Czesław Miłosz
The Borderland Foundation was founded to build a platform of cooperation and mutual enrichment among multicultural communities. We consider ourselves heirs of the humanistic traditions of tolerance, in accordance with which people of various creed, languages or skincolour deserve the same rights, respect and understanding.
The Foundation’s employees are highly qualified specialists in intercultural work carrying out innovatory artistic, literary, educational and research projects. In this way the Foundation combines local community initiative and cooperation with academic and cultural institutions from all over the world.
Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Prize winner in literature, was our mentor and an important link to the place where we established the Center "Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations": the small town Sejny and the Milosz's family manor house in Krasnogruda on the Polish-Lithuanian borderland. Our publishing house, as well as the two cultural magazines we publish, specializes in the literature and history of Central and Eastern Europe. Many writers, translators and researchers from different countries visit our Center specifically in order to explore the Documentary Center of Borderland Cultures, which possesses a rich collection of books, magazines, films, records, art prints, postcards, photographs, maps etc.
A popular adage about the Polish culture compares it to a pretzel — its tastiest parts are located on the outer crust, and not in its centre. And it is true that its most eminent representatives, writers such as Mickiewicz, Schultz, Gombrowicz or Miłosz came from the culture’s peripheries. This peculiar world, full of mysterious metaphysics and tensions engendered by its permanent existence on the point of junction with "the other" was nicknamed borderland, and the people representing it, famous for their penchant for languages, border–crossing and dialogue, were called Borderlanders. The 20th century turned out inimical to that world—it ravaged it with wars, cut across it with new borders, and Borderlanders themselves became exiles. What has survived is the culture myth, inspiring new generations of writers, dissidents and social workers.
Pogranicze (Borderland)—both the Foundation and the Centre—were established to relate to the multicultural heritage of the central European peripheries, to once again make them a field of spiritual exploration. For their headquarters was selected the small town of Sejny, located in north-eastern Poland, in proximity to the Lithuanian border but also close to the borders with Belarus and Russia. But it was not the proximity to state borders that determined the choice of location. Borderlands are an area where different frontiers—linguistic, ethnic and other—coexist within one community. Sejny is inhabited today by Poles and Lithuanians, but also a small number of Russian Old Believers. The town was built along the axis formed by the basilica and the synagogue, a miraculous war survivor. The Dominican friars, who were early administrators of the region, invited Jews here in the 17th century to help develop the town. A little distance from the centre stands the local Evangelical church, a vestige of the presence of the Protestants in the area once located not so far away from the Prussian border. In the town and its surroundings one can also find the traces of the presence of Ukrainians, Gypsies, Tartars, Karaims, members of the Orthodox Church and the followers of the prophet Illiya, not to mention the remnants of the first settlers of these lands—the Jacwingians.
The founders of Pogranicze arrived here following a literary trail. The Suwałki region is the only area of contemporary Poland to preserve an authentic Romantic landscape connected with the former Great Duchy of Lithuania. Here was situated the family home of Czesław Miłosz, the greatest 20th century writer of the Polish language. He was born in Szetejnie, now on the Lithuanian side of the border, but his family owned a manor in Krasnogruda, near Sejny, where he often visited and wrote. As a Nobel Prize winner he began returning here from his exile becoming one of the patrons and closest friends of Pogranicze.
The Centre Pogranicze is located in the restored buildings of the former Jewish quarter of the town—in the "White Synagogue" (today a venue for concerts, performances and conferences), the "Old Yeshiva" (housing a gallery and art workshops for music, pottery and painting) and borderland house (the building of the former secondary school, today a modern centre housing the museum of multiculturalism, publishing house and audio-visual room).
Visiting us from around the world, writers, translators, researchers and students are welcome to use the rich collections of the Documentation Centre for Borderland Cultures—a unique collection of books, films, records, old postcards and lithography depicting the cultures of central Europe, the Balkans, central Asia and Russia. The Foundation also administers the manor and the park of Krasnogruda where, at the moment, work continues on the creation of the International Centre for Dialogue. It is hard to quantify the most valuable features of the Borderlands—the beauty of its nature or the beauty of its cultures. The important thing is that it has become a place of revival and return, overcoming the memory of exile and neighbourly conflict—dazzling with its heritage and inspiring a spiritual quest.
Krzysztof Czyżewski