Artūras Morozovas. Arteries, Capillaries, and the Wild-Hearted Believers

I began thinking about this piece while walking the dirt road to the nearest bus stop. When Donatas invited me to write on life in the regions, I was spending my days at a homestead in the Rokiškis district. I needed to get to Šiauliai, but my car was at the mechanic’s. The only way to get from point A to point B was this: walk to the town of Jūžintai, hop on a district bus, wait an hour in Rokiškis for a bus to Panevėžys, and from there take a train to Šiauliai.

At six in the morning I set out, walking nearly an hour down a drizzle-soaked dirt road. The daily Rokiškis–Vilnius bus that once passed here had been canceled a year ago. For many in the parish center and surrounding villages it had been the convenient link to Utena and Vilnius – and from there to other cities. If you left in the morning, you could return in the evening. The bus even stopped at Santariškės hospital, a lifeline for a dozen or so Jūžintai residents undergoing cancer treatment. The bus company justified canceling the route with familiar arguments: too few passengers, poor road conditions – especially in winter, when a ten-kilometer stretch turns to ice and cannot be graded. For locals, the question of paving the road has become a festering sore over the past decade. More than once, a paving project was announced, red-painted stakes appeared along the verges, prep work began – and each time, for one reason or another, hopes were always dashed before the end. Now, without an intercity bus, the road’s classification has changed, and few believe it will ever be paved. To get asphalt, the daily intercity service would have to be restored. But the bus company won’t risk its vehicles on potholes. It’s not worth it.

Approaching the stop, I fall in step with others coming from side roads – dressed neatly, headed to town. We nod, start chatting. The topics are exactly what you’d expect. In their voices I hear disappointment, a touch of anger, and quiet resignation.

I’m a local who comes and goes, so I tend to judge change by an aesthetic measure of the natural and social landscape around me: they closed the school? A pity – the building will just sit there, no kids playing on the field. They cut down the century-old ash avenue by the road? I’ll miss the rustle and the cooling shade. I remember a car pulling into the yard and a young woman inviting me to sign a petition to pave the gravel road. I hesitated: did I really want to give up the photogenic, archaic romance of stones underfoot?

For people who live here, these changes are not aesthetic. They are personal – about dignity and the quality of daily life. A cut tree is not just a visual change; it’s memories, a piece of everyday scenery, woven into local identity. No wonder every change feels like a wound. The worst is when decisions come from outside, made without listening.

Traveling around Lithuania, I see the same story again and again. The sorest points are always education, health care, and transportation. In other words: schools consolidated and shuttered, clinics and hospital stripped of services, public transport networks thinned to threads.

If we saw the country as a human body, then in recent decades we’ve focused on the arteries – the big cities and the roads connecting them. We’ve achieved enviable quality of life and services in major cities. Other large vessels are maintained too – new roads, logistics hubs, special economic zones. Through the veins flow freight and city-dwellers, reaching their weekend homesteads without complaint. But at a community meeting I once heard a man put it differently: the tiny blood vessels – the capillaries – are left to fend for themselves. Starved of blood, the nerves in the extremities go numb. What doesn’t hurt, we don’t care about.

Circulatory diseases are the leading cause of death in Lithuania.

I remember when the closure of the Salakas school began. In the local press it was a minor headline – a small school shutting in some unknown town, and I, too, shrugged. Later I saw the drama from within, at a meeting between municipal officials and the school community. It started by chance: while filling out a project application, teachers learned from staff that the school would soon close – that applying was pointless. Alarmed, the teachers appealed to the district authorities and were invited to a meeting.

The small assembly hall filled with teachers, parents, representatives of other Salakas organizations, and district officials.

“Today let us to talk not about this school’s future, but about the fate of the entire town and community,” headmaster Leonas Sadauskas began.

Bureaucrats spread spreadsheets across the tables; staff from the Education Department kept glancing down, looking for something in the numbers, jotting notes. Worried parents and soon-to-be-unemployed teachers asked questions. The vice-mayor was blunt: the school cost too much, there weren’t enough pupils, so there was no alternative. But there was: Salakas had 56 students, just four short of the minimum. Since Dūkštas school nearby was also being merged, its pupils could have filled the gap. Combined classes could have been subsidized – that would have cost about thirty thousand euros a year, enough to keep teachers and staff employed. Other solutions existed too: attracting new families, drawing in children from elsewhere. Salakas school was 116 years old; many of its teachers were alumni who had returned home after studies in Vilnius to teach community’s children. “These kids will represent our region,” teacher Dalia said. “How can we educate them by cutting corners?”

Still, the main classes were abolished. It wasn’t worth it. Several teachers lost their jobs. The librarian asked: “And what exactly will be better for the community thanks to the savings?” No one could answer. Officials reassured people that the school wouldn’t be closed entirely – the primary grades would remain.

But a few months later, just three days before September 1st, I got another call from Faustina, a mother of six whose family I’ve long photographed. On the phone she recounted what sounded like a novel: on a late summer walk to the lake, she met a teacher in tears. The teacher told her that the primary classes had been cut too, despite being approved before summer. Parents and children were thrown into chaos, ready for school in two days with nowhere to go. The eldership said it had orders from the ministry; the ministry said the municipality hadn’t done enough and had failed to inform the school earlier. Everyone was right, therefore no one was responsible. Parents and children had to scramble to find places elsewhere. Salakas is far from the district center, Zarasai. Now Salakas children travel over an hour by bus each day to their new school.

