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Photo: Gints Ivushkans
22:51 on November 22, 2023
Author: Guna Roze, “Kultūrzīme”, AS “Latvijas Mediji”
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Latvia’s event of the year in culture is hard to beat – Tukums won the title of Literary City of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.
This news reached us right on the first day of Patriot Month. A few days later at the Sheffield library, where I was invited because my novel “101. kilometer” has become the object of international research, I began my address with the words: “Greetings from beautiful Latvia, from my beautiful small town Tukum, and that means greetings from the UNESCO City of Literature. This is our first international literary event after winning the title.” The second one soon followed – in the UNESCO City of Literature in Milan, within the framework of the annual book festival “Bookcity Milano”, in the international competition of various arts “Otto Millioni”, Tukuma literati Ingrīda Zaķe won the 1st place in the fiction section for her miniature “Diablo vēji”.
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Currently, there are 51 cities of literature in the world, including Prague, Baghdad, Melbourne, Seattle, Odessa, Lviv, Vilnius, Tartu, Barcelona, Manchester, Reykjavík, Dublin, Edinburgh, Lillehammer, Bremen, Rio de Janeiro and… Tukums. It is especially significant that Latvia entered this network directly with literature, because it is undeniably the most personal art of each nation. A nation is nothing without its culture, but there is no nation without a language.
However, the news that “Tukums is included in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a City of Literature” seems to have momentarily stunned the public. Put on pause. Someone was even irritated. A handful of Latvian literati (it is inconvenient to publish the surnames of such famous poets) yelling and screaming on Facebook was pitifully small: “Tukums? Nothing is happening there!” It reminded me of the tale of Puškaiš, a farmer from Tukum, about Kurbad, the son of a mare, where after every seemingly impossible victory of Kurbad, from all corners of the walls, muskets pour into the field and “beat very restlessly: ‘When you would squirm!'” But we will not squirm at all!
And in contrast to individual moškis, there is an incomparably larger group of Latvian literati who are happy from the bottom of their hearts for the success of Tukums, and therefore of the whole of Latvia. Likewise, the country’s leading literary critics, cultural journalists, literary managers, publishing organizations and VKKF experts are not surprised by such a result. There is life on Mars, even if no one knows about it.
How Tukums moved towards this goal for six years is worth a separate story. The path was both easy and difficult. Difficult because this is not a project that can be written in the last week. It’s difficult, because we still didn’t know in April which of the two Latvian cities would claim this title, because each country can only delegate one. Difficult, because we didn’t have spikers – we haven’t looked at Sigulda’s 2021 application, nor at the application of the nearest City of Literature – Vilnius. We – the “Tukuma Literati Association” and the municipality – wrote our application for the competition intuitively, listening to the recommendations of the UNESCO National Commission.
The path was easy because it was not an artificial decision: “Hey! What if Tukums tried to get the title of City of Literature? Let’s start building literature?!” In Tukuma, the art of words has been as natural as music in Liepāja for 400 years. We didn’t make any new moves to please UNESCO’s demands, and we didn’t spend a cent to move the city towards that goal. Tukums did not hire project developers – everything was done by love, strengthened by faith and the belief that Tukums is already a world-class city of literature.
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Tukum’s prospects were also seen by his Vilnius colleagues when we went on an exchange of experience this winter (oh, yes, this business trip will have been Tukum’s only expenses on the way to UNESCO). “The city’s purse strings and self-promotion play no part in this contest,” they said. In the voluminous application form, we indicated only a fraction of everything that has already been done. We deliberately did not “paint our lips and smell” during the four evaluation months; none of the websites presented to the jury showed any sudden activity. On the contrary, we continued without fanfare to do what we have been doing for hundreds of years. And UNESCO has appreciated it – they do not doubt that “there is life on Mars”.
Tukums is a UNESCO City of Literature! Yes, we are very proud of this achievement, but we are not and will not be proud. As before.
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2023-11-22 21:04:18
#Guna #Roze #life #Mars
