the whole flower.
	*Cucumber.* Known since the pre-Christian era, the cucumber is a symbol of the preservation of life because of its ability to retain water.
	*Ears of Cereal Plants.* This is a beautiful example of stylized plant representation. Very contemporary in design, it is, nevertheless, a pre-Christian ideogram. Other orchard trees such as the pear or plum are occasionally seen as well.

Animal motifs. Motifs based on zoomorphic representation are not as commonly used as are other categories. Generally speaking designs from the Carpathian mountain region of western Ukraine use these motifs along with geometric forms. Their use reflects the close association of the mountainous peoples with their natural surroundings. Many of these motifs were in use during pre-Christian times.

	*Stag.* An ancient ideogram dating back to the Trypilljan culture, the stag signifies leadership, victory, joy and masculinity.
	*Horse.* The horse appears as the ancient sign of the sun. Archeologists claim that the horse was first domesticated in Ukraine. This motif symbolize wealth or prosperity, endurance and speed; it also emphasizes the motion of the sun.
	*Ram.* Chiefly a male symbol, it represents leadership and strength in the face of opposition. The popular motif of numerous variations also suggests perseverance and dignity.
	*Rooster.* This motif is considered a talisman of coming good fortune. In ancient times, it was related to the coming of the sun. It also denotes exultation and vigilance. As a symbol of masculinity, it predicts a rich married life with the blessing of many children.
	*Hen.* Symbolic of fertility, the revered hen is the bearer of the talismanic egg.
	*Birds.* Many different species of birds were considered to be harbingers of spring. The swallow foretold the coming of spring to the householder; the stork symbolized the coming of new babies; the lark brought spring into the fields; the nightingale announced it to the orchards; while ducks and geese were precursors of spring to the lakes and rivers.
	*Butterfly.* Representing the pleasure and frivolity of childhood, the butterfly motif suggests the ascent of the soul into immortality. It also reminds us that things of delicate beauty must take their own course rather than be contained.
	*Spider.* This ideogram was first seen as a variation of the sun motif with projecting strokes or rays. It symbolizes patience, artistry and industry.
	*Fish.* The fish, a symbol of Christianity, suggests abundance, baptism, regenerative powers and sacrifice.
	*Hen's feet.* This is a delightful motif which stresses protection of the earth toward her young. They also denote guidance or direction of the young in their search for knowledge. *Goose Feet.* These represent the soul or spirit as well as giving an intimation of warning of wakefulness.
	*Horns.* This motif suggests nobility, wisdom and triumph over problems. There is also an implication of manhood and leadership.
	*Ram Horns.* Strong leadership or further strength in the face of opposition as well as perseverance and dignity are suggested by this motif.
	*Bear's Paws.* The bear was associated with the forest guardian spirit and this motif speaks of bravery, wisdom, strength and endurance as well as the coming of the spring. It also suggests a protective concept and is associated with the master of a home.
	*Rabbit's Ears.* This ideogram denotes the humility of man as he attentively listens to the lessons offered by nature.
	*Wolves Teeth.* Wolves teeth denote loyalty, wisdom and a firm grip. So strong was the talismanic belief in their power that wolves' teeth were given as amulets to both children and adults to help teething and to prevent toothaches.

Said to re absolute, constancy, eternity or the womb, black may also denote death.

White
Purity, virginity, innocence, and birth, are symbolized with this color.

Yellow
The symbol of light and purity. It speaks of youth, happiness, the harvest, hospitality, love and benevolence. It is the color consecrated to the light deities and is the Christian symbol of recognition and reward.

Orange
Symbolic or endurance, strength and worthy ambition, orange is the color of fire and flame. It represents the red of passion tempered by the yellow of wisdom. It is the symbol of the golden, everlasting sun.

Green
As seen in the spring renewals, green symbolizes the breaking of shackles, freedom from bondage. It is the color of fertility, freshness, health and hopefulness. In the Christian context, it represents bountifulness, hope and the victory of life over death. It is the color of Christmas, Easter and Epiphany.

Red
The magical color of folklore, red is considered a positive color signifying action, fire, charity, spiritual awakening. It also glorifies the sun and the joy of life and love. Consequently, pysanky with red fields or motifs are typically designated for children or youth. In the Christian symbolism, it denotes the divine love and passion of Christ.

Brown
Brown is symbolic of the mother earth, bringing forth her bountiful gifts.

Blue
Blue is used sparingly. It signifies the blue skies or the life-giving air and is a talisman of good health. Also symbolizes truth, fidelity, higher life and trust.

Purple
When used in pysanka ornamentation, purple speaks of fasting, faith, patience and trust.

Symbolism of Color... The colors used in pysanka design are steeped in symbolism. The most magical ancient pysanky were considered to be those having four or five colors, each carrying a message of good will for the recipient such as happy family life, peace, love, good health, or success

Black; Dark before Dawn

Black and White: Protection from Evil

Newsletter: Amber Sale Edition

2010-01-21T05:22:00.000-08:00

Baltic Imports Newsletter

207 East Hennepin Ave, Mpls. MN 55414 612-331-3296 www.balticimports.com

A Member of the International Amber Association

Celebrating Our 20^th Year in Business

"For the amber master there is a certain truth in amber… even more than beauty. People seeing my work for the first time say I am drawn to beauty… that I create beauty. But it is the truth that claims me.”

A rough transcription of my conversations with Georgs Romulis, 1988 Latvia

Dear Customers and Collectors,

In the winter months I, too, am drawn to truth. I used to think it was the result of the very starkness of the grey-black trees sitting in white snow fields. But as I grow older, I think it is more. I think it is the human need for placement, for an unfolding, for that intuition that means you have touched your soul and brought forth “thoughtfulness.” In the old world this was the season of the story; cold, bare wintertime stretching from the Winter Solstice to the ancient New Year. That was when, after the winter work was done, we filled our need to socialize with a time to tell and teach and to look inward while the world about us was still.

In the store we, too, are heeding Georgs’ words as we get ready for the Amber Sale. Maija says that our new designs for our 20^th Anniversary Year should be simple, elegant, and affordable; pulling those words from the core of her experience, her concept of the truth. What my soul hears in her words is that we should try to touch truthfulness, timelessness, and accessibility… the same intention, different words, for how we see beauty. It took me years to realize that my definition of beauty, like most amber masters, was the unfolding of the truth.

Sincerely, Sean for the Baltic Imports Family

NEWS

Store Hours

The store has returned to its traditional winter hours, with the exception of adding later hours on Fridays:

Monday through Thursday 10:00-6:00

Friday 10:00-8:00

Saturday 10:00-6:00

Sunday 11:00-3:00

20^th Anniversary Year

We are very pleased to announce that Baltic Imports is celebrating its 20^th year as a business with many special sales, events, new products, and lectures that will occur throughout the year starting with our January Amber Pre-Sale. A partial list of Events through June will be included in calendar form at the end of the newsletter in place of an essay. If you miss our regular essays, new essays are being prepared for our Baltic Imports blog.

Balticimports.com, Blog, and Facebook Page

We have continued to update our website, www.balticimports.com, for the winter season and for our new and traditional Easter Products. We are also continuing to post articles on our blog, balticimports.blogspot.com. Our Baltic Imports Facebook page has turned out to be great fun. We have and will be posting a series of “favorites” on our blog and Facebook where Baltic Imports staff shares their ideas about new products or jewelry choices.

Amber Pre-Sale, January 23 - 31

We will be having our traditional Amber Pre-Sale starting on Saturday, January 23rd and continuing through Sunday, January 31st. The Amber Pre-Sale is a time set aside for our mailing list customers and collectors to select amber before the Public Sale which runs February 1-14. Discounts on all amber, be it vintage, religious, or contemporary masterwork, will be for 25% off. If you are ordering online, we strongly recommend that you call the store on our toll free number, 800-680-3380, to check on the availability of the piece before ordering. For online purchases, please be sure to enter the Amber Sale web code AMBER10 in order to receive the discount. The discount is valid for all items listed under the category Baltic Amber. For in-store purchases, instead of our traditional paper coupon, our Pre-Sale customers need only to offer their name to the sales staff at the time of purchase. Happy Shopping!

Baltic Imports’ Support for Our World Community

We continue to support our world community by adding new organizations and associations to our network of artists. Through the years we have, and continue to support Disabled Folk Artist Associations, Women’s Groups, and Sustainable Communities throughout Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. This Christmas we added our aid to the wonderful Orthodox Sisters of St. Elisabeth in Belarus who work tirelessly with the indigent and with those who are suffering from chemical dependency and abuse (look for the Artist Spotlight on our blog). Presently, Ingrida is exploring ways that we can support the Orthodox carvers, sanctioned by the Patriarch, in the Russian Federation, who are making traditional holy wooden icons for the blind, many of them young children.

This past week Mara and Maija have worked selflessly on support for the people of Haiti. One of the safest and simplest ways that we know of to aid Haitians is to “text” HAITI to 90999, which automatically sends $10.00 dollars to the International Red Cross. If anyone has another “safe” support mechanism they would like to share, please feel free to post a message on our Facebook page. Our world view is a world in community, caring and sharing.

NEW PRODUCTS

There is tremendous excitement among our staff as we ready all of our amber for the Pre-Sale. Sean will be in the store this week organizing our stock and he and Ingrida will be in the store on Saturday and Sunday for your amber questions.

Amber Highlights

There are too many wonderful and unique amber pieces to specifically mention each one in the newsletter. For our 20^th Anniversary Winter Amber Sale we will be highlighting the work of Georgs Romulis, the greatest of the Latvian amber masters who is recognized internationally for his amber work. Georgs is regarded as one of the greatest amber masters in the world.

Niello of the Kievan Rus

The ancient Kievan Rus were among the first and the greatest of the ancient metal smiths to perfect niello, the filling and darkening of an engraved line made in gold and silver. Perfect traditional hearts, diamond shaped pendants, and delicate oval earrings, traditionally made in silver and highlighted with liquid gold then darkened, all from ancient patterns, will be in the store this week. Such simple, elegant, and affordable pieces, made from precious materials, make a perfect Valentine’s Day present. Please come early, our prices are way below market value because we buy at the source, but our supplies are quite limited.

A vintage niello horizontal diamond pin and two archaic Russian village rings will be in the vintage case. Sean loves them… and wonders who will get the old, wide Russian rings blessed with gold.

Russian Vintage Wooden Toys

Four wonderfully painted Russian village market toys, of hand carved wooden forms made to catch an attached wooden ring on a string: a woman or a man with a long nose or an archaic hockey player, will be in the vintage case or about the store. Ingrida and Sean tried to catch the rings themselves and lost constantly with great laughing delight. It’s a perfect inexpensive gift for a cell phone or Facebook addict to remind them of the world of ancient childhood. For the toy collector, it is a vanished world.

New Matryoshkas: Russian Stacking Dolls

New inexpensive Matryoshkas, the traditional Russian stacking doll, and 4 great Masterwork dolls for our 20^th Anniversary year, all selected by Ingrida in her travels, have arrived and should be on the shelves soon. The 4 Masterwork dolls, each one of a kind, are breathtaking. The green-eyed Masterwork doll with the Firebird is among the best that we have ever seen. The inexpensive dolls are all finely made and classic examples of their kind. Ingrida found a simple doll whose inside dolls were pouting. Very rare, an artist’s bad day, but perfect in every way for a child.