The consequences: several clubs shut down, a renovated activity center left half-empty, two families moved away, other cultural organizations – those directly linked to the school’s 56 children – withered or closed.

At one gathering about the school’s closure, a mother said almost in passing: today we should fear most the bureaucrats who do their jobs well. Every link does its part, but no one sees the whole. It wasn’t clear who ought to have initiated discussion and brought the community together to look for solutions.

I travel the regions constantly, photographing people. Every portrait brings a conversation. I see an extraordinarily beautiful country. I hear genuine, vibrant citizens who care. And I feel the tension of a changing way of life: people freeing themselves from a Soviet regime of imposed living (collective farms, drained homesteads and villages, growing small towns) and looking for new ways of living.

You feel it most on the periphery, which over the last three decades has been abandoned by young people seeking opportunities in the big city, leaving to study and never returning. Urban life offers polished paths to self-realization: events, galleries, media – everything that creates meaning and image. There should be an asterisk at the end of that sentence, because there are always conditions attached.

As professor Egidijus Aleksandravičius notes, the “Little Moscow” complex still lingers – the belief that if you’re not there, your life is worth nothing.

Brewer and local historian Simonas Gutautas would object to my word “periphery”: “Here the city has never been the center. Lithuanians saw the city as a constraint on their freedom. Only those unable to sustain themselves in the countryside, the landless without a farm, were drawn to cities.”

Small towns and larger villages are going through metamorphosis. We lack a far-sighted regional policy, or it’s ineffective – no clear vision of what to do with depopulating settlements, how to guarantee a dignified life and access to services for those who remain, how to attract qualified professionals and young families. That uncertainty hastens decline, because few will tie their future to a place shadowed by constant insecurity.

Each municipality tries their own solutions – offering financial incentives to attract high-skill workers, local action groups managing EU programs and teaching people how to use them. They try to lure in big-capital companies, hoping they will attract a new factory.

For now, nature itself is the strongest draw. Life in the countryside, cheap empty homesteads – these attract remote-working city people, often burned out. I could name at least five social-media influencers who have, in recent years, left the city for a lone farmstead, becoming ambassadors for their place.

Here we can’t do without Krzysztof Czyżewski’s term “wild-hearted believers”. He uses it for those who have found their place outside the metropolis, convinced that life there is not condemned to dull routine but full of opportunity.

Czyżewski himself needs no introduction. A Polish intellectual and writer, he left Warsaw for the distant town of Sejny, revived – with his own funds – the Miłosz family manor in Krasnogruda, and founded the influential Borderland Foundation there. In his “Little Center of the World,” he has been weaving the social fabric for a decade – gathering locals for cultural work, mentoring Sejny youth who now impress salons in New York. The most sought-after Polish and global intellectuals are regular guests in Krasnogruda.

For Czyżewski, a provincial is not someone who lives outside the big city, but someone whose place of residence fills them with an inferiority complex. Seeking to cure it, they look for their center somewhere else than where they live. The problem is they do not love the place they live in; they’re ashamed of it and push it into secrecy (even if they wear the face of a liberated citizen of the world). In Czyżewski’s view, the world that created the provincial – or that they agreed to live in – takes away the place where they live; they disown the place they live.

A little over a decade ago my friends Guoda and Šarūnas got off the train in the Švenčionėliai station. What drew them first were the 19th-century brick buildings along Lithuania’s first railway and the closeness of nature: right past the tracks runs the Žeimena, and the Labanoras Regional Park begins. At the time I had moved to Visaginas and often visited them. I saw how a spontaneous idea – guided by a strong sense of possibility – grew into that “Little Center of the World.” The growing Švenčionėliai “Forest Port” community is the clearest example of such positive change. Young people saw potential, moved their work there, and revived a small town: empty buildings inhabited again, institutions created, jobs and cultural spaces opened, an old sawmill reborn as a lively cultural venue. Most important, long-time residents were drawn into the effort.

You can find communities like this, large and small, scattered along the coast, in Anykščiai, Antazavė, Antalieptė, Salakas, Musteika, Krokšlys, and surely elsewhere. These wild-hearted believers change the fate of a place and infuse it with new energy. Traveling around Lithuania I also meet newcomers who simply chose to move – often young families. A few years ago, I reclaimed my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ homestead. It has become my anchor – the place I no longer wish to leave for the city.

After years of repairing a house that sat empty for a decade – where I once spent my summers until it was sold – friends began visiting. Now I see a growing community: my friends have bought three neighboring homesteads, and our presence has truly enlivened the place and bound us with living ties.

In his book Borderlands and Centers (Paribiai ir centrai), Ramūnas Čičelis rejects the comparison between life in the city and the region, arguing that it has no logical basis. Each person chooses where they’re better off.

“Perhaps the only healthy stance, free of complexes, is that of a thoughtful person who constantly weighs reality, not one who is closed off and fossilized. Only then does it become clear that someone who grows and tends trees in their yard is far stronger, healthier, and often deeper than those walking on concrete slabs. For a person of the ‘province,’ the place where they live is still the center – the point of reference from which they see the world. For the de-centered denizen of the megalopolis, what remains are chance, inner chaos, and great insecurity – the roots of our era’s disorders. Those who shout to small-town folk ‘hang in there!’ in fact have no ‘here’ of their own. Their big city is not a place or a center for them; it is just a space they can swap out at any moment, so being responsible for it seems old-fashioned. Only the person of a small town can still say they are ‘here,’ because physically, in thought and feeling, they are bound to their place – a place that obliges and gives meaning,” Čičelis reflects.