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European Marks

By Kirill Kobrin.

Translated from Russian by Katya Luca.

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We were driving from Kirkenes to the museum of Skolt Sami, which is situated near the Finnish border. There were three of us in the car, Andreas (German) was driving, I was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, and in the back sat Jasmina (Serbian). Andreas is the art director of the group of the curators “Pikene pÃ¥ Broen” (1) and Jasmina is in charge of contemporary culture in the administration of the northern Norwegian town Tromsø(2) . For me this was the third time I have come to Kirkenes in the last two years to try to understand the essence of this place, as it is situated between two borders, and in many ways becomes a border in itself. What a “border” constitutes is exactly what will be discussed here.

We left Kirkenes, the small-scale port town on the banks of the Varangerfjord. It is one of the Northern-most towns in the world of human settlements, with a convoluted economical life with a very diverse population in ethnical, cultural and social terms. There are not too many inhabitants, around four thousand people, plus a couple of thousands in the suburbs and seasonal workers. Technically the majority are Norwegian, however a few hundreds are Russian, having come there in the last twenty years or so. Quite a few of the Russians do not live in Kirkenes permanently, but rather work either at the shipyard, at the open quarries, in the port, or in the service industry. The names of the streets in Kirkenes are given in two languages, in Norwegian and in Russian, and of course all the useful public information as well, such as names of shops, signs on administrative buildings, and so on. When it comes to the “Norwegians”, they are also not monolithic. First of all, many of the local Norwegians have Sami roots. The Sami are one of the so-called indigenous people of Northern Europe. They live on the territories of modern Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. Incidentally, the municipality that Kirkenes belongs to is called Sør-Varanger, and the latter is a part of the Finnmark region, as in the “Finnish Mark”. Here I think it is appropriate to take a break and say a few words about what a Mark is.

Of course, we are not talking about the Russian word “mark” (марка) – which translates as “stamp” – the four-sided piece of paper that needs to be put on an envelope. A Mark (or March, Marches) is the European name for a border, a frontier, a “boundary” territory; its name comes from early Middle Ages. The Franks called it marka, Anglo-Saxons called it mearc, but both nations meant only one thing by the word: something that is situated between two sources of power, political and economical influence, and law. Starting with the early Middle Ages, the Mark became the specification for a territory that was usually recently colonized and bordered areas with a hostile population that spoke a foreign language and adhered to a foreign culture, and sometimes even a foreign religion. There were many such Marks in the Middle Ages, here are some of the most famous: Ostmark (currently the majority of Austria’s territory), Danemark (today’s Denmark), Margraviate of Brandenburg (the Mark of Brandenburg), Marca Hispanica (the Spanish Mark), the Scottish Marches, and the Welsh Marches.

Typologically the organization of these territories was similar, although they varied in location and population. Typically these territories were given away by the crown to a powerful vassal, who in turn was given considerable rights. Technically these Marks were mostly autonomous or semi-autonomous regions and were governed by semi-military methods. The rights and freedoms of the ruler of the Mark (Markgraf – margrave) were partially given also to certain categories of its population. Often the Mark was temporarily released from paying the royal taxes, the margrave had the right to manage his lands as he wished, and only in rare cases was he tried in the monarch’s court of law. The freedoms in these lands were also usually completely unique, having formed spontaneously through a colorful collection of laws. All of this did not come without reprimand. Marks usually lived in a state of semi-war, and the margrave, had to maintain an army and build defensive structures out of his own pocket. The neighboring lords often attacked the Mark, as well as the Mark’s military also raided the neighbors, and sometimes even undertook more serious expeditions in the course of which they rounded off the Mark’s territories. The central ruling authority benefited freely from this strong defense of the borders, however sometimes the rulers of the Marks became too powerful and too dangerous, and therefore once in a while the monarchs had to get involved in the military and the politics of this domestic game of boundaries.