Russian Kitchen Blessings

Traditional kitchen blessings of carved little wooden cups and kitchen scenes framed and set against linen or of a brightly painted samovar are whimsical enough to hold a grandmother’s blessing, the power of continuity, for one of the most important rooms of the house.

Polish shot glasses, beer mugs, Pascal Lamb linens, Easter Baking molds, seeds, and Valentine’s Day Card sets have arrived at the store. Expect many more items.

Baltic Imports 20^th Anniversary Year Calendar

With a great deal of pride and a certain sense of vulnerability, we are pleased to announce our 20^th anniversary year in supporting the Folk Arts of the former Soviet Union. We are proud, for we have actually made a difference. We are hesitant, because we have passed through so many worlds: the old Soviet Union, the start of a great decline, revolution, the first steps of Independence… until we have marked so many starts that we could feel old. Old is not what we embrace. Rather, our concern has always been the timeless traditions of the people of the land. Our heart has always been their hearts: a world that comes alive in simple births and christenings, in commonplace confirmations and weddings, in childbearing, growth, and in the very release that death brings. We are blessed enough to remember a time when funeral dolls whose heads were make out of acorns and whose bodies were made out of birch bark were tied to white trees that were planted at the crossroads.

Our world has always been about the “more,” about continuity, and the human spirit and its traditions that give life structure and meaning. That fill one up when one is empty. If we are known for anything, let it be for this: our love for the commonality of the human experience that one can touch when one holds one’s culture in their hands and gives it sweetly, in gentle celebration, to their children. The old world was built upon sorrow and hardship; from that foundation it raised itself to joy. We struggle to offer the same— a way to joy, with the hard work of our family’s four hands, joined together, for a time.

January: Amber

Sales: Amber Pre-Sale 1/23 to 1/31

Products Highlighted: Georgs Romulis: Historic and Contemporary Amber Work

February: Amber

Sales: Amber Sale 2/1 to 2/14

Products Highlighted: Natural Hand Cut Amber Hearts

Lectures: Thursday 2/4 7:00pm Healing Traditions in Amber

Thursday 2/18 7:00pm Amber Open House: Bring Your Own Amber with Questions.

RSVP all lecture discussions to maija@balticimports.com

March: The Symbolism of Easter

Products Highlighted: Icons, Crosses, and Eggs

Icon Show: 3/14 to 4/3. Icon Show Opening: 3/14

Lectures: Thursday 3/18 7:00pm Writing Icons

Thursday 3/25 7:00pm The Symbolism of Eggs

Please RSVP

April: Vintage Folk Art

Products Highlighted: Vintage Amber and Folk Arts

Lectures: Thursday 4/15 7:00pm Contemporary Travels in Eastern Europe and

the Folk Arts. Please RSVP

May: 20^th Anniversary Month

20% off All Products All Month Long

Products Highlighted: Siberian Gems

Open House: Saturday 5/22 and Sunday 5/23. Surprise Specials!

Lecture: Thursday 5/13 7:00 pm The Healing Gems of Siberia Please RSVP

June: Our Mara’s Wedding Store Closed 6/18 through 6/20

Products Highlighted: Traditional Wedding Gifts

Lecture: Thursday 6/3 7:00pm Eastern European Wedding Traditions. Please RSVP

A Polish Recipe to Get Through the Winter

2010-01-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

This is a wonderful adaptation of a traditional Polish recipe originally published in the New York Times food blog. A good way to keep warm through the last months of winter!

Artist Spotlight: The Convent of St. Elizabeth

2010-01-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

"The Sisterhood of St. Elisabeth was founded in Minsk, Republic of Belarus in 1999. The sisters serve in the National Psychiatric Hospital, boarding homes for mentally challenged adults and children. The mission of the Sisterhood is to provide spiritual and social help to the sick and the suffering. The Sisterhood runs a homestead located 19 miles from Minsk. It helps drug and alcohol addicts as well as socially vulnerable persons tackle their problems and provides the homeless with shelter and care. To support and develop the above ministries numerous workshops and studios operate within the frameworks of the Sisterhood. These include an icon-painting studio, sewing and embroidery shops, candle workshop, wood-carving and blacksmith workshops. The Sisterhood activities also include religious education and publishing."

Baltic Imports carries handmade and hand painted Ceramic Bells, Wooden Angels, and Ceramic and Straw Christmas Ornaments, which are currently 25% off. Also, look for their Traditional House Blessing on the Grandfather Frost shelves and their Nativity Blessing. Their handmade Nativity Mug with Gold, and Guardian Angel Tea Light (Night Light) are some of the sweetest images we've seen in years. 50% of the proceeds from sales go to benefit their work among the poor and chemical dependent in Belarus.

The Number Three and its Critical Importance in Latvian and Lithuanian Cosmology

2010-01-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

The cosmology, or world view of a people, is an integrated whole: forged, reformed, and somewhat forgotten over time. It changes as the history of the People change, meeting the needs that arise to mark a particular time.

What I am about to write of, the numerology of a People that expresses their identity, is a story that is set in the center of folklore, and one which is critical to the understanding of any people. Numerology, a culture’s use of numbers and number patterns, is an overwhelming force in the creation of artifacts which express sacredness. To the folk artist, numerology may often be intuitive, but it is almost always a system that is marked by correctness: that which is right/wrong, rather than an aesthetic of good/ bad. To the collector numerology is one of the principal measures of determining authenticity.

“The ancient Balts were a conservative People, the Latgallians the most conservative of all. You can see it in Latgallian burials. They never took jewelry patterns from the tribes that surrounded them. Never took an innovation in an outside form, but adapted it to their numerology and world view. They were buried with the Latgallian shawl, the color of the sky in deep summer’s last light, wrapped about their shoulders, their uncovered faces gazing towards the sky.”

I was pounding bronze into the form of a 3rd century bracelet of the Latgallian People. Daumants Kalnins, the greatest of Latvia’s traditional blacksmiths, was teaching me about cosmology with little stories, as we took small breaks around the forge, and he smoked the terrible old Russian cigarettes as the great forge burned cooler and smoked as well.

“When you’ve filed the head of the grass snake into the great wards of the bracelet, into each end, you cut three lines behind its rectangular head, for the People came to the Grass Snake, the wisest of all things, seeking its help. The world of water, air and sky opposed each other. They pulled away, divided, and the world could not be whole. It was the Grass Snake that agreed to wrap itself around all three great elements and, by the union of its body, make it one.”

It was later in the day, fascinated that the World of the People, the earth, was but two small lines on the great bracelet, a single line for the world of the living and another underneath it for the burial of the dead, that I asked Daumants about the triangle I would strike in small lines and the three suns that would rise above it. Daumants sat for another cigarette and I got Ingrida to come and help translate the complexities I wouldn’t understand.

“The World Mountain, the sand hill, has 3 suns that rise above it, the Sun at morning, at midday and at evening... the lights that encompass the whole of one’s life.”

We talked about the suns, about where the spirits go after death. Later I started to strike the small suns that go down the middle of the bracelet and the suns that would sit inside Mara’s mark, and represent night and water. It occurred to me that I was making Daumants’ story, that here with the work of my hands were the 3 great elements, earth, air, and water, held together by wisdom, cold forged, hot forged, pounded on metal and on wood. It was Daumants who taught me to count, to see meaning in pattern, and most of all to hear the stories as that pattern unfolded.

Three has always been a dominant element in Balt, that is, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian, pattern. In many ways it is the transformative number of the Balts. The even numbers hold the solidity of the four seasons and express the world of continuity in reoccurring symmetry. The great female Sun was given the number two for the holy tears she wept. If we strike 3 suns into metal or hang 3 amber tears from a necklace we are “writing” something more. Eight brothers in an ancient prayer poem will become the larger concrete world around us while nine brothers become infinite and magic. 1/3, 3/3, 9/3 are components of every Balt charm I know, from the ancient amber brooches to the consistent use of the triangle. The same numerical progression forms the basis for magic words, whether to protect your field or stop the flow of blood.

I once asked my students to tell me how the “world” of the ancient Egyptians would change if their sacred symbol was a sphere and not a pyramid. The ancient world of the Balts was one of union with their environment, yet all culture must create distinctions within that union, hence the duality and consistency of the even numbers. But the even numbers did not raise the ancient Balts to the sky… that became the function of the triangle. With a single great Sky God and the Dievadeli (the sons of God), Thunder, Sun, the Morning Star, etc, Balt cosmology reached up to the dome of the heavens from the real foundation of the earth. The divine sign of Dievs, God, became the triangle with a circle above it, the mark of Mara, the Earth Mother, made into the sand hill, the mythological world mountain, with the female Sun above. With the understanding that Dievs was beyond the Sun, beyond the symbol, in the empty space, the farther space, in the mystery.

Within most of Balt culture the idea of a priest who would be an intermediary between the People and the sacred was foreign. Holy people, healers, elders, would rise as leaders of song, tenders of groves, diviners, but the ability to join the sacred, participate in it and carry its symbols, was individual and encompassed in the larger whole of the tribe.

Thus we have the triangle that represents birth, prime, and death (the 3 of beginning, middle, and end) as a symbol for the individual as well. To the foot of the world mountain one is born, through strength, energy, and work one ascends to its highest point under the Sun. There one receives knowledge, a dream, a vision, which they will carry in their descent, their eventual decline to death, and where, with their burial, they will again join the foundation of the People.

The triangle thrusts one out from the mundane world of time, and 3 transforms it, making it more. Out of 2, in a union of opposites, comes 3. Out of the union of the male horse and female horse, comes the foal. Out of the rooster and the hen, out of the man and the woman, comes abundance and the life of the tribe.

3 elements: earth, air, water

3 times: past, present, and future

3 processes: beginning, middle, and end

These attempt to express in language that which is not really orderable and definitely not simple. Daylight waking dreams, the dew which rises from the earth as silver tears, knowing the end in the beginning…those liminal shifts in individual experience bring the wonderful human soul to a place where it must create a construct for the mysterious. In ancient times it may have taken one to magic, to blessing, to faith and union, but always, even now, three takes one into the “other.”

Baltic Gift Ideas: Estonian Tableware

2009-12-14T15:46:00.001-08:00

Wonderful and whimsical hand-painted animal plates from Estonia. Mugs, bowls, plates, trivets, and teapots are just some of the items that are colored by scenes of dogs chasing cats, a little hedgehog curling up to go to sleep, or a rabbit in the snow. Many of our customers have given it as a gift to the children in their lives, knowing that the adults will love it just as much.

Holiday Gift Ideas: Polish and Lithuanian Teas

2009-12-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

Tea is one of the most popular beverages in the world. And now that it continues to get colder, it's the perfect gift to let people know your warm feelings for them.
In Polish teas, we have a wonderfully fragrant and fruity black currant as well as an energizing apple and peppermint. Additionally, we have a wonderful loose mixed fruit tea.
We also recently received teas from Lithuania. Our Linden tea, which is so reminiscent of the delicate blooms one finds in the springtime, is good for the nerves and stomach. There is also the cough remedy with licorice, which is soothing and sweet.
This is a perfect gift for hosts and hostesses during your many home visits this season.

