BookTrail the locations in The Glass Wallĭucal vault at Jelgava in Latvia (C) Max EgremontĪn eighteenth-century General, the Duke of Croÿ, was taken prisoner during the war between Russia and Sweden and died in Tallinn in 1702 after a period of drunken decline. These seem to show a consoling hope that life and revenge can outlast terror: that souls survive conquest or suffering. It’s not surprising that the eastern Baltic has many ghost stories – of mysterious figures that flit along empty moonlit coasts, of pale faces seen at castle windows before a Baron’s death, of victims of gypsy curses or peasants’ visions of landlords in hell.
Names changed: the Prussian Danzig became the Polish Gdansk, Königsberg transformed into the Russian Kaliningrad, the Russian Reval into the Estonian Tallinn, the German Mitau into the Latvian Jelgava, the Russian Helsingfors into the Finnish Helsinki. But the turmoil began with the northern crusades in the thirteenth century, continuing through the seventeenth century occupation by Sweden and, from the start of the eighteenth century, imperial Russia. Germany and Russia, the two arbiters of modern Europe, fought across these lands, shaping their beauty and their nightmares.
Baltic shore (C) Max Egremont BookTrail the locations in The Glass Wall
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