This is just well-known knowledge. It is astoundingly more interesting to study how the Mark’s society was cultivated socially, ethnically and culturally. Certainly the monochrome living of the western and the central European medieval society should not be exaggerated, however it was in reality quite similar, especially if we are talking about peasant life. Picardy consisted of “picards”, the majority of “castilians” lived in Castile, and “people from Kent” resided in Kent. Obviously, sometimes there were foreign ethnical and even religious elements in those communities, especially in cities, for example the Jewish population, but this phenomenon was mostly an exception. In opposite the Marks’s diversity of languages, customs, occupations, clothing and tools was the absolute norm. It is important to note that the measurement of this diversity was never an individual person, but a whole community. In other words, the Mark presented a mixture of different groups of people, each one representing its own way of life. On the lower levels of the society these communities that belonged to different ethnical groups barely mixed with each other. However, the higher up the social ladder a community stood, the tighter these diverse groups weaved together on a more personal level.

In these lands the clergymen were the most varied. Considering the fact that most of these Marks appeared on the borders of the non-Christian world (or even Christian, but different, let us remind ourselves of so-called “Celtic Church” in Ireland and Wales), among the clergymen you could find natives from almost all the corners of Europe, as the personnel politics of the Catholic church on the borders of the Christian world were always refined and international. Furthermore, the monarchs tried to appoint their “own” bishops as the heads of the local dioceses, so they could keep an eye on the semi-independent margraves, and these bishops could be from any land, as their origin didn’t matter, only their loyalty.

The feudal class of the Mark was even more vibrant. It involved both the conquerors and the local elite. It is vital to understand that the conquerors of these boundary territories were the seekers of fortune from all over the Christian world. Often they were younger sons of the famous aristocratic families, as due to the custom of the firstborn sons inheriting the titles and the estates, these younger sons got nothing, but at the same time these younger sons did not follow the religious path to become clergymen (a usual custom for the second son). The younger sons had to obtain the titles, the income and the lands on their own with the help of weapons and the ability to adapt, the latter involving the talent of sprouting roots in the lands where they ended up eventually. This is where the marriage of the local and the foreign elite comes from.

A vital example of a medieval Mark were the Welsh Marches. After the Norman conquest of England in the territories of the southwestern, western and northwestern borders of Wales (3) , there were plenty of Norman, French, Flemish and many other seekers of fortune. Gradually they started to subordinate the neighboring Welsh territories, and at some point even occupied almost all of Wales (however afterwards they were forced to leave most of the conquered lands). William the Conqueror, who was not too concerned with conquering just one more territory of Britain, especially one so detached and poor, tried to build a border with the restless and war-like Welshmen with the least amount of loss for himself, as the happenings in England, Normandy, France and other parts of Western Europe were a lot more interesting to him. He appointed his three closest companions to rule the three main boundary territories and gave them immense rights and freedoms. That is how the three bordering counties in England were established, one of them being Cheshire, a typical Mark in so much so that its rulers received the title “palatines” (4).

Peace was only established for a limited time on the border, considering that just a few years after the death of William the Conqueror the Norman lords started to attack the Welsh territories. At the beginning of the 12th century they ruled over the whole of southeastern Wales, as well as parts of the west, southwest and the northwest, and that is how the Welsh Marches were established. Conquering the lands did not in any way mean “ethnical cleansing” or even displacement of the local small authorities. The Welsh population with its traditions, including legal traditions, merged well with the new administrative structure. The Welsh lived primarily in the mountains, they continued their customs and followed their rulers. Below the mountains in the farming lands and the newly formed towns lived mostly the newly arrived population, such as the English, the Normans, the French, the Flemish (who were approached by Henry I to colonize the Welsh lands), and many others. There was no significant amount of communication between the worlds of the colonists and the locals, however the fusion, including ethnical fusion, still happened, especially on the level of “the lords”. When the Welsh rulers of the “Native” Wales led wars against the Anglo-Normans, it often became clear that they were fighting with their own relatives.