Holiday Gift Ideas: Russian Secret Boxes

2009-11-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

As the coming holidays approach, we find ourselves discussing many of our favorite items that represent to us the warmth and the beauty of the season. As a family, we relish finding the perfect gift for those we love, something that seems to fit a part of them. Therefore, we thought it would be fun if we featured some of the wonderful things we have to offer. Every few days, we will pick one item, available both in our store and online, and tell you a little more about it. We'll pick a variety of items, large and small, for a variety of people. Perhaps one might be the perfect gift for someone in your life.

Our Russian secret boxes are hand carved from European Linden and hand painted in a variety of beautiful colors. Their wings swivel to reveal a small compartment perfect for keeping secrets... Great for bird lovers. Mara loves how hers compliments her wood dresser and is a perfect place to stash her rings without a mess. Available in Red-Breasted Sapsucker, Cedar Waxwing, Snowy Owl, Screech Owl, Chickadee, Eastern Bluebird, Cardinal, Ring-Necked Pheasant, Loon, and Ruby-Throated Hummingbird.

Fall 09 Newsletter

2009-11-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

BALTIC IMPORTS NEWSLETTER
207 East Hennepin Ave, Mpls. MN 55414 612-331-3296 www.balticimports.com

Fall 09

"Harvest time is over, and our gracious lord has now turned to us. We have come to meet him in great haste. We have bound a fragrant wreath to please him. We have tied the wreath of wheat ears, and beautiful garden and field flowers… May he and the lady live like a pair of doves.”
--Hungarian Peasant Customs, Karoly Viski, 2nd printing, Budapest, 1937

Dear Customers and Collectors,
What a gracious time approaches. With harvest over, the energy of fall slows before winter’s gate. It is a time in which we tend to our souls and our past. Now, at October’s end, after gathering everything in to us that was whole and bright, we light our houses in the deepening darkness.

In the store we are moving towards winter as well. Our harvests of traditional folk arts are arriving and they speak of both the past and the present. Ingrida has brought back 50 pieces of vintage amber, bronze, and copper jewelry. Russian wood carving masters have sent one-of-a-kind carvings. Brightly colored gems and deep toned amber for winter shine in our cases. Advent calendars crowd our counter. We have come home from Europe and are reading our house. We are inviting the world around us to come in and touch the light and warmth of old and new beauty. We are filling our hearts and store with timeless blessings and things that comfort. We stand at winter’s gate with a little light in our cupped hands.
Sincerely, Sean and Ingrida

NEWS
Holiday Store Hours
The store will extend its evening hours November 9th through the holidays. Our new hours are 10:00am to 8:00pm Monday through Saturday and Sunday 11:00am to 5:00pm. We will be open on Christmas Eve day from 9:00am to 3:00 pm.
International Amber Association Membership
Baltic Imports and Sean, its amber master, were recognized by the International Amber Association and made members in spring. It is a great honor. Baltic Imports has been long recognized in Latvia and Lithuania and by the International Conference on Amber and Archaeology. The International Amber Association has now acknowledged Baltic Imports for its commitment to and knowledge of natural amber products of the highest quality.
Balticimports.com, Blog, and Baltic Forum
We have added over 150 new products to our website, www.balticimports.com, for the fall and winter season and redesigned the site for easier shopping. We also are continuing to post articles on our blog, balticimports.blogspot.com, and in addition, have created an electronic “open forum” where our customers may respond to information on many topics, and post their own responses: www.balticimports.com/forum.
Facebook Page
With many of our customers joining us individually as friends on Facebook, we have decided to create a separate Facebook profile for Baltic Imports (type Baltic Imports in the search box, click on the individual page, and once there, click on “become a fan.”) There, we have started to offer more frequent store updates, photographs, and unique seasonal coupons. It may be a fun way to keep abreast of sudden holiday specials.
Folk Art Evenings at the Store
Our informal Education Evenings at the store will continue on Thursday, November 19th from 6:30 to 8:00pm, with a lecture by Sean on “The Most Valuable Amber: Tips for Buying Amber in the Contemporary Market.” We are offering this evening for the many customers who could not make it to our August lecture and who asked that the event be repeated. Please R.S.V.P. to maija@balticimports.com or call 612-331-3296 if you would like to attend. All amber during the evening will be offered at 15% off.
Black Friday Coupon and Sale
We will be having discounts throughout the store the weekend of November 27th-29th. Additionally, on November 27th ONLY, use the following coupon to receive a $25 gift card with a purchase of $100 or more, in store or online. For online purchases no web code is needed, any purchase meeting the criteria will get a gift card! Happy Shopping!

NEW PRODUCTS
Products are pouring into the store. There is a tremendous excitement among our staff as the fall designs arrive and we reach into winter. This year our theme has been comfort: a traditional tea in a dark evening and a perfect glass to drink it in, jewelry that one would buy for oneself and touch throughout the day; gifts for lovers that are timeless; and the bright little gifts that light the soul as it runs through the dark nights of winter.
Amber Highlights
Ingrida has brought back over 50 pieces of antique amber, bronze and copper jewelry from her fall travels. It’s hard to describe it all, for each piece is filled with tremendous cultural and traditional meaning. Weddings, births, healings, and deaths, are marked in the metal of their patterns, and the antique spiritual amber is so softened in tone that it has become wise with age. Three opaque yellow amber leaves wrap themselves about the story of the Sun in a late 1920’s art deco wedding necklace, cut “ modernly” to rest square between the bare neck and cloth-covered breasts. An archaic bronze 1890’s Finnish pin of a village healer is marked by four lines of suns in a disk that would have protected her in both the light and dark of the world. An antique copper blacksmith’s necklace of the guardian moon offers the hand-forged metal blessing of 3 moons wrapped in a single great moon, from which is suspended a half moon made of thick clear amber. A merchant’s necklace, odd in its metals, German silver and more archaic bronze, holds a piece of rare and perfect sea-tossed amber polished into a great clear drop. The necklace falls into two separated metal patterns, the flat cut of silver to highlight the bare space beneath the neck, and the silver and rare amber to ornament the breasts. The bronze filigree of the classic piece is hand-balled on the silver and represents warm suns over the moon-colored metal. A Latvian copper healer’s pin of the pregnant female sun, offers in its feminine purity the beauty of the late 1800’s, with a simple fall of three triangles that mark the world of the earth forever with the gift of magic. The triangle necklaces of yellow and white amber, aged to deep warm honey, set on wound silver cord or German silver chainmail, bless the wearer with the love of the Mother of All Things, whom the young woman about to be married embodied; Mother of Milk, Mother of Forest, Mother of Wind, Mother of Fields. Old pins, some of the amber 200 years old, 7 tiny perfect coin-silver rings, a brilliant art deco pair of bronze and double cut amber cufflinks among a collection of 1920’s cuff links, round out the collection. New contemporary amber is being set out every day.
Textiles
New Latvian mittens, socks, and hats have come in and will keep your hands, feet, and head both warm and beautiful. An extra long wedding mitten has Mara’s mark, a symbol of the Earth, in green flower braid patterns against an onion skin red brown. Wonderful! Linen shawls for the season and Russian patterned wool scarves offer beautiful colors to combat dark nights or moods. Three hand-broken flax open-weave runners, 2 with blessings of Mara, the Earth, and one with the Great Cross of the Sun in raised pattern have come from one of Latvia’s greatest tradition weavers and still smell of natural flax oil, a scent that is as rare as it is comforting. German and Austrian fall and Christmas linens are arriving in every color and shape.
Siberian Healing Gems and Cultural Stones
We have brought in new Siberian healing gems, mammoth tusk earrings and necklaces, and Czech Moldavite pendants, so that our case of stones in the store is quite full. The Siberians have also made chalcedony pendulums for us that are wonderfully weighted and balanced perfectly for the healers coming to the store for the gems. Chalcedony is the ancient stone of wisdom, insight, and truth and is diverse in color and pattern, each stone being unique. It’s their way of saying thank you to our community.
Polish Teas, Candies, and More
All natural Polish herbal teas, elegant tea or coffee glasses with modern metal holders, matching coffee presses, herbal ceramic cups, and cups for Father, Grandmother, and Grandfather in Polish, are part of our kitchen display. The teas we have selected are as delicious as they are healing: Black Currant for overall health, famous Lemon Balm (Melisa) and Orange for the immune system and nerves, Apple and Peppermint for the digestive system, and Natural Assorted Fruit Tea with Rose Hips made from real fruit pieces, because that was how grandmother made tea for fall. Other teas will also be arriving during the Christmas season. Polish Christmas candies will be near the cash wrap counter along with Polish Eagle shot glasses, and wonderful Polish green glass fall leaf bowls. Look for the blue and white Polish salt and pepper set, one of Maija’s favorite little things.
New Boleslawiec pottery has arrived
Among the new pieces are Christmas patterned dinner plates as well as several others with Christmas designs. Also wonderful are the individual tea mugs with strainers.
Lithuanian Teas, Candies, and More
We are also hoping to have Lithuanian Christmas chocolates, traditional Tree Cakes, and a variety of all natural Lithuanian herbal teas for the holiday season. Please keep checking the website and/or call the store to find out if our shipment comes through.
Seasonal Products and Ornaments
Wonderfully carved wood nativities from Poland and Russia, in both small and large sets, compliment the most masterful Grandfather frosts we have had in years. One, a resting Grandfather and a brown lab curled around him to lick his fingers is made from one great piece of wood. Some incredible German smokers--my favorite a wonderful St. Nick on a motorcycle, add whimsy to the sacred and the beautiful.
Bright German Advent Calendars with many different new scenes to choose from have been handpicked by Ingrida for their link to tradition. An old fashioned archetypal Bethlehem with solemn kneeling shepherds caught in light or a fold out, free standing triptych, with images of young children writing cards and young angels flying them up to heaven all represent the sweetness of Christmas now and the spiritual beauty of Christmases of the past. Polish oplatki cards and traditional cards without oplatki are rich in design. Among my favorite cards are Ukrainian Christmas images of traditional reverse glass painting from west Ukraine.
Our splendid seasonal matryoshkas and little village dolls with gently painted old fashioned animals are so authentic and reasonable that they are perfect for children or the collector. The cat and dog dolls carved with ears have to be opened and unstacked to be seen. If you love animals the exceptionally painted personality of each cat and dog is so masterful that it brings a knowing smile to one’s face.
With our pledge to support the folk arts abroad and the people that add grace to a country, we are pleased to be bringing in the clay winter bells of the orthodox Sisters of St. Elizabeth in Belarus. They care for the sick and needy, and those addicted to drugs and alcohol while making traditional crafts to fund their projects.
As always, our Christmas ornaments are as diverse as ever, and represent 6 months of shopping for those that illuminate the heart of a culture. Large Polish glass balls are in the wooden case, one cut out with the Christ Child lying on straw in its inside. A beautiful painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Black Madonna, has an image of the ancient icon on one side and that of Pope John Paul on the other. A hand painted Madonna in gentle blues, sweetly done, is the largest ball we have. Large Polish birds are stacked below with feathers and gilded husks for tail feathers. New Czech and German birds have arrived, some small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, others 16 inches long. Everywhere new ornaments fill our store from almost every country we represent. Latvian crochet snowflakes, Estonian wood cut outs, woven straw suns and birds from Lithuania, masterful traditional glass from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany. Come in and visit! And ask our staff about folk meanings!

