Jurij Dobriakov

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves <…>

It is known that names of places change as many times as there are foreign languages <…>

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Where do place names come from? Why are places called what they are called? Who is the author of each particular place’s name? I sometimes feel tempted to reconstruct or re-enact the original process of naming places, as some of the names, both in Lithuania and elsewhere in the world, are simply mind-boggling. Why was a rocky area near Moab, Utah called Devil’s Garden? Who had decided to give a small Lithuanian village the name of Switzerland? Such names instantly create an imaginary mythology of the place even when there is no official legend; they seem to tell the story of the place in just one or a few words.

By giving names to places, we claim to symbolically own them. That is why the invention of toponyms is always on the list of things to do first when one arrives to a previously uninhabited or a newly conquered territory. An unnamed piece of land or natural object is just a geographical site; a name makes it a place. The process is very similar to domestication. I believe it is impossible to inhabit a site – to establish a psychological connection with a location on the map, one must come up with a name for it. The name is an anchor. It expands the borders of the domestic environment, the safety zone.

Map by Kriss Salmanis

Place names are also among the elements that communities centre around. The set of toponyms defining the territory inhabited by a community embodies the collective imagination of that community. It is a mythology that everyone partakes in by simply being born into the community or becoming its naturalised member. If a place name originates in a sighting (of an apparition, a herd of wild animals, a flock of birds, etc.) reported or remembered by a single member of the community (say, one of the founding pioneers), then, by extension, all of its members “remember” this original encounter or event by adopting and using the name of the place. An individual, temporal experience becomes a shared and timeless one, tying together the changing generations of the community.

Map by Marko Stamenkovic

Giving names to places is not merely an aesthetic, practical, or social gesture – it is also deeply political. Especially so when a place already has a name and an associated ethnic or political mythology. Renaming a place is an essentially violent (if also liberating sometimes, as in the case of restoring a historical name) procedure. It is not just the name that changes, but the very quality of the place, its metaphysical character, its history. In Western Lithuania, by referring to a border town on the Nemunas river as either Tilžė (the historical Lithuanian name), Tilsit (the historical German name) or Sovetsk (the current Russian name, which has no historical roots whatsoever) one demonstrates an affiliation with a particular ethno-political group and a preference for a particular version of history. I happen to have been born in this town, and I am still not sure which of its faces I know.

Map by Mindaugas Gapsevicius

The situation is similar in most of Lithuania. One can choose between Trakai and Troki, Vilnius, Vilna and Wilno, Kaunas and Kovno, Paneriai and Ponary, etc. – and the choice is virtually always very deliberate and viewed as gravely important. It is not simply a word that is being chosen (because of familiarity or the way it sounds), but a particular meta-narrative. In a country like Lithuania, a historical crossroads of cultures and ambitions, referring to a place in a particular way is a manifestation of belonging to a certain group, a certain collective memory, a certain tradition of interpreting reality. Most often at the expense of some other group, some other memory, some other tradition. “It is known that names of places change as many times as there are foreign languages,” writes Italo Calvino. Yet perhaps the phrase is not complete; as the names change, the very histories of places and the places themselves change as well. Wilno and Vilnius cannot be the same place, and Vilnius and Vilna do not coincide. A site can hold numerous places withnumerous unrelated pasts, presents, and even futures.

Still, the region right next to Nida, the present Kaliningrad area and former East Prussia (or Lithuania Minor, depending on the historical perspective), is fairly unique in its complex layering of names and histories. Practically each location has had a Lithuanian, a German, a Polish, and often even an ancient Prussian name. Meanwhile, the current Russian names of these locations strike the eye as being incredibly artificial and generic, completely out of touch with either of the historical ones. This latest process of naming must have looked rather like erasure or forgery. Today, when the Soviet Union is no more, and the Kaliningrad area formally belongs to Russia while physically being an enclave surrounded by (and isolated from) EU states, the place names that still testify the “glory” of the extinct Communist superpower and its political and military heroes seem to throw today’s Russian-speaking inhabitants of the area off balance. They are caught up in a place that is literally placeless and atemporal, a nowhere-land. These names give the whole area a period theme park-like feel. And it’s not like the old names and the associated histories have completely vanished: they can still be seen through the façade paint. I wonder what kind of a relationship the local youths establish with these historical remnants, if any.

Map by Vytautas Michelkevicius & Jodi Rose

In Nida we tried to simulate the process of giving names to the objects in the territories surrounding the Nida Art Colony, pretending that we don’t know anything about the place and its mythology. Actually, in most cases this was not even necessary, as for many of the Interformat Symposium participants Nida was a completely blank space mythology-wise, which was a beneficial circumstance for imagining possible (hi)stories and inventing place names associated with them. Our purpose was to populate the objective site with a multitude of subjective places. The several maps that were produced (including the one on the symposium’s poster and booklet that had been drawn even before the workshop and served as a good example of attributing custom names to existing locations) show, in micro perspective, the variety of possible approaches to this task. The strategies range from minimalist to romantic and from fictional to experiential. In fact, mapping is not viewed as an end in itself in this project; rather, it is a handy tool that provides a certain framework for reflection on the phenomena and problems related to place names.