The so-called “glue” of this society was not so much the higher ruling power of the monarch who resided far away (and often not even in London but on the continent), but the Catholic Church, which was the main universal power of the western Middle Ages. On all the territories controlled by the crown (we are not talking solely about the Welsh Marches, but the king’s authority was recognized by all the rulers, even in Native Wales), the English king was trying to achieve uniformity by conducting a church reform with the help of Rome, to implement the universal rules of the dominant Roman version of Catholicism, not the “strange” customs of “Celtic Christianity”. Despite the old customs that were cherished for hundreds of years, the reforms were successful, therefore it turned out that both the newcomers and the locals were spiritually fed by the same priests from the same canon.

For contemporary historians involved with the medieval times, the most interesting point in the Welsh Marches was the question of the people’s identity. Who did they see themselves as; toward who or what did they feel the strongest loyalty, to their own community, their lord, their priest, or the crown? Naturally historians were not able to come to uniform conclusions, although they had in their possession the incredible (and very rich for the Middle Ages) material: dozens of writings of the cleric Giraldus Cambrensis, who lived between the second half of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century. Giraldus came from the Marches’s baron family, and his ancestors were French, Norman and Welsh; he studied in Paris, then lived in England for a long time, including the time at the end of his life after his Welsh church career became a failure. Giraldus wrote a few autobiographical texts which allow us to reconstruct his own opinion of which part of the society he belonged to. Without diving deep into details, we can easily say that this is a person with a multi-layered identity, in which certain elements activate or even mobilize depending on the moment. Sometimes Giraldus was a typical Anglo-Norman, other times a servant of the universal church authority, and yet other times he was also Welsh, especially in the eyes of the people surrounding the English king.

It can be assumed that such a multi-layered, stratified, twinkling identity was characteristic for the majority of the ruling classes in the medieval Marks. Gradually it also spread to the lower classes, because toward the end of the Middle Ages the regions where the population was so mixed, one could not distinguish the newcomers from the locals. Nonetheless by that point even the structure of the Mark as a type of territorial and administrative system was washed out as well. The borders had long shifted around, and the need for the existence of such boundary zones was gone too. As a result of this, there was only a stamped memory in toponymy and heraldry left in the recent times, together with jokes about Cheshire, which even though turned into the usual squalid hole, was still called “palatine”, and to this day its title is given to the Prince of Wales, the heir to the British throne (5).

All the history notwithstanding, we were driving through Finnmark, which was founded by the Norwegian crown in 1576 as “Vardøhus len”. During the next few hundred years it changed its administrative borders a few times, and in 1919 it received its current name. Finnmark borders Russia on the east side, Finland on the southeast, and runs far along the Barents sea. Sliding down the slope of the Scandinavian peninsula to the southwest is the Norwegian Troms county. The eastern part of Finnmark (and Kirkenes is considered farther east than St Petersburg and Istanbul) was at some point considered “nobody’s land”, and the border was only introduced after the Constitution of Norway in 1814; let me remind you that this was the time the Danish kingdom lost Norway and Norway was united with Sweden. In my opinion, the need to finally draw the borders in these almost completely empty regions was the result of the Napoleonic Wars, as Russia ended the Wars and in the meantime gained the previously Swedish Finland, and in turn Sweden gained the previously Danish Norway. Therefore, the new border between Sweden and Russia was established.

Industry, together with modernity, started appearing here only at the end of the 19th century, as prior to that the Sami, the Kven, the Norwegians, the Finns and the Russians all engaged in their individual pursuits: some were fishing, some were herding cattle, and some were hunting. The only way to determine the boundaries of these ethnical groups (and therefore the groups ruled by different monarchs) was to travel through these lands and observe the moment when the Russian wooden churches get replaced by the protestant “kirchen”. During the period when this land became “somebody’s”, as in governmental property, it presented a world which had barely any “history”, and the newcomers from the “historical world”, such as the Russian orthodox hermits or the Norwegian (or Danish) administrators, existed entirely in isolation without mixing. Essentially “history” started happening in these parts only when they were officially named “Finnmark”.