The Winter Tree and Its Ornaments
A Folk Art essay by Sean McLaughlin. Copyright 2003.

Winter brings a stark beauty over a quieted Europe. The days draw shorter and shorter as the night makes haste to triumph in its moment over abundant nature and the sun. It is a time of grays, of turned-soil blacks, of brown mud, coated by snow or patterned by rain. A time when even the warm breath comes out like smoke and tedium seeks to replace vitality. Throughout the millennia, we, as a species, have sought to balance the failing sun and to bring color into the heart of our dwellings.
There is much scholarship on the early Roman celebration of Saturnalia, which began on December 17th and continued for 7 days, to mark the fall and return of the sun. Saturnus, the god of seed grains and sowing, was honored by feast and ribald actions. Trees, especially the evergreen, which was a symbol of eternal life, were adorned with flowers. Candles, a symbol of sacred domestic fire, were lit to aid the “weakened” sun. Wax tapers and a small terracotta doll were the appropriate gift to give one’s friends.
The history of the mythology illustrated by Saturnalia existed before the Romans and well after. The Kalends of the Celts and Northwestern Teutons, The “Dies Natalis Invicti Solis,” the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun, the Feast of Mithras in Persia, or of Attis in Asia Minor, all centered around the green tree, floral and green decorations, fire rites, gift giving, and feasting.
It wasn’t until the 4th century A.D. that the Catholic Church agreed on a date to celebrate the birthday of Jesus. Pope Julius, in 350, designated December 25th as the Holy Day. As Christianity moved to the outlying areas of the Old Roman Empire, and conflicts rose about the diverse cultural celebrations of the solstice, Pope Gregory the Great, in 597, advised that pagan customs be assimilated into the Church and then re-educated in Christian perspectives.
One of our first Christmas tree legends comes from this time period of Christian and pagan interaction. The Legend of St. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, tells of his travels through Geismar and his stumbling upon the preparation of a human sacrifice at a blood oak, of a child king, to the God Odin.
Boniface convinces the men to fell the oak instead. Upon its falling, a fir sapling immediately rises in its place, offering itself as a symbol of Christ and Eternal Life.
The important story of St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, begins in the 4th century. As patron saint of children, merchants, sailors, and bankers, he is synonymous with giving to the poor, and the three bags of gold that he gave as dowries to the daughters of a poor man are often said to have been the model for the first round glass ornaments.
It is in the 7th century when the stories of Thor, described as an old man with a long beard who fought the Gods of Ice and Show with red thunderbolts, slowly start to transform into a legend of one who will come near the solstice and reward those who have been just and punish those who have not. Suffice it to say that an amalgam of St. Nicholas and Thor becomes Father Christmas and then Santa Claus. Whether the preferred ornament color of red comes from Thor or from St. Nicholas’s rich robes, no one is now really prepared to say.
Our Christmas tree evolves, never really passing away, never really becoming a separate entity in itself. In the 16th century, Paradise Plays emerge in Christendom and the fir decorated with red apples is honored throughout Advent. Soon the apples would be replaced by blown glass balls.
The first written record of a decorated Christmas tree comes from Strasbourg in 1605. It states, “They sat fir trees up in the parlors…and hung upon them roses cut from many colored papers, apples, wafers, guilt-sugar, sweets…” There is much discussion now that places the first “Christmas trees” in Riga, Latvia.
Decorated trees enter America with the Hessian soldiers during the War for Independence in 1776. By the 1850’s Franklin Pierce starts the tradition of a decorated tree in the White House.
By 1865 German and Czech glass ornaments were being imported and sold on street corners. The American glass blower, William A. Demuth, had already been producing silvered balls and bead chains, while the now famous kugel-like grapes and pears had found their way from the immigrant glass blowers in New York and New Jersey to the joyful Pennsylvania Dutch.
The 1869 issue of Harper’s Bazaar contains a descriptive list of ornaments: “the now clad veteran, Santa Claus, his bag emptied of its treasures with which he has adorned the tree: globes, fruits, and flowers of colored glass, bright tin reflectors, and innumerable grotesque figures suspended by rubber string.” The list does little to illuminate the deep folk tradition that the ornaments rose from.
To the German peasant working in the glass blowing village of Lauscha, or the Czech or Polish itinerate artist, the ornament held familiar folk beliefs. Acorns would be the symbols for the Tree of Life and stand for strength. Animals were directly connected to the Nativity scene, with horses and pigs possessing the ability to speak and prophecy about the coming year. The bell was a reminder of the fact that on the night the Christ was born, evil died and every bell on earth and in heaven rang continuously for an hour. Birds were the messengers of God and of love, with the birdcage symbolizing the happy home. Cones symbolized motherhood and fertility. The doll, as a representation of childhood, stood for the future. The many forms of fish were all symbols of Christ, of longevity, and the eternal made possible through faith. The first fruit ornaments represented the sweetness of Christ’s salvation to man. Even the heart ornament was interpreted differently, for in tradition it stood for the very seat of the soul.
Form in ornaments was also symbolic. The common ball or sphere represented circles of eternal life. But within that vast form other folk beliefs lay just beneath the surface. The three balls in St. Nicholas’s legend differed from the balls of the Paradise Tree. The heavy glass kugels, beloved of the Pennsylvania Dutch, also brought good luck, while a variation was called the Witches’ Eye and was originally made to hang in a window of the house for protection.
The history of the ornament and the winter tree is complex. Its folklore is established and compelling. Our staff will offer their insights and scholarship to aid in your selection. We will also offer a host of stories to go with our pickles, spiders, churches, globes, rockets, clowns, dogs, cats, birds, and perfect flowers.
A fitting tale to end with comes from western Poland near the Czech and German border. It is an old legend, which states that three trees stood near the manger of Bethlehem: a date, an olive, and a pine. The date gave the newborn Jesus one of its fruits, the olive did likewise. Only the pine had nothing to give. So the stars came down to rest on the pine’s boughs. The Infant was so pleased he made the pine the first Christmas Tree.

Source: The Glass Ornament Old and New. By Maggie Rogers with Judith Hawkins. Timber Press, 1977.

For information or comments please e-mail Sean at info@balticimports.com

Vintage Amber Highlights: Fall 2009

2009-11-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

Ingrida has brought back over 50 pieces of antique amber, bronze and copper jewelry from her fall travels. It’s hard to describe it all for each piece is filled with tremendous cultural and traditional meaning. Weddings, births, healings, and deaths, are marked in the metal of their patterns, and the antique spiritual amber is so softened in tone that it has become wise with age. 3 opaque yellow amber leaves wrap themselves about the story of the Sun in a late 1920’s art deco wedding necklace, cut “ modernly” to rest square between the bare neck and cloth covered breasts. An archaic bronze 1890’s Finnish pin of a village healer is marked by four lines of suns in a disk that would have protected her in both the light and dark of the world. A copper blacksmiths necklace of the guardian moon, made before WWI, offers the hand forged metal blessing of 3 moons wrapped in a great moon, from which is suspended a half moon made of thick amber which in its turn, holds a circle of pollen. A merchant’s necklace, odd in its metals, German silver and more archaic bronze, holds a piece of rare and perfect sea tossed amber polished into a great clear drop. The necklace falls into two separated metal patterns, the flat cut of silver to highlight the bare space beneath the neck, and the silver and rare amber to ornament the breasts. The bronze filigree of the classic piece is hand balled on the silver and represent warm suns over the moon colored metal. There was in this high studio necklace recognition that bronze was regarded then and now as the greatest of healers, more respected than gold. A Latvian copper healer’s pin of the pregnant female sun, offers in its feminine purity the beauty of the late 1800’s, with a simple fall of three triangles that mark the world of the earth forever with the gift of magic. The triangle necklaces of yellow and white amber, aged to deep warm honey, set on wound silver cord or German silver chain mail, bless the wearer with the love of the Mother of All Things, whom the young woman about to be married, embodied… Mother of Milk, Mother of Forest, Mother of Wind, Mother of Fields; countless mothers uncounted, within and without. Old pins, some of the amber 200 years old, 7 tiny perfect coin silver rings, a brilliant art deco pair of bronze and double cut amber cuff links among a collection of 1920’s cuff links, round out the collection with a great selection of old pieces for men and women. Of course our contemporary amber is still there as beautiful and as reasonable as ever.

A Mythology of Tears: An Amber essay

2009-10-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

The continuity that unites myth, legend, and story together is often the collapse of the sacred. From the wellhead of myth that reflected a profound interest in amber, the greatest gem of the ancient world, came a multitude of amber legends, and from that multitude, a multiplicity of stories.

Nicias of ancient Greece, the Athenian statesman, was unhappy with the myth of the "Tears of the Heliads" as an explanation of amber's origin. In that story, Phaethon, the son of the Sun God, would meet his death by Zeus, following his foolish attempt to fly the sun chariot by himself. Cast down to his death into the great northern sea, Phaethon’s sisters, the Heliads, journey to the shores of that sea and weep in their sorrow, standing on the cold sea’s edge. For a thousand years they weep, until Zeus, upset by their continued sorrow, turns them into poplar trees which weep amber.

Nicias, an early scientist, tells his own story of how the blunt rays of the hot sun, falling onto dark soil, cause the soil itself to sweat. It is this sweat that flows like tears, he says, and which, when it runs into the sea, becomes amber. The golden light of the ancient world, he concludes, is born from the tears shed by the dark heart of the earth.

Sophocles, too, weaves his own tale of tears and the origin of amber. He states that it is the sisters of Meleager, personified by the great white birds that fly from Greece to the Indian Sea, who weep into the sea and cause that wonderful gem to appear.

Whether reacting against a mythology of tears, or retelling such mythology with different characters, no scholar would debate that the "tear" has been the strongest symbol associated with early amber stories. Natural, teardrop-shaped, raw amber lumps have been known and esteemed since humans first gathered amber. These lumps, rather a crude word for beautiful gourd-like shapes with amazing textures, are often only as big as your thumbnail. They offered to the ancient world a view of a whole form of amber rather than a fractured or broken piece.

But that “whole” form alone does not give rise to so many stories of tears, all wept by women, who were either goddesses or women who had somehow entered that boundary of transformation that separated the eternal from the mortal.

It is their tears, which are wept from loss and given back into the world by their continued compassion and sorrow, that seem to be the mythological origin of this little gem that I love.

The Balts, the nation of tribes who occupied the greatest of the amber areas, also see amber as a gem born of tears. The Lithuanians tell of the tragic love between Jurate, the Goddess of the Sea, and a mortal, a handsome and courageous fisherman. Their love is destroyed by the God of Thunder, for it breaks the natural order of things.

Jurate, chained to a fragment of her once great amber palace, is left alone through eternity to weep, shout, and churn the sea in her frustration for those few moments of great happiness. Yet from that very remembrance of her momentary love comes her constant gift of amber.

The Norse, who traded amber and prized it as a symbol of immortality, spoke of beautiful Freya, the immortal who saw the amber necklace “Brisingamen,” as bright as the sun, among other necklaces in the workshop of the black dwarfs. Unable to buy it with silver or gold, for something so great must be given not purchased, she offered herself as a bride to the four dwarfs and thus was married at night, four nights consecutively, she who was still Odur's wife and the mother of two fair daughters.

