"I didn't know where Vilnius was, luckily the pilot knew!" chuckles the sign that welcomes visitors to Vilnius airport.
There's something nice about places that don't take themselves too seriously, aren't puffed up with excess self-importance as the center of the world.
Small countries that are aware of themselves and the great advantages of being small.
In the not-too-distant past, the Lithuanian Ministry of Tourism took this anonymity to more extreme places than the current sign.
A few years ago, the Lithuanians went on a journey to encourage tourism, with the motto being that "Lithuania is the G point of Europe, no one knows where it is, but the moment you discover it, you cannot forget it".
It made a bit of media noise of the shallow kind.
The social media sleuths wondered who the geniuses were who managed to sell such an evil advertising campaign and how much money they managed to make, but as anyone involved in urban branding knows, when the gimmick is more significant than the content, the bluff is quickly exposed.
It is not certain how many tourists came as a result of that provocative advertising campaign, and anyway since then there has also been Corona, and if you are still wondering where exactly Lithuania is - then the answer is somewhere in Eastern Europe, in front of Sweden, northeast of Poland, below Latvia, on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Periphery in Europe.
Friends giggled, what did you lose there?
Even on vacation you can't wean yourself from the periphery?
Well, those who are looking for celeb attractions at Golden Ring prices, who will stand in the bursting queues for Paris, London and Barcelona.
Those looking for an Israeli vacation at a price that Israelis can afford should fly to Greece, and those looking for adventure should fly to Eastern Europe.
For adventure is about the unknown.
Where the familiar is strange and the strange is unfamiliar.
But I'm definitely ahead of the curve.
At the end of the straight road between the dense forests, the town of Markina is discovered in the Alita district in the south of the country.
102 kilometers from Vilnius and Gaonia, on the surface it looks like another neglected and forgotten peripheral village.
An ancient church, one ice cream parlor, one supermarket, a liquor store, an Eastern European bistro, re-created rural dumplings filled with beets with flax seeds and sesame seeds, and in the hunters' restaurant under deer antler lamps and IKEA bulbs, you can eat great happiness for seven shekels: wonderful golden potatoes in a cream sauce with a variety of local mushrooms - When it's perfect you don't need much more.
And all of this is in complete contrast to the big sign announcing that tonight and tomorrow - a local cultural festival.
A few hipsters sit on the gray steps leading up to the village's art center.
Almost all of them have laptops, one is admiring a display of neon lights, another is feverishly editing an avant-garde film.
Inside a local band directs the sound and lights, the waitress from the bistro smiles at us as she arrives at rehearsal with her choir and hurries back to the waiter before the show.
In the countries of the long day at nine in the evening everything is lit up, and the feeling is that an important event is about to begin.
In the last census from 2021, Markina had 963 residents.
I look at the festival program again through the lens of Google, and indeed, the festival boasts that all the artists are local.
As someone who has produced a local art festival or two in my life, I am the last to disagree about the importance of a festival that exploits the talents of local people.
In my opinion, festivals like this are the main tool for shaping the local identity, since nothing speaks more or creates the place than their sons hanging on walls or going on the stages to tell their family and neighbors how they see themselves and them, up close.
However, what is puzzling here is the relationship between souls and creators.
Small places tend to lower expectations and lower the ceiling of their dreams.
"Do we have enough 'serious' artists to produce such a festival?" wondered the heads of too small municipalities, and in general - who will come to see?
Our audience loves celeb attractions!
If I bring him local forces, won't it look like we "spared" him?
Go to Marquina's local cultural festival, I tell them.
If less than a thousand people in the periphery of the periphery manage to produce two days of local culture, on the purity of the local people - with an audience that also comes from far away - then you can too.
This is the measure for the recovery of the periphery from its marginalization - the self-confidence in its proper existence.
And maybe it's no coincidence that the symbol of the village and its flag is a unicorn.
Completely genuine, a local attraction.
Attractions are the monosodium glutamate of the tourism world.
Small, pointed spikes of exaggerated taste, through which they try to sell you the usual routine flavors around.
In Lithuania they specialize in strange attractions, but in Markina they decided to take the matter to the extreme - in front of the wooden church stands an ancient building and in front of it two signs created by a local artist.
The styling from the world of nightmares on Netflix - black and red, captured a knot between strange pagan symbols, and in the content is written the word REX - king, in Latin.
The equal passers-by are invited to write their thoughts on the sign.
But only when you get past the strange display, you discover that it hides the main attraction of Markina.
Because if you didn't know, in this very house, on May 20, 1648, the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Władysław Vaza (for the life of me, I'm not making this up), met his death.
The sign reminds me of Asi Dayan's great and forgotten film - a feast for the eyes.
In the film, the residents of a remote town try to bring about the death of a poet who happened upon them, just to be on the map and encourage tourism and pilgrimage to the place of his death.
I stand in front of the building and wonder about the trembling hand of the Lithuanian cook who, on an ancient May evening, prepared the king's dish, and perhaps among all the cream they also stole some unruly little mushroom among the thousands of wonder mushrooms that grow in the surrounding dense forests.
Served to the king, with some pepper, and told him good night forever, because what can't be done to create a local attraction.
Across the square, a country house is offered for sale, and the Israeli realtor in me is intrigued and approaches to see. But as soon as I cross the road, the muted history of the place hits me. A red brick wall remains a sword from that war. Next to it is a small sign hidden behind the hedge of bushes with a Star of David on it. This There was the "shul" - the room in Markina's Jewish study center.
Markina was one of the first Jewish settlements in Lithuania and there is evidence of Jewish life there as early as 1539.
Among forests and large rivers, in the depths of the European periphery, there existed an alternative life of Jews in Christian and pagan lands.
On the side street, someone painted a Jewish figure on the entire wall in front of the shul, next to it was a sign explaining the bustling Jewish life that existed here.
At the end of the 19th century, the Jews were almost two-thirds of the residents here, but at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the German army occupied the tiny town and the Nazis "allowed" the Lithuanians to conduct a pogrom against the Jews of Markina and the surrounding area.
In September, the survivors of the pogrom were led to the confluence of the rivers outside the city, and according to Jaeger's report, 854 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in this action. On the edge of the sign it says that there is a special Gilad in their memory. We try to locate him and reach the edge of the village. indifferently
Mrs. Google says we've arrived.
A narrow mud path leads into the heart of a dense forest, two Jews are searching on a smart phone for humanity's stupid past.
Stumbling and wondering we deepen into the green darkness, get tangled in leaves and almost slide into the river.
Finally we give up and turn back.
Too bad, I think to myself, this could have been a great attraction.
Were we wrong?
We will fix it!
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