It is strange that the government of the newly formed independent Norway decided to conform to something that didn’t happen in the far North of the country during the Middle Ages. The name clearly recalls the era of the original Marks, the situation of feudal boundaries with the hostile neighbors. In 1919 Finnmark’s neighbor was no longer the Russian Empire, but the newly independent Finland, which harbored no particular hostility to Norway (6). Fundamentally the Norwegian and the Finnish type of society was about the same. When you ask a person from Kirkenes why Finnmark was named this way almost one hundred years ago, you might get a reply that those in the south, in Oslo, have always considered the north a colony with backward semi-wild people, but as they have always had a higher opinion of the Finns, then that is how Finnmark got its name. This is partially true; even today, taking into account the growing role of the North and the obvious change in attitude from Oslo, something colonial is still present, albeit something very little. Here in the North, especially in Finnmark, a completely unique world has formed, which does not really depend on the exact placement of the border. It is a world of the original meaning of the word “Mark”, although completely different to the medieval Mark: it is modern. I was going to the Sami museum (7) exactly for that reason: to see how one of the new types of the old society works.

It transpired that in the place we were going to this particular mechanism didn’t work, but even this variation was very interesting to me, as it showed how other bigger and more powerful mechanisms connected with the Norwegian North worked or didn’t work. The historical and cultural museum of the Skolt Sami was supposed to be built at the end of the last millennium. However, a very murky story happened: two museum workers that greeted us led us around a very strange building, gave us tea, talked in detail about the architectural contest, the governmental demands, deadlines, contracts and so on. Still it was impossible to understand, who was right and who was wrong. The builders forgot about the local climate, about the electricity supply, about the fire hazards and about many other things. At the end of it all the roof was leaking. To eliminate the defects they need money, that of which there is never any to be had, especially after the 2008 economical crisis and semi-recession. Furthermore, the country’s government for the last few years was right-wing, and they do not particularly enjoy giving money for the “socially significant” actions which do not immediately produce pragmatic results. As the result of that, near the village Neiden in the forest there is a low drawn-out building covered in grey wooden planks, which looks like a country house of a medium Swiss bureaucrat. Two people sit in this loneliness among an enormous amount of paperwork and surrounded by black walls covered in future plans; they sit preparing not-yet-planned exhibitions in the not-yet-opened museum. It reminds me either of Kafka’s parable about the guard at the gates of the Law, or the novel by Dino Buzzati “The Tartar Steppe” (I am not going to make a banal analogy with the famous Beckett play).

This story could almost be considered comical and even partially dramatic, if it wasn’t for the fact that if we take away the political and economical malice of today, a very interesting picture opens up. The Sami belong to the “indigenous” ethnical group. It is assumed that they have been here (a wide term “here”: from the Kola peninsula to Lapland, parts of Sweden and today’s Norwegian region Troms) before the ancestors of the current “Norwegian Norwegians” (or “Scandinavian Norwegians”). In the romantic nationalistic and government-oriented consciousness of the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, (which was built, and partially still stands, on the division of nations into the “historical” and “non-historical”), the Sami were somewhat a part of Nature. Their History (meaning Culture) began afterward.

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However, here in the northeast of Norway the situation was even more interesting. First of all, Norway itself was part of another country, first Denmark, then Sweden, and not a very important province of Sweden either, as many considered it to be almost a colony. Furthermore within Norway (seeing as how the Constitution for autonomy was signed in 1814) the role of the far removed outback of a colony was played by its own North. The division between the colonizers and the colonized did not stop there – in the North there was a firm division between the Norwegians on the one hand, and the “indigenous people” in the form of the Finns, the Sami and the Kven on the other. There was another element: the Russian Pomors. They have been involved in trade here since before the era of Peter the Great, and this trade did not end even in the 19th century. Of course the Russians were outsiders, as they were ruled by another kingdom, they were Orthodox Christians, and they spoke another language, but they brought a significant contribution to the overall mechanism of the population’s consciousness in today’s Finnmark. However, the “agents of modernity” in the region were the Norwegians, who brought industry, modern-style town settlements and so on.