Freya, upon discovery, seeks Odin's forgiveness and is bound by him with another amber necklace called "Disdain," which speaks when one does something against the established order of things. Freya, with “Disdain,” leaves Asgard and journeys throughout the world weeping for her lost lover Odur and for his rejection of the continuing possibilities of her love. Freya's tears become gold when they fall on rock. They become amber when they fall into the sea.

Such is the nature of amber. In the majority of the great tales it is born from that which touches the tragic or the broken. It is born from the tears of the female world. It is born from such tears that reenter the world when the female world is changed by a decree of power.

In 1987, Ingrida and I were told a Latvian myth regarding amber by Georgs Romulis, for the myth still forms a basis of traditional Latvian amber design. It is about the Great Wedding of the Daughters of the Sun, and of Saule’s, the female sun’s, tears. It is a myth that weaves together compassion, sacrifice, and loss, and adds to them, a small but profound promise.

The world of amber is built upon profundity, not the least of which is the healing and guarding power of women’s tears. For their tears, in the largest sense of the word, first shape amber’s heart. If one would question why they are women's tears then one forgets the great polarities of the ancient world, the very healing qualities of amber, and the ancient age of the amber trade.

Quietly, I must say that it gives me great comfort to know that somewhere out there, in the multiplicity of our world, are Sirens who sing and, even if they do not sing for me, yet they grace the world with their beauty as their traditional feathers of amber wrap about slender and taloned feet.

Yet as still as they are now, in this little town far from the sea, it is said that they will sing rich and fruitful songs when an ancient soul finally does leave this world. I will wait patiently for these songs. And, while I wait, I will acknowledge them: all the women who sing and who weep. For what can one do but sail upon a sea that embraces all that is memory, that embraces as paramount all that is love, in a world that knows sorrow.

Next week: Vintage amber highlights from our most recent trip to Latvia.

The Nature of the Folk Arts

2009-10-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

As Ingrida and I travel through Northern and Eastern Europe during the summer we search for folk art for the store. True folk art goes beyond simple well-done crafts. In its best form, a folk art piece becomes an artifact whose basic nature must combine cultural authority, authenticity, and transformation.
In Northern and Eastern Europe the makers, specifically the designers, of the applied arts of leather work, textiles, metal work, woodwork, ceramics and jewelry are held in high esteem. Often they have been raised on traditional form and encouraged to find from it the wellspring of the new.
Likewise, it is within traditional form that a folk artist is raised. They simply do not leave it. The “new” for them becomes a way of re-perceiving the traditional, of using the traditional to aid the present.
It is the spirit of the folk artist that actually begins the creation of a folk piece. It is a spirit that knows tradition. One which goes beyond the simple possession of that knowledge by applying it in a masterful form. Through it all, the continuity of the past must be validated and embraced and the reality of one’s time incorporated. Folk art is a living thing.
The master folk artist in Northern and Eastern Europe is not an “outsider” artist. Rather, he or she has a job where they must, again and again, enter into a larger whole. Continuity with the past and community with the present gives the folk artist a foundation of identity.
In all the folk artists we have met, it is this immersion in the continuity of a people, through the history of their craft that sets them apart from a regular artist.
Often, the great folk artists don’t see themselves as artists, nor do they live easily with that adjective applied to them. Instead of judging their work as good or bad, they judge it as right or wrong… as correct.
Cernavskis, among the greatest of Latvia’s Latgalian ceramicists, Galkins, ranked as a great goldsmith, Romulis, Latvia’s premier amber master, and Kalnina, an archaic bronzesmith, have risen to such recognition by the very regard of Latvia’s people.
Their commitment has given them an authenticity. To their authenticity, the people have granted authority.
The mythological markings on a wood-fired vase, on a wedding sash, on a maiden’s crown, on a child’s hanging crib, or on an old man’s bronze bracelet, speak of a larger world.
The color, the shapes embracing form, the pattern of ornamentation, the number of repetitions and divisions, speak of a larger, greater world, and one that has been handed down, through training and inheritance.
Yet it is in the very human world that such “larger” things have always been made, with fire and earth, with water, plant and stone. The folk artists are these makers. One after another through time.
As Ingrida and I travel, we don’t look for the famous. We seek those whom the people turn to when the common world becomes a world of celebration or sorrow.
We don’t look for the large and boastful, rather we look for the convincing.
We look for something alive in the moment, which has the power to transform the moment, and touch its gentle rapture to a larger story.

--Sean McLaughlin, 2004.

A Folk Tale for a Cold Night

2009-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

The Two Harmonious Brothers
Saticeigi bruoli
Retold by Sean McLaughlin

November brings cold to the seta, the Latvian farmstead. Whether it comes in winds or in rains doesn’t matter. It simply comes.

A cold spring, or a too rainy summer, and the rye crop will be but half as high as it needs to be in August. Clear September may bring the start of harvest if all has gone well. Often it doesn’t, making a poor harvest and placing great importance on the second sowing of the winter crop.

Woe to the farmer who has not harvested the rye, the rudzi, before the soaking rains come or who has not stored it well before the hard frosts drive the field mice into the warmth of the farm buildings, for that farmer will lose part of his crop. In Latgale, eastern Latvia, even now the rye grain is “life” to the people. It is the gift of the earth that with great hard work becomes the People’s bread.

This story was told long ago during Martini, after the harvest was in and the mumming activities of kekatas had started. Those who live by the Long Lake in Latgale talk of the story as a teaching story. Yet among the elders there, many say that the story is based on fact, for once they say, there really were two brothers who found their way to wisdom.

The two brothers, near to each other in birth, in wit, and in strength, worked the rye fields left to them by their father together. As similar as the brothers were to each other, their families were not. One brother had a short, dark-haired wife with hazel eyes, while the other had a tall blonde wife who had eyes like the blue-grey sea. One had four children and one was childless. But both brothers lived on their father’s land and broke bread in one place.

It had been a difficult year for the rye crop. The harvest was poor. The summer had brought no rain then it brought uncommonly cold rains which lasted days. Hay time was a disaster. Harvest was but half the size of the crop that had been gathered the year before. Harvest itself had been hurried by the cold rains. A whole week of work had to be done in one day of the sun, while the days that lengthened without sun were spent in brooding and fear.

Yet Martins came as he always comes. What little grain there was, was threshed. The horses were corralled. Again the seta began to gather in upon itself. The brothers, as they had done for years, divided their rye crop into two equal parts and stored it against winter.

That night the oldest brother lay awake in his bed thinking about the celebrations to come and about kekatas, the masquerading which he loved. It was then that he decided to give his own portion of rye to his brother, for his brother had a much larger family and needed more bread than just he and his wife would need. In the dark of the night when the seta was finally still, he determined to simply pour his rye into his brother’s portion without his knowledge, avoiding any fuss or bother, for his brother was very proud and would never accept what he might regard as charity.

In the meantime, the younger brother also lay awake thinking similar thoughts. He thought about his four children who would soon be able to earn their own keep. He thought about his brother who was slowly growing older without any children to care for him when he was aged or to help him with his chores.
“I will go pour my grain into my bother’s portion,” he told himself.
“I will say nothing for my brother is proud. I would not hurt him by offering him what he might think of as my pity.”

Thus it was that the following morning, just before the rising of Saule, the sun, the brother’s each poured their own grain into the other’s portion, the storage of which were in different areas of the seta.

All day long they kept returning to the grain which had been equally divided the day before and, to their astonishment, it still was. So both brothers determined that in the deepest hours of the night they would again give away their rye.

So they did and still the rye was equal in the morning. So it happened for three days until each brother, realizing what was happening, talked with the other.

From that time onward the brothers lived in even closer harmony. Mercy, zelsirdiba, and compassion, lidzcietiba, the neighbors said, came to exist alongside the hard work of the seta. Never again was the grain divided. Never again did anyone count who ate more or who ate less of what the seta raised with their labor. Likewise no one feared as old age stole upon them.

There are no clay whistles made in the form of rye in all of Latgale, although the green of rye fields is among the most sought-after colors in Latgalian ceramics. To find a little whistle that goes with this story you would have to go to the village of Siljani, where the daughter of a great potter, whose own father was a great potter, and his father before him, still lives. There is an older woman who still remembers the seta named ezergailitis, the Lake Rooster, for her great grandmother was of that family.

It was she who gave the three whistles to the little daughter of this family in the late fall of the year when the last yellow birch leaves had been striped away by winds and hard frost had finally fallen on the fields. It was she who told the story.

Her whistles, which have become family treasures, are of two brothers and a sister whose mouths are open in song and whose bodies are pulled backwards like birds. The whistles represent the “gudri veli,” the wise spirits of the seta, she said.
“Those that know the songs, the tales, and the duties of the people.”

Riga's Christmas Market

2008-12-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

Once a year the market we visit in the cobblestone square of Riga's largest church gets transformed to its Christmas and Winter solstice counterpart. It carries traditional things that one needs to mark the passing of long days into short: baskets to carry to raw yarns and linens needed for extra warmth, bright yellow beeswax candles to put bedside, heavier and darker bread to support heavier and darker butter...

The stands that are built in the old fashioned way of farmer's huts are laced with white lights, so that a glow transforms the open space of the city. Families walk around, drinking hot tea made of wild strawberries that turn their lips as pink as their cold cheeks. Rather than have Santa Claus sit in on a throne waiting for childen to come to him, he walks throughout the market, telling jokes and handing out bon-bons to the young ones excited to catch a glimpse of him, but also to the older women who sit in the circles of the weaving guilds, bringing them warm gingerbread that never seems to run out of his pockets.

It is one of our family's favorite times of year, and the market illustrates those things we love beautifully. Embracing the changing season with warm traditions and the company of friends, turning the year's dark months into our personal light.

Taking Pictures of Lithuania From The Car

2008-11-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

Ingrida was driving through Lithuania, in a new Swedish Saab this time. We borrowed it from our brother-in-law who had just flown from Riga to Berlin for a small vacation. Despite making the road literally less bumpy, I think she missed the simplicity of the broken down Ladas. It took her long past the outskirts of Riga and the Stat Oil gas station to learn that she needed to pull up the little ring that encompassed the shift knob to find reverse. Me, I offered what comfort I could and graciously pointed out that we would almost always be going forward. Needless to say the queen of drivers ignored me even though I offered her her favorite Latvian cinnamon buns, that I had bought in the tiny white kiosk at the tip of our sweet street that Grandfather had pointed out.

In the early morning rain, now hours ago, we had driven in great traffic down Lacplesa iela, a street named after a medieval hero, and across the “Stone Bridge” of Riga to take the unmarked narrow turn that would bring us out circling and put us on the Central Lithuanian road.

I had brought a small Nikon digital camera to document amber and folk art. Ingrida suggested that I take pictures of the interesting things that we pass, kind of a Robert Frank view of Lietuva. In my naiveté I said, ‘yes, why not,’ still trying to compensate for the evil new car’s strange gear shifts and the fact that I was almost useless.

Where I pointed my camera, every single scene I fell in love with: a farmer with his horse and wagon returning from market, the carved old trees that bordered homesteads, the Mountain Ashes planted in twos before the main entryways to the old Lithuanian buildings, and the covered crosses at the cross roads, but my documentation never seemed to work out. The worst was the storks.

