The Sami make history in Brussels

Earlier this year I went to Inari in the far north of Finland, home to the Sami parliament. While I was there I was lucky enough to meet several Sami people, including one of the parliament's Vice-Presidents, Tiina Sanila-Aikio (pictured below). I learned a lot about the Sami culture, including how the indigenous Sami people are seeking to preserve their language and traditions.

© European Union 2013

By a stroke of luck, the Sami parliament happened to come to my hometown of Brussels this week where they made history by holding a session in the European Parliament. As you can see from the photos, they came attired in their traditional dress as they sought to remind the EU of the importance of fighting to preserve minority languages and cultures.

©Anna Jenkinson

The invitation to Brussels came from the MEP Nils Torvalds who in welcoming his Sami colleagues said, "We don't need to go very far back in history to see that the Sami people didn't have many rights in Finland...You should continue your fight. You have to save the Sami languages for your children. Without the Sami languages, the Sami culture won't be there in 100 years. We hope it will be there as long as Finland or Europe."

© European Union 2013

Digital Words and Images

I took a peek at the World Digital Library, which was launched today, and found all sorts of curiosities.

As I’m currently studying the opera Carmen as part of a university course, I was interested to find an 1872 manuscript, handwritten by Bizet, of the ‘Havanaise’ from his opera Carmen as well as a short film dating from 1898-1899 by the Lumière brothers of a traditional bullfight in Seville, Spain.

I also stumbled upon a more amusing item: a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed by three girls identifying themselves as “Elvis Presley Lovers,” begging the president not to allow Elvis’s sideburns to be cut off after he was conscripted into the army in 1958!

The digital library is an initiative between the Library of Congress, Unesco and 32 partner institutions. It’s a web site containing digitised books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints, photographs and sound recordings from libraries and archives around the world. It’s free to browse, easy to search (by country, date, topic, type of item or institution) and you can share discoveries with others by any number of social networking tools (some of which I’d heard of, some I hadn’t).

You don’t get the same kick out of seeing digital versions of these cultural materials as you do from seeing the original. However, maybe you otherwise wouldn’t get to see the original at all – the site has items from national libraries ranging from Iraq, Brazil and China to Russia, Israel and Serbia -- or maybe this site may prompt a visit to one of the libraries or institutes.

One discovery I made for example was a beautiful illuminated page in Javanese script from a chronicle of a Javanese court in Yogyakarta. Since my travels to Java and other Indonesian islands, I do have a soft spot for Indonesian culture. And this particular item is at an institute in Leiden (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), which really isn’t that far at all from my current home town of Brussels.

Go and explore and see what you find at www.wdl.org!

Lisbon's colours by day and night

As we sat on the tram’s wooden benches, looking out at the colourful tiled façades lit up in the March sunshine, a young woman dressed in a cotton print dress and straw hat burst into poem. The carriage fell silent to listen. I could only recognise the odd word, but was fascinated by the sounds and rhythm of the Portuguese language.

The short descent down the steep, narrow street from Lisbon’s Barrio Alto to Praça dos Restauradores allowed time for just three poems to be recited by her and her friends, who sat on the window ledges at each end of the carriage. It was a lovely gesture to mark World Poetry Day (March 21).


This linguistic surprise was one of several highlights during my long weekend in the Portuguese capital. Another was the country’s fado music, which literally means “fate”. It took a while for us to find a fado club we were happy with, finally plumping for a small, basement one in the Alfama district. Most of the audience had clearly made an entire evening of it, dining, drinking and listening. We went in for a nightcap and an hour or so of the beautiful, doleful music.

Two old men played guitars – one a simple, rhythmic line on a Spanish guitar, the other a more intricate part on a 12-string guitarra. To this accompaniment, a voice sang its words of love, sorrow and yearning. A set of about 15 minutes by one singer was followed by a break of a similar length to allow time for chatter and drinks, and then another singer would take to the floor. The three performers stood in the middle of the room, with the low, vaulted brick ceiling above and the audience seated at tables all around.

The minor key, the melancholic voice, the traditional black dress and shawl of the female singer, together they created a sombre, dark mood, far removed from the bright colours of the daytime and yet just as much a part of the Portuguese culture.

St. Petersburg's wintry allure

I got back this week from my first trip to St. Petersburg and I certainly hope it won’t be my last one. What a city!

I just loved the facades of the buildings lining the city’s rivers and canals – blues, pinks, browns, greens and beiges. The coloured fronts, along with the white snow covering the ground, brightened up what otherwise could have been rather gloomy, grey January days.

It’s an easy city to explore on foot and so I made the most of that. And when it got too cold, there was always a cafe to hand for a pot of tea (I hadn’t realised what big tea-drinkers Russians are. I thought they generally just went for the harder stuff!) or a bowl of soup, a meat pie or a stuffed pancake. Of course, there was plenty of culture to enjoy too.

The Hermitage was amazing – I spent an entire day there and still barely touched the surface of what was to be seen. The Russian Museum was of a more manageable size and yet because there were so many new artists for me to discover, once again I felt that I didn’t really do it justice. That said, it more than piqued my interest to learn more about Russian art and I’ll be on the lookout for Russian exhibitions closer to home. I particularly liked the work of Natalya Goncharova (1881-1962), who painted both Winter (at the top of this blog post) and Four Envangelists (below).



On the musical front, I went to the Mariinskiy Theatre and saw Tchaikovsky’s Pikovaya Dama (Queen of Spades). I thought it was a brilliant production and the tenor playing the lead role of Herman, Vladimir Galuzin, was particularly impressive. Being in the Mariinskiy was a great experience in itself and then to be seeing a Russian opera set in St. Petersburg just topped it off perfectly.

An afternoon concert in the St. Petersburg Philharmonia was another highlight. The Philharmonia has an amazing history, with a seemingly endless list of famous 19th century musicians who performed here and great Russian composers who premiered their works here. The best-known example perhaps is Shostakovitch’s “Leningrad Symphony,” which was written during the Blockade of the city in World War II, and broadcast from the Philharmonia in August 1942.

Unfortunately there wasn’t any Russian music on while I was there. Instead I was treated to a programme of Mozart and Haydn, with a mesmerising performance of Haydn’s cello concerto in D major by Lithuania’s Vytautas Sondeckis.

I could say so much more about each of the above aspects of my trip and maybe I will in a future blog post. For now though, I think I’ll put on one of the CDs I bought and have another look at my photos!