The Sami and the Kven people had no choice but to either ignore what was happening by continuing to live their own way, or to dissolve into the new life. Among the current local population of Kirkenes (meaning not the ones that came from the south of Norway) many, if not the majority, have Sami roots. However, only recently, about 40 or 50 years ago, this fact was recalled when there was a campaign to revive the culture and language of the Sami and other “indigenous people”. The written language was invented then and taught in schools (by choice), there were new special centers built to study and conserve the culture, and even a special Sami parliament was organized to represent the interests of this ethnic group (8). Finally, quite recently, almost 95% of land and property in Finnmark was given to the local indigenous people. The not-working museum that we visited is an important part of these policies.

It was a typical situation for late modernity to construct an “ancient people”. All the usual tricks of the trade were used, especially the ones that were supposed to separate the Sami from the other Norwegians, to dig out the Sami from the deeper layers of the modern day Norwegian’s consciousness, and that was only one side of the situation. The other presented the practice of preserving the “original people” in their “pre-historical existence”, that is why in the museum and in other places I was told mainly of the traditional crafts and occupations which need to be re-established and expanded. In some ways, it is the same colonial and nationally oriented consciousness (or simply “national” and “ethnically oriented” consciousness), which makes the Other People archaic by depriving Them from “real history”, plunges Them into eternal “antiquity” and invisibly denies Them modernity and the possibility to just be civilians, city-dwellers, inhabitants of the region and so on. This policy subtly imposes an ethnical identity, even if it comes from the purest intentions. It is curious to note that this policy comes from people who themselves are terrified of national and ethnical identifications, even though they are the ones defining and saving.

Although I hold the utmost respect for the practical use of these projects in the sphere of research and museum reconstructions, they produce a certain duality. These projects are ethnically perfect and politically reasonable, but they mask an obvious misunderstanding of the world which we live in, or in the case of Finnmark, the world in which this region thrives. Ethnical and national identity can be ultramodern and pragmatic, and not be reduced to ancient ornaments on shirts and forgotten rituals. Since we talked about Wales, the language of the “indigenous” population managed to escape the inevitable archaism; today it is not only the language of Dafydd ap Gwilym (9) and “The Chronicle of the Princes” (10), but also the language of the local BBC channel, businesses, the administration and the youth. More people speak Welsh in Wales than the number of people who speak Irish in the neighboring independent Ireland. And why? Because people were forced to learn Irish, and the language was deliberately made archaic by turning it into a linguistic zoo for the locals who like to drink a pint of Guinness in the company of a good-old choir performance. I have to say, a lot of Kirkenes inhabitants with Sami roots whom I met do not think too highly of the focus on saving the ethnical elements. They agree that something needs to be done, but they themselves don’t show any enthusiasm. They are modern people who live in Finnmark; they sparkle with their identity, but it is different to the identity on the Welsh border in the 13th century.

On the way back to Kirkenes we stopped to stare at the two borders passing through the area. The Russian border had a typical arrangement: checkpoint, passport control, customs, even a small duty free shop on the five meters of no-man’s-land. Russia was just on the other side of the river, but it was no different than Norway, the same emptiness, forests, mountains, lakes and rivers and fjords persevered. There was not a single soul around, and in reality this is nobody’s land that for some reason got cut up into pieces. The Finnish border was almost impossible to notice, except that the car jolted slightly by a sign stating we were entering Lapland. We did not go far, Andreas, who has been living in Kirkenes for almost half a year, decided to take advantage of our museum expedition to go shopping in the nearby roadside shop. In Norway everything is expensive, in Finland just slightly less so. I had only two days left in Kirkenes, so I wandered around the shelves aimlessly and discovered that in the Finnish shop they sold a much bigger variety of British ales than the entire Scandinavian beer products put together. At the bottom of the shelf a lonely bottle of Brazilian beer dwelt, famously loved in London by Jamaicans.