We had spent the summer with storks finding them everywhere we went. Traditionally they are a great good luck symbol. But in the last years they have become something more; perhaps a symbol of balance and union with nature, and of one still being within culture and knowing the old ways, the ways of the People.

“You certainly have to have some pictures of storks,” Ingrida, The Driver said. My ill fated stork pictures and their pursuit would take a tragic novel to describe. It was at the very end of our journey going through central northern Lietuva back towards Riga that I realized the storks were playing with me. I saw a field with at least 50 storks all walking their old man like walk, bobbing and bending, and when I had actually seen them through the lens of my little camera and taken the picture, not one showed up on the LCD screen.

Ingrida asked in her sweet way, now long and long after the shift knob, “Did you get it?” I said “Yes.” A picture in my mind forever, of these wonderful birds, the dark tilled soil, the wet rich tall grass heavy with seed on the side, and the hayed land encircling.

Kaunas

2008-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

I find a great peace and comfort in this Lithuanian city. Here, Ingrida and I work all day long in the amber trade among darting minds and gracious beaders. Exhausted at night, we throw ourselves into the harmony of the city and the setting sun as its last lights illuminate the pedestrian avenue. We always stay in the same old giant Soviet hotel, only partially remade, that sits on the walk way.

The amber work of the day, the selection and size of beads, the many discussions, and the paper and pencil of design, always exhausts us. At the end of work we are tired and emptied out. Tired and empty we walk down the long tree lined avenue facing into the sun and quietly, among the gracious others that surround us, friends walking arm in arm, lovers around small tables, women in linen going home, we renew our strength and relax into a simple celebration of life.

The hotel is a certain smell that stays with one through the long odd passages that lead to painted doors and narrow dark wooden beds, two in our room that by their size won’t allow us to sleep together. White sheets, comforters even in summer, are piled on the darkness of the mattresses. The bathrooms are always odd and not quite working. But the rooms are always reasonable and familiar, whole in their own way, leading one outward to the sweetness of the Lithuanian streets.

Out of my last 3 birthdays, I have spent two here, and I count myself lucky. Extremely lucky. For here is a gracious civility built upon simple human interaction with a high regard for a depth of intellectual thought. Here lovers should come, to be lovers in the whole. Here thinkers should come to be thinkers in the whole. Here mystics would find that they are mystics in the whole. For each is embraced and offered that wonderful right of way that marks a city that is confident of itself, small enough to be known, and complete.

More on Lithuania:

2008-11-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

Thank you for the response to the entries about Lithuania. As some have asked for more writing on this gem in the Baltics, tomorrow's piece will be be about a particular city I love, Kaunas. Until then, here is a pictoral clue of my inspiration today, the tree lined streets of that city you will soon read about...

Lithuania

2008-11-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

I fell in love with Lithuania in 1988. Somehow Ingrida and I were able to cross the boarder without being turned back, separated, held, or made to pay a bribe larger than what we could afford. We had come to Lithuania to talk with folk artists and amber masters, to get amber crosses for the priests graduating from the seminary in Minnesota as per Grandmother’s wish, and to place our own family crosses at Krustu Kalns, Cross Hill, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope.

We were driving a Soviet red Lada car that had screw drivers stuck in the windows to hold them fully rolled up and to keeping them from falling outward or inward. The car had been broken into in Rezekne by young street kids who had simply pushed the windows in. The car of course was borrowed and Ingrida was the driver as she has always been, being better at jiggling the shift and hoping that it actually got into 1st, 2nd, 3rd and with God’s help, reverse. Sweet Ingrida had bought a motorcycle when she was old enough to drive one, a little Italian-made Harley Davidson dirt bike. When she was old enough not to break Grandfather and Grandmother’s heart, she pointed it outward and had been driving since.

Ingrida drove and we talked as we covered most of central Lithuania, going down its middle and turning east towards Vilnius. Everywhere was delight. I remember how organized the Lithuanian fields were, for the kolhozas in Latvia were sketchy on their care. If one walked them, it was ripe and waste. The waste was not created with ignorance for the land but rather it came from a tired, almost exhausted uncaring about the whole.

Here in Lietuva, was care, small measures of love made visible. Trees gently pruned. A hedge tended and cleaned of parasites. Rows of roses laid down for no reason at all but that they were beautiful. Even the ditch grasses were clean and ready to be cut for fodder.

I was moved by it. So it was most fitting that as we tried to not attract attention to ourselves I was given a five foot verba, a great Palm Sunday creation of broken flax, field crop, and grasses, that showed the Lithuanian “Tree of Life.”

No one that we passed by in crowded Vilnius did not stop to look. We were like a wave that created humor and sweet concern all about us, for Easter was a world away, and we were carrying an ancient national symbol through the streets of a difficult time… a western fool and the thin Latvian woman.

It was because I was Irish, not Lithuanian, an American who probably didn’t know anything about anything that it took us just 3 hours to cross over again at the boarder. The guards could have cared less about Limewood masks of Devils, flax constructs of wise horses and spiritual birds, or the gentle womens woven belts that blessed the basic ability of a Lithuanian woman to bear Lithuanian children. They passed us through with the 12 white amber crosses tied about my neck on a rough band of leather.

The verba, The Palm Sunday weaving that the Lithuanian’s make to commemorate Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, takes the place of split palm fronds which no common person in Eastern or Northern Europe had ever had. The one I carried then is still among the very small set of things that adorn my gentle apartment in Riga. Perhaps it is the greatest thing for it is the eldest in our history, Ingrida’s and mine, that has survived in a vagary of apartments and places to stay.

Looking at it, as the summer rains slash against our ancient wood windows, I am renewed with wonder about the heart that made it so purely. Here is love and an ancient faith that forms the common into beauty and tells again the story of a People. Thinking about my being then in Lietuva, to carry such a thing through the streets of Vilnius among the police and the soldiers, in a time of struggle, then I say that I could not think of a better thing to carry. For it was not a gun which the movies prefer, nor a slogan which is only politics, but a simple form of a profound spiritual belief about an eternal return, “cut the tree down and it will grow again.” Made through the will of an artist, it gives reverence for something that is “more” in the dark nights of the soul.

The Baltic Road

2008-11-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

In 1987 Grandfather, Grandmother, Ingrida and I, with our daughters, then little children, were finally unofficially allowed to travel through Latvia to visit the family graves in the east, in the little village of Feimani, Latgale. As we were driven by a distant relative with Party connections along the great river Daugava, grandfather and grandmother told their stories that had to do with the road from Riga to Rezekne, through the history of their life, to the crowded car. To this day I remember the brightness of their faces and the sense of rapture that wrapped the shiny black official car in the moment and made it something more.

The world that opened up then with our ability to travel the Baltic roads as a family has changed my response to those roads even as I travel them now, for the road became stories and the stories opened fresh with every vista and view. The gracious little stories, sad, funny, or quietly terrible, told by Grandfather, by Grandmother, by Great Aunt Elza, by a multiplicity of people, unfolded their simple words into a multiplicity of levels that slid easily from personal history into folklore and the mythic.

The road that we traveled together in those years also produced its own stories: driving from Tallinn to Riga when there was no official gas and everyone looked for the Lithuanians along the coast highway who were selling gasoline in smuggled buckets and tins; of Grandmother Anna’s pilgrimage to Krustu Kalns, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope, in an oddly painted green cargo van packed with praying old women who were going to say the rosary from Riga to beyond Bersai, and the calmness of my two little daughters who were allowed to accompany them dressed in thin raincoats and holding bags of sandwiches. Stories that were left after all the break downs here and there, along every main road that ran through the three countries. Family stories of Grandfather, Sean, the improvised water bucket and the huge farmyard dog, that makes us laugh even now.

Not being able to travel outside of a certain area in Riga for so many years made the road when it did open for us into a precious thing. Every field, forest, tree, stork, village, city, became memorable. The clouds, the smell of the land, the type of crop in a field and its condition, even how the stones were dressed on the battered walls that had been left standing seemed to tell us something about each of these distinct lands and their people.

We were taught that summer, Ingrida and I, to listen with our hearts, the seat of the soul, as it enfolded what it heard in the changing moment into that rare state of timelessness and union. To our daughters, it was but part of their inheritance; the gold of the dainas and the living Latvian oral tradition.

A Winter Recipe:

2008-10-29T14:51:00.000-07:00

For my father, lamenting the approaching and inevitable Minnesota snow falls, a recipe guaranteed to warm the coldest set of bones:

Sorrel Soup
Note: the dark green sorrel leaf resembles spinach in look and taste. However, sorrel has a lovely tart flavour that can't be replaced in this recipe.
250g (8.75oz) pork, 800g (28oz) water, 300g (10.5oz) sorrel, 30g (1.05oz) carrot, 20g (0.7oz) onion, 10g (0.35oz) parsley, 20g (0.7 oz)fat, 20g (0.7oz) pearl barley, 1-2 eggs, salt, sour cream, dill and parsley.
Soak pearl barley for 6-8 hours in cold water. Dice pork. Put pork and grits in a saucepan, add water to cover and cook until the meat is almost tender. Chop sorrel, onions and carrots and sauté in butter. Add sautéed vegetables, parsley and salt to the saucepan, and continue cooking until meat is tender. Before serving, sprinkle with chopped dill or parsley and add sour cream. You may substitute 200g (7 oz) of diced potato instead of pearl barley. Boil potatoes with the meat. Steam sorrel separately and add it to the soup when the meat and potatoes are tender. Decorate with a boiled egg. (Courtesy of the Latvian Institute.)

The Gaismas Pils

2008-10-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

We have often talked about the changes Latvia has gone through in the period of being rebuilt. Literally, post 90's revolution, the architectural growth of the country has been astounding. The nation has always prided itself on its ornate buildings and dedicated museums, and with the newfound wealth it has been offered from the European Union, this is more true now than ever.

A fledgling agency within the government is currently overseeing the building of a new concert hall, a new modern art museum, and a new national library. With each building, special attention is being paid to incorporate mythological and cultural symbolism, as even with modern Latvia, the ties to tradition remain essential.

The proposed national library is of particular interest to our family of devoted readers, and we are especially impressed with the design of the building, which represents one of our favorite Latvian folk legends. The Gaismas Pils, or Castle of Light, was a hill of glass that once stood in the capital, and according to legend, sank into the depths of the river Daugava during the blood period of oppression in Latvia. In folklore this crystal mountain symbolizes the heights of achievement - something not easily attainable but full of rewards for those who make the commitment to reach its peak. Latvian literature also speaks of the Castle of Light as a metaphor for wisdom that has been lost. The legend says that when brave men and women summon it, the castle will rise from the darkness, and the people will once again be free.

The architect, Gunars Birkerts, who designed the project based on the original proposal of Saeima from the 1920's, has incorporated the symbolism by building a literal crystal hill on the bank of the Daugava river. While the reflective paneling is meant to interpret the original tale, it evokes further meaning to the Latvian people who will use the new library: while the building is modern, it is built as a literal mirror across the river from the Old Town, thereby directly reflecting the old roots of Riga throughout its new corridors.

We continue to be so thankful that despite the modern changes taking place in Latvia, the pride and respect for tradition still permeates. To read more about the Gaismas Pils, please click here, and you will be offered a site in both Latvian and English.

We leave you now with one of the most favored Latvian forms of expression, the translating of a Daina folk poem into song. This particular arrangement is at a song festival honoring Jazeps Vitols in his original arrangement about The Gaismas Pils.

