Anna Volovik has been living in Kaliningrad for 14 years. Long enough to be considered native and short enough to keep discovering new places. For example, the slipways on the River Pregolya. The artist sees Kaliningrad as ‘unassuming, endearing and always amazing as soon as you turn off a familiar street.’
Anna Volovik is an illustrator and graphic artist from Kaliningrad. In 2016, her graphic novel What Colour is the Snow? won an award in the Best Graphic Novel category at the BigFest comic book festival. She also won the 2017 prize for Best Graphic Novel (Jakow) awarded by the publisher Boomfest.
Kaliningrad Oblast covers an area of 15,000 sq. km and is situated between the EU countries of Poland and Lithuania. Until 1945, Kaliningrad was called Königsberg and was the capital of East Prussia. It became a Soviet city after the war. In 1996, the Russian Federation granted its exclave on the Baltic Sea the status of a Special Economic Zone. The oblast is home to around one million people.
Many parts of the former Königsberg were devastated during the war and some buildings were destroyed in peacetime. The ruins of Königsberg Castle were blown in 1967, on orders from Brezhnev and the House of Soviets was built where the castle once stood. The high-rise with the two towers in the city centre is an unfinished building that is still empty today.
Svetlogorsk is a seaside resort situated about 35 km north-west of Kaliningrad. Known by the Germans as Rauschen, the coastal resort town is a popular tourist destination. Above all, visitors love the decorative wooden villas dating back to around 1900. The main attractions are the cliffs and the wide sandy beach. The beach can be reached by cable car.
Kaliningrad is amber country with 90% of the world’s reserves. And it has been this way for 40 million years. Once described by Ovid as the ‘tears of the gods’, the stone is therefore coveted. Many collectors are gripped by amber fever, particularly after storms. Mining and collecting for commercial purposes are however illegal, which is why amber smuggling flourished in the 1990s.