In general, it became possible for me to draw some conclusions, even semi-theoretical ones. Finnmark has the word “Finnish” in the name, but in fact it is purely “Kirkenes”. Different social, economic, cultural patterns coexist in this city that are typical for modernity (11). Here they have industry, they have the harbor and the port serving mostly Russian ships. There is an open quarry near the town, where iron ore is mined (and the waste product gets taken to Yamal). There is the post-industrial “service industry”, such as hotels, “snow safaris”, tours for lazy onlookers who want to witness king crab fishing, the famous “snow hotel” which really does get built every winter from snow (12). Kirkenes has a good school, a large hospital that has patients from all over the Sør-Varanger community. Naturally the locals catch fish and crab, although the large fishing companies nearly killed the small fishing trade in the last few decades. And lastly of course, there is contemporary art which get attended to by «Pikene pÃ¥ Broen ».

Let us proceed from the economical systems to the layers of possible self-identification of local residents. The first layer is clear, it is national-governmental. The majority of the locals are Norwegian citizens, and as I mentioned before, there are a lot of Russians as well. Plus there are the invited “foreign experts”: “Pikene pÃ¥ Broen” has two Germans (13) , its previous art director was Russian. On the streets you can run into people from Africa and South-East Asia. The owner of the Kirkenes mining company is Australian. Now let us focus deeper on Norway itself. There are many immigrants in Kirkenes from the south of the country, from Oslo. Previously they were bureaucrats and businessmen who worked here as “representatives of the metropolis”. Now the situation has changed dramatically. Northern Norway is a place with a great economic future, let us recall the oil and gas projects on the ice shelf and plans for the international use of the Northern Sea Route for transportation of goods between Southeast Asia and Europe. In contrast to the metropolis and the southern parts of the country, the north now has jobs. Two project managers of “Pikene pÃ¥ Broen” are from Oslo, where both had finished university, one of them even studied in the famous Goldsmiths art college in London. All of these people are here in Kirkenes, and they view themselves as inhabitants of this city. In other organizations, especially those associated with the “creative field”, the same thing happens.

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Let us add two more layers to this. The first one we already discussed, that is the ethnical layer: it is no longer embarrassing to have Sami roots. As Kjell Olsen wrote in an invaluable study of the ethnic policy of the Norwegian authorities in the North, the Sami identity is a completely modern phenomenon (14), regardless of the attempts to make the people and their culture archaic. If previously an old Sami would only start to talk a little in his own language having drunk a considerable amount of alcohol and left the family table for the comfortable armchair in the corner, then now “to be Sami” is one of the identities which appears (or rather mobilizes) at certain particular circumstances. This does not mean that it is a constantly active phase; it twinkles just like the other identities. Only due to this aspect is the current “Kirkenes Mark” similar to the Welsh Marches.

The second layer is a regional one. The region is not “just the North”, it encompasses also the Barents region, including the huge territory from Komi to Troms. Just the idea of such a region can be viewed as artificial and far-fetched: as if they took all the territories that border the Barents sea and combined them into a unity from different counties and ways of living. In some ways that is true, and the confirmation for this is the name of the recently launched online project by the special organization “Barents Sekretariat” dedicated to this region (15). News, analytical articles, statistics and forecasts are trying to envelop the Barents region as one entity, but if we look at the name of the actual project, the real stance of its editors becomes clear. “Patchwork Barents” – “quilt blanket Barents”, and quilt consists of random elements. In the the sewing of such a blanket it is important to use only that which is at hand, and the overall framework limits the number and the size of the random elements. In a sense this mentality can be applied to the Barents region.