Whistle While You Work:

2008-10-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone!

Part One of Sean's Journals is regrettably done. What a wonderful time we had reading and reminiscing about our journey this summer. We were sad to see it close, but excited to get to the new chapter of our blog posting, and what you can expect from us.

We will be responding to our customer's and student's Frequently Asked Questions, discussing upcoming goings-on in the store, writing essays on cultural significance, and doing a second showcase of Sean's journals from his time spent with the great pottery masters of Latgale.

Meanwhile, our solstice and Christmas offerings are newly up in the store, and while we regret jumping into the consumer fray of beginning the holidays so early, we are delighted to mark one of our most interesting seasons of merchandise. We love this time of year, when Minnesota is just beginning to get cold and the bare birch trees look not that different from those growing along the dunes of the Baltic.

We live in the old way, working harder as the sun sets earlier, lighting the lovely Tannen-duft pine houses, and having an excuse to eat our dark, dark Estonian chocolate to keep warm. We listen to Latvian radio streaming across the internet, fantastic broadcasts brought to us from the cobblestone square right next to the Riga Winter Market.

With the impending chill, as always, excited to share with you our common threads.

Sean's Journal, Part Eight: Bread, Honey, and The Conclusion

2008-10-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Along with the Song Festival came many events. As we dropped Grandmother and Grandfather off in a little parking lot near the Music Conservatory we heard a choir practicing medieval songs that sung in Latin of the joy of God’s presence in our world. As seductive as they were in their clarity, organization, and word choice, Ingrida and I still had to leave, for we had offered to buy perfect bread and different healing honeys for the family gathering in the evening, around the television again, with Grandfather’s ailing knees.

Grandmother always bought three loafs of bread whenever we stopped anywhere. Eating small twists from the loaf she would announce like a great wine connoisseur whether the bread was dry, moist, sweet, sour, raised well, rounded in flavor, and well baked. It didn’t matter what Grandmother’s verdict was, we would never throw any bread away, for bread is, in its simple way, sacred. Rather, the tables of the day would find us with Grandmother announcing that she would eat the dry sweet sour bread please, “the one with the thin crust, that’s not quite baked enough.” To us she would offer the best bread as she always did, eating the other herself as if she did some kind of penance for the state of the world’s poorer breads.

So as a thank-you, Ingrida and I had pledged to go to the Bread Festival and buy the very best breads we could find: moist, clear, flavor rounded, appropriately formed, thick or raised open, the flour and moisture structured by baking, cooked with an awareness of the middle of the loaf and the crowning of the crust. Further more, we had coughs to cure, pain in the knees, and weakness in the arms, that only country honey could cure.

Of course, we arrived too early, half the booths weren’t yet set up and the crowd was non-existent. But still we voted on the best bread display of The Great Brooches of the Sun formed of dough and walked away with a dense sweet sour rye bread formed around plump partially dried fruit and wild hazel nuts for Grandmother, her heaven of selfish bread choices. For the table and our guests Ingrida brought a fermented rye and flax loaf that was perfect in color, heavy in form, and thickly structured, appropriate for an evening of beer and spirits. To make the next two days ones of delight, we brought two string bags home with us which held single sliced samples of every great bread that had ever been produced in discerning Latvia.

Honey was a hard choice! We bought pure Linden Honey for coughs and colds aware that it has a tense aftertaste, and also rare, full flavored, dark Wild Forest Honey for strength. We were moved by the passion of the bee keepers and we left the little park thinking, in a world of modern things, how close real bread and honey are to song here, and to the souls of a people.

Sean's Journal, Part Seven: In the Heart of the Song Festival

2008-10-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

The Latvian Song Festival may sound trite to those who do not know it. I heard it referred to by an American- Latvian who had never gone as “A time for Latvians who are living abroad to come back to Latvia and spend their money.” We think of a national event in America with cynicism: parades, dogs, flags and ponies, when each has lost a great deal of their meaning.

The Latvian Song Festival does start with a parade, it has flags, many of them, and Riga’s dogs would be quite unhappy if I spoke ill of them. As to ponies, they still have a countryside where they are quite real. The Festival goes over a week ending in a final great chorus of singers and folk dancers that has consistently won the Guinness Book of World Records for its size. During the Song Festival’s time, it’s true that for tourists lunch and drink specials, and “ethnic” markets are opened throughout Riga.

Yet those that truly hear the Song Festival’s language and listen to what that language sings, it is a time unimaginably inspiring. It was the first symbol of cultural independence after the fall of Communism. The parade was the first gathering of free Latvians, and to this day they come together to celebrate this fact more than anything.

We brought Grandmother and Grandfather as close to the opening parade route as we could. The police had cordon off streets leading out of Riga Old Town, and Grandfather wanted to be near Laima’s Clock, and the televised announcement stand where every Latvian who had come to great Riga, or lived in great Riga, also wanted to be.

So Ingrida drove as far as we could straight towards the angry policeman who was dramatically shooing us away. When we were as close as we dare go, I leapt out to help open the back doors of the yellow Skoda as quickly as I could, as the tired Latvian policeman righteously attacked with his waving. When the door was opened, out came a 90 year old man with a cane and a folding stool, to be followed by his bride of 63 years with her simple but constant dark beret, carrying her own seating arrangement. The policeman, who still possessed the Latvian respect for elders, patiently watched them exit, and then told me in a clear precise way, with no tolerance at all, to drive off. It was 3 hours before the parade and every Latvian who could was assembling.

Our job, given to us in evening planning by Grandmother and Grandfather, was to return the car to our apartment and to then get flowers, traditional large white daisies or the sweet and profound blue rye flowers, and then meet them near the clock. Latvian tradition dictates handing out bouquets to each relative and friend who passes in the singing procession, so that blooms innumerably outnumber people, held in the hand of every one person who was gathered to honor the blooming of the generations. Our elders were no different. They would, of course, give out flowers to all, to those who passed by who didn’t have any yet, especially if they were from Latgale, the Eastern part of Latvia whose complicated and dying language both Grandmother and Grandfather still speak and love.

We ran from our apartment only to find the flower stalls all empty. Even the market, the great tirgs, had only rejected blooms, too old, too wilted, left. A young Latvian country girl about nine years old, with her sister who was four years older, spotted us a half a block away and came forward to stand by her two buckets of yellow field flowers that she still had left. The little one, as beautiful as can be in traditional dress and maiden’s crown, sold us all of her last yellow flowers, at double the price. The sweet rye flowers, she said, were all gone. We paid her gladly, even relishing her cunning, for her braids were thick, her crown was straight, and her language was perfect. It was a day of celebration for all.

As we moved through thousands of people, we realized that we would never be able to find Grandfather and Grandmother. Or if we could we could not press through the crowd of people five rows deep that lined the streets. But Ingrida, a golden daughter, still tried, and three hours later she finally joined them to burn herself in Saule’s clean sun and to be by their side as they, at last, gave the bundles of flowers out one by one to the singers and dancers who moved down the avenue in front of them. Four hours later, grandfather stretched his stiff legs in the entry way of our favorite park, happy to simply be alive. I was at home, cooking a celebratory meal on the old Soviet stove, with which to welcome them all back from a day well spent.

It was after the parade, in the night, in our little fallen down apartment made holy with family that I had an epiphany. We had set out our best drinks and food, the dinner which had been prepared had long been consumed. A song came on our small television continuing the festival, with tens of thousands singing it, about Heaven’s smith, Perkons, whose sparks from his great forge fall into the Daugava, the sacred river of the People. And about a sword that falls into the Daugava as well, quenching itself. And about Saule, the female Sun, whose tears would also fall into the Daugava. As I struggled to translate the song fully to myself, I realized that a whole country was singing the song in the quiet open space of memory, all those who knew the language. I realized that the song which everyone was singing or listening to or praying with, was teaching both strength and sorrow, addressing a courage and loss that was ancient, even to when the first German Crusade came to this land I was in. The song held it all again, in that time, and united to this now. Held, remembered, and passed through, by the will of a whole People. I was humbled to learn the emotions of the Latvians.

I smiled inwardly as I accepted another of Grandmother’s wonderful after dinner cheese sandwiches on dense sweet sour bread, as I move across the wooden floor to welcome more knocking family from the family outspread at the 1880’s red madder door. I smiled, for here in a little apartment made waste by the Soviet, was a place where I would bring my family and my students to learn. To learn as I was learning, alive in a moment that, like the song, was both ancient and new.

Sean's Journal, Part Six: An Apartment of Promise

2008-10-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself,

again and again."

-Joseph Campbell

Years ago we bought an apartment in a quiet district, near the railway station, in central Riga, the principal city and capital of Latvija. We bought it for our children and our extended family, so that we, together, would have a place to gather, and not forget a history of heritage. The apartment is but minutes from the Old Town of Riga and at night one can walk along the canal that runs like a green ribbon through the city’s center.

During Soviet times the apartment had been a communal space for three families. Two cheap gas stoves were set in the tiny kitchen and each family lived in one of the three bedrooms sharing the kitchen, the hip bath, and the single sad toilet that worked by poring buckets of water down a hole.

However, the apartment was intended to much more splendor, built in the Czarist time in Latvija, in the 1880’s. The walls and floors are built upon six inch thick hand hewn pine that had been floated down the Daugava River from Belarus. The ornamentation of its hallways and ceilings was grand long before it had long been striped away.

The five story brick building that our apartment resides in was built when the famous Jewish School was erected across the street. Our building was built to house the Jewish School’s director and principal staff. When free Latvija was lost the Jewish School became the principal Ukrainian School of Riga. The last family member of the original inhabitants who was raised in our building died in the nineteen nineties and spoke of our apartment and the building as a place of grace.

We love the apartment. And after rebuilding the bath and toilet in the early 90’s, we have come this summer to finish restoring the rest of it, the walls, ceilings, floors, windows, and doors. By doing so, we have leapt into that odd and singular craziness that always accompanies getting anything truly and cleanly done in Eastern Europe. But which marks those who try with the subtle air of difference, moving them closer, male or female, to the heroes whom Joseph Campbell so well describes.

Sean's Journal, Part Five: Blessings in the Market

2008-10-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Most folk art is about luck in the old sense of the word, a world of fates to be cajoled or conjoined. Almost all of our old, vintage amber is a visible ritual of blessing. Almost all of the new amber that we are drawn to or design blesses as well. I found a triangular piece of opaque yellow amber in the market place after Midsummer that was so old that its outside was oxidized blood red. Ages ago when the world was a world of song it had been shaped into the Baltic Triangle of the World Mountain, The Mark of Mara the Earth Mother. It is the representation of our life under the Sun, one’s youth, one’s prime and one’s descent to death and burial with The Whole of the People Who Have Come Before. This small, red Bronze Age piece must have been turned up by a plowshare or washed back in from the sea from that time of dreams.

The holy piece had been pinned a hundred years ago when Latvia was just beginning to rise. Later, it had been strung as jewelry by an invalid in the Folk Arts Guild under Soviet oppression.

I was astonished to find such a thing in the market place. The little amber triangle was magic when magic was central to a people… when magic was the acknowledgement of suffering and a form of prayer for “more,” when prayer as it is known today was still thousands of years away from coming to our world.

