Author Archives → Limbic

Lights among the ruins

Excellent post by Bldgblog discusses a topic that I also keep returning to, the horrors of northern Germany in 1944 and 1945. From Lights among the ruins:

…while working on The BLDGBLOG Book tonight (due out Spring 2009! from Chronicle Books! buy loads!), I was re-reading W.G. Sebald’s extraordinary On the Natural History of Destruction.

At one point in the book Sebald describes the literally shell-locked life of people who had managed to stay on in the destroyed cities of northern Germany during WWII. He describes ‘the unappetizing meals they concocted from dirty, wrinkled vegetables and dubious scraps of meat, the cold and hunger that reigned in those underground caverns, the evil fumes, the water that always stood on the cellar floors, the coughing children and their battered and sodden shoes.’

Battling grotesquely bloated rats and enormous green flies, these ‘cave dwellers,’ as Sebald calls them, lived with the ‘multiplication of species that are usually suppressed in every possible way,’ amidst the gravel and shattered windowframes of their now ‘ravaged city.’

Based on an eyewitness account written by an Allied Air Commander, Sebald then refers to ‘the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst the monstrous destruction, [which] makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war.’

For some reason the next line just haunts me:

No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in.

Which leads me to ask myself whether it’s simply a factor of my age – I’m not exactly getting younger here – though I do drink a lot of orange juice – or if it’s something more closely related to the weirdly militarized political climate in which we now live, but I’ve started to react to things like this with a kind of concentrated studiousness, as if reading – absurdly – for advice on how to survive my own generation’s coming, perhaps even more calamitous, future.

What ‘monstrous destruction’ of world war and oil shortages and global terror and climate change might we, too, have to face someday?

In twenty years’ time will I be out holding up some pathetic light among the ruins of a destroyed city, wondering where my wife is, dying of thirst, deaf in one ear, covered in radiation burns? “

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

Amazing Soviet buildings

From  English Russia come these wonderful images of Soviet architecture.


Palace of Marriage, Tblisi, Georgia (built 70’s)


Hotel “Friendship” Ukraine


“State Department for Traffic” Tblisi, Georgia (built 1975)


“Palace of Soviets” built in Kaliningrad city, Russia in 1975


Technological Institute in Minsk, Belarus (built 1981)

The Kalmyk of Belgrade

Whilst looking for a Buddhist centre in Belgrade, I came across the sad story of the Kalymks and their gift to Belgrade – a Buddhist temple.

Apparently there is a little country in the Russian Federation called Republic of Kalmykia. It is Europe’s only Buddhist country. The Kalmyks are decendend from the Mongols and have a very troubled history which involved two diasporas and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Joseph Stalin. They appear to have a tendency towards  backing the loser (White Russians during the Russian revolution and the Nazis in WW2).

Here is the Belgrade connection:

During the first Diaspora a large group of Kalmyks fled from Russia with the remnants of General Denikin’s White Army to Turkey. The majority chose to resettle in Belgrade, Serbia.

…The Kalmyk political refugees in Belgrade built a Buddhist temple there in 1929. [Source: Wikipedia]

Unfortunately, the temple they built was eventually destroyed and their colony disintegrated at the end of WW2.

The first Kalmyk refugees arrived in Serbia at the end of March and the beginning of April 1920 and settled mainly in the eastern part of the country. The second and the largest group (some 300 people) arrived towards the end of 1920 and settled at the outskirts of  Belgrade. This was the largest Kalmyk colony in Europe. Since most of them were lacking necessary skills for a good job, they used to be engaged in physical labor: as workers at brick plants, or construction workers, or as porters, hired coachmen etc.,  while the women ‘sewed for the army’, and made the slippers. They used to be poorly paid.

In the first five or six years the Kalmyk did not form any sort of organization in Serbia. The Kalmyk Association came into being in 1928 and it immediately took the steps to build a home for social gathering and the place of worship. They finished them in December 1929.

The Kalmyk colony in Belgrade disintegrated at the end of WW II when all of them retreated to Germany and later on either to the USA or Western Europe.

A deserted temple was heavily damaged during the battle for Belgrade (October 1944) when the upper part of the roof (“the tower”) was burned down. A few years later, the whole building was demolished and a new building was erected on temple’s  [Source: Kalmyk Buddhist Temple Online Exhibition]

They are a tragic people. I hope things turned out well for them wherever they ended up.