At the same time the Barents region is not just an outer frame in the form of a coast of a very important sea. As strange as that sounds in a conversation about modern life that is almost completely devoid of sentimentality for the distant past (except flashy sentimentality, of course), I would like to point out two historical circumstances. Firstly, this is the region that was united by trade for a long time, and the Pomors played one of the main roles in it. Thus, the “Russian element” should not be written off completely, even with the understanding of how different the fabric of life and way of thinking is between, for example, Arkhangelsk and Kirkenes. Secondly, this is a region of colonization that stemmed from different centers of power and influence, but was populated by one and the same fundamental indigenous people. Therefore the story about the “Sami Revival”, which was discussed earlier, is not an exotic example.

The modern European public opinion considers freedom and the richness of choice of each individual to be the the main values. The very idea of being “European” stands on this aspect. It is possible to argue with these values, as those east of Brest-Litovsk are awkwardly trying to do now, but in the current world it is impossible to oppose them with more attractive ideas. It is especially important to have the choice of identity: gender identity, social identity and national identity. In this light the “Kirkenes Mark” is undoubtedly the embodiment of the main European values. It is interesting that this “standard” or “golden meter” of European-ness is located on the edge of the world where people catch fish, drill the ice shelf and move cargo ships on the northern seas. Once again we are given the confidence that modernity, which spawned this type of economy and way of life, has not ended yet. We live in it here and now.

Footnotes.

1. “Girls on the Bridge”, named after the famous Edvard Munch painting.
2. The capital of the Troms county.
3. Let it be noted that Wales was not one kingdom, it was a collection of territories controlled by a few dozens of dynasties.
4. In accordance with the continental margraves.
5. Among the interpretations of the secretive smile of the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, there is this one: “Everyone knows the phrase ‘To grin like the Cheshire Cat’, which means to have a cynical smile. There were many attempts to explain its origin. One of them is that in Cheshire they made cheese that resembled the head of a grinning cat. Another is that Cheshire was a palatine county, and its high ranking name was ridiculed even by the local cats.” (J.L. Borges “Book of Imaginary Beings”).
6. Today’s small part of the Russian border doesn’t count, because in the year 1919 Norwegians had no understanding of what was going on and what would be after all established on the other side.
7. Ostsamisk museum.
8. In reality throughout this ethnic group, as I understood from specialized literature, the Sami are divided into many parts such as the almost extinct coastal, the continental, the eastern, and so on.
9. Welsh poet of the 14th century.
10. Medieval Welsh chronicles “Brut y Tywysogyon”.
11. The author specifically does not use the term “postmodernity”, as he believes that “modernity” is still happening now. Even the discussions about “postmodernity” are an integral part of late modernity.
12. For some reason it is especially enjoyed by Malaysian tourists, as they come to stay here for a few nights, not just one. The inside of the snow hotel is very cold, as the materials really are snow and ice.
13. And our travel companion, the Serbian Jasmina, creates and implements the municipal politics in the sphere of contemporary culture in Tromsø.
14. Olsen K. Identities, Ethnicities and Borderzones. Stramsund: Orkana Akademisk, 2010. P. 21–22.
15. http://patchworkbarents.org.
16. I don’t want to upset anyone as I understand there is a huge difference between different groups of the Sami, as well as the difference between the Kven and the Sami. I am talking about something slightly different: in the eyes of the newcomers, all these people were “locals” with whom they had to build relationships. The traditional crafts of these locals were similar, which confirms the modern attempts of trying to conserve this type of living.
17. Although if we remind ourselves of the scale of goodwill of the central Norwegian government, then this example is truly special. It seems that no other group of “ethnic” people ever got 95% of their land returned to them.

kirillkobrin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirill Kobrin writes fiction and nonfiction prose, co-edits Moscow magazine of culture and politics Neprikosnovenniy Zapas (‘Emergency Rations’), and researches the cultural history of Russia, Great Britain and the Czech Republic. He is the author of 14 books and his texts have been translated into several European languages. He lives in London.

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