The pendant’s seller was a middle aged woman who sold things for the invalids. We gave her as much as we had. More than she or we could initially imagine. I put it on and have not taken it off.

It was later on, while I was talking to Ingrida to take a break from the wonder of the red amber that I saw the gentle weaver’s charms made by an invalid as well. They were a macramé of string made by a grandmother using a women’s weaving method so old and so thoughtful that we sometimes forget that their forms were born of great power and passed down as a heritage through family. Here was The Female Open, The Female Closed, and The Female Pregnant with the Light of the Sun and the Bursting of Waters.

We live in a different world now. I don’t know if it is better. At my age I try not to judge things. Rather I think that it is Ingrida’s and my place to live between the two worlds, the now and the world of the past, and act as a bridge so that these worlds might touch together in a fruitful sense and the best that is in us, as a species, be remembered and so, continue. To this end we each have given a life time.

Imagine then my joy in a day which had already been blessed to find that another grandmother, unknown and unasked for, had drawn with white chalk, a blessing over our threshold, over the dark painted door of our Riga apartment, made in the eighteen eighties that Ingrida and I constantly pass through in the bridge of our worlds. There on the lintel she had printed the anagram of the Holy Family and the Three Magi and linked it to our apartment. What could have moved her to do so but love? What emotion other than that could have overwhelmed me as I took the amuletic weaver’s charm’s in my hands and thought of the life that made them; the hands, the soul, and the memory that moved her to create?

We live in a world that is better for any blessing. That the holy can reach out and touch us is thing beyond measure, singular and critically important. Yet it happens, again and again, in the little moments, in the common day… when the soul has been granted time to see.

Sean's Journal, Part Four: The Light of Midsummer

2008-10-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

Jani, St. John’s Eve, is one of the most important of the ancient Latvian festivals. Nature’s growth has risen to its purest point in the cycle of the year and all is bathed in the healing light of the longest day. When the almost dark falls a great fire is lit and its light beckons all of Janis’ children to gather, singing.

In the hours before the bonfire, we gathered flowers, leaves, and grasses for crowns and wreaths. Saplings were cut to stand at the doorways; others were bent and tied into circles to be hung on windows. Walking through the fields and forest, I took little pictures of the simple things in nature and of the beauty of the light as I picked daisies or gathered three kinds of grasses. I spoke my thank you, up and out, for the cycle and balance of nature, for the gathering of family, and for the simple beauty of the moment. It is a deep, graceful, beauty that comes not just by union with great nature but by participation with those who are deeply thankful for all that nature is and will be.

Sean's Journal, Part Three: Means of Transportation

2008-10-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

We had arrived in Eesti 3 days before midsummer. We stayed 2 days there and then journeyed south from Estonia to Latvia. We traveled by Euro Lines, taking the Bus south to Riga, taking the coast highway that runs from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius, Lithuania, now called Via Baltica. There is no longer a train between the two countries and one must go by bus or plane. We elected to take Euro Lines, the choice of locals, so that we would have a toilet on the bus for our 5 hour journey. We earned the toilet, having for over twenty years traveled on the regular busses without toilets, which would pull into an official toilet stop and everyone would run for what ever facility existed: out-houses, tiled stalls, wood cupboards, and/ or the forest. I must say that more often than not the forest was preferable. There, the bus driver would have 2 quick cigarettes with about 20 other people who were more desperate to smoke rather than use the facilities, and when done, he would get into the bus, start the engines, and drive away. Regardless of where ever you were in what ever process.

If one has the opportunity, take a train. A four hour journey within Latvija costs 9 dollars, whereas a bus with a toilet, if available, will cost 30. Bear in mind that this year it costs about 80 dollars to fill the tank of a medium size car and the price of gas is going up.

As we drove down the beautiful highway, with the great pines rising from the sand dunes, the cities and larger towns were starting to become deserted. The field flowers and tall grasses that had fill the market places and the temporary road side stands that the farmers had erected were almost sold out. Cars were parked along public stretches of forests or fields while their inhabitants gathered gentle gifts freely given from the wealth of the green world. Everywhere, every one who could, was going to the country. Going to the country to eat, to drink, to sing, and to join in fellowship on the days when great nature is at its height. Being at its height and power, nature graciously blesses and heals in spirit all who will let themselves be truly taken by the harmony of her beauty… who will let go of the worry laden “now” and become more.

We would go as well, Ingrida and I, first by bus, then by driving a yellow Skoda deep into the country, to a “seta,” a homestead with cranes, among wet forest and tilled fields, with a “pirts,” the holy sauna of the Latvian People, taking grandfather and grandmother, going together to be whole, joined once again with the family outspread.

Sean's Journal, Part Two: Tallinn's Old Town

2008-10-15T10:52:00.001-07:00

Tallinn is a fantastic harbor city full of history. The majority of her visitors rush to see Old Town. But the vitality of the city lies about Old Town like a ring. The new modern rising Estonia is gleaming metal and glass. In a way it is quite fitting that the old road which leads to historic Parnu going south out of the city goes past “modernist” estates, which were built during Estonia’s freedom in the 1930’s. They are masterpieces of the clean aesthetics of the right angle and how it may hold the circle, square and rectangle. They are among the finest I’ve ever seen in the Baltics.

Tallinn’s main open market is near the bus station on Tartu Mtn, an easy walk or tram ride from Old Town. It is quite fun to go through. Not being overly large it is very accessible without being exhausting. The most interesting products for us usually come from individuals who sell on the outskirt or boundary of the market proper. There the selection of goods is most easily carried away when it becomes overwhelming, when the vendors yell or the market police come.

We had come to Tallinn for the Medieval Day’s Celebration that happens in Old Town’s Square. We spent hours talking with our artisans and meeting new ones. My folly was buying a leather bracelet from a 60 year old woman who had made 20 pieces in the whole of a year and whom we could probably never contact again. I walked away with the red and blue fox leather bracelet and thought how if I put it out in the store I’d have wonderful customers asking for bigger or smaller, green, purple, or yellow fox bracelets and being very disappointed when we gently said, no, the foxes are limited. The older woman’s works, made during the long dark nights of winter, were based on her dreams and the animals that would come to speak to her in them.

Ingrida bought a number of traditionally dressed Estonian dolls from a grandmother and granddaughter. When she asked if we could order more the young granddaughter, translating, told us that Grandmother, who was a traditional costume master, had made them to take her mind off Grandfather’s sickness. With Grandfather’s death, Grandmother was now sending each and every the little doll out into the world. When they had all found homes Grandmother would quit the market for she would make no more.

Coming In By Sea: The Pictures

2008-10-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Sean's Journal, Part One: On the Topic of the Sea

2008-10-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

Every journey to Northern and Eastern Europe brings its own, singular, time of discovery and reflection. For thirty years Ingrida and I have journeyed across Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland talking with folk artists, collecting folk tales and studying culture. In the small markets and festivals, in out of the way little stores, in barns and granaries we’ve purchase folk art. Among gracious masters of their craft we have purchased amber.

Together Ingrida and I have born testament to such fragile things as the thin trees that rise from the little islands in Swedish waters. Together Ingrida and I have watched some of them fall to bones. Yet the rocks that the trees grew upon will be there for our children.

Together, in a world of change, we have watched borders open that once were closed, great cities rise like slumbering giants out of a forced stagnation. Though every harbor that we knew has changed, we can still feel the same tension that we felt thirty years ago in those who travel along side us and whom like us are coming home after a distance of time and place.

These lands, waters, skies, and languages have shaped us. We in turn have marked their history with personal memory. Such history is a foundation that new memories should be built on. In moment upon moment we bind again our souls with the land, the sky, the sea, the ancient 3 elements, and to the common people who still hold these elements dear in the vast room of their hearts.

A journal is but a record of when a soul has time for words. It is a wonderful little, as changeable as the soul is changeable, and as limited as to what quiet one may find in a day or a night. So here dear reader is the little, done with love, made to make the quiet, sleepy moment, more, in those delicious long lasting lights, which spread out through the day and seem to ask great night not to come so quickly, which is the joy of Northern European summers.

Swedish Waters

One of the most beautiful parts of a voyage from Sweden to Tallinn or Riga is the long quiet sail from Stockholm through the archipelago of islands to the open sea. For those who know the unpredictable Baltic, it is a time of gentle waters before the rough and tumble of open sea waves. Ingrida and I use it as a time of rest, a time of romance, where we may sit as a couple softly before a window and mark together the islands of our past and present.

Tallinn Harbor, Estonia

My wedding ring fell off my finger as we sailed from Tallinn to Helsinki on a Russian ship 30 years ago. It was a simple pounded circle of bronze two sizes too big which the extended family that had been left in Latvia was happy to get at all. Ingrida was weeping then as the spires of Tallinn were receding and the Russian soldiers were yelling for us all to get inside so we wouldn’t see what military ships were in the harbor. As I comforted and then gently tried to move her away from the badly painted railing to the deck door, the perfect ring slid off and fell cleanly into the rolling waters. Its loss made Ingrida cry the more as we were shoved through the door into the ship’s barren center room by the soldiers with rifles and the shades on the few windows were pulled down and guarded.

I always see the little ring in my mind, the holy bronze buffed as golden as the female sun, when ever we sail into Eesti’s great harbor and the spires of her ancient churches rise up into the light. I kept telling Ingrida then, those many years ago, as we leaned together on thin plastic chairs taking what comfort we could from the warmth of each other, that we hadn’t really lost the little ring. It was there, in the sea, guarding a gate to an older world which we had just joined; an older world that somehow was still surviving by a simplicity of faith and an idea of promise… the faith which we had just pledged, the promise which we had vowed to struggle to keep.

The Beginning:

2008-10-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

"Tēva zeme nepieder

ne kalnâ, ne lejâ,

pieder mātes villainites,

vaj rakstitas, nerakstitas."

"The Fatherland doesn't belong

in the mountains, nor the valleys,

it belongs in mother's patterned shawls,

written, unwritten."

Welcome to Baltic Imports: The Blog. You may know us in Minneapolis as the gift shop and lecturers of the same name. You may know us in Riga as folk artists and cultural researchers. Or you may just be getting to know us right here.

Since the 1970's, we have served those communities mentioned and many more as supporters of the preservation of Baltic culture, most especially in traditional folk arts such as pottery, amber, linen and wool textiles, and woodwork. In our home in Latvia, we strive to provide resources for artists committed to working in the spirit of our ancestors. In our home in Minnesota, we strive to educate and inform willing ears of the rich history and tradition of the old country.

We couldn't do this without our wonderful customers and students, and we recognize how blessed we are to be able to continue to travel through the Europe we love, and along the way meet so many talented beings who share the same pride of the Baltics as we do.

This blog is both a thank you to that experience, and a tool, to be used to further explore the observations and journeys we have taken in this adventure of finding our home no matter how near or far we are to The Baltic Sea. It is an open forum, where we encourage question asking and open discussion. It is a lesson to remark on great craftsmanship, and it is a memoir of a family's multi-generational cultural passion not to preserve, but to prosper.

We will begin with Sean's travel journal from the summer, shown here exclusively in chronological order, each entry offering new remarks of places not yet seen, and musings recalling older memories of having passed through before. From there, the essays are endless.

As always, Thank You and Enjoy.

Sincerely,

Sean, Ingrida, and the Baltic Imports Family