Photographer Edmundas Katinas, who worked for 35 years in one editorial office – the former Kauno tiesa, now Kauno diena – and is now a respectable senior citizen, hardly ever gives interviews. We don’t have a permanent exhibition of his works in the city, we can’t buy a solid photo album in the bookstores, so it’s nice that Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum lent us some photographs by E. Katinas for the issue, the publication of which coincides with the 35th anniversary of the Baltic Way.
Indeed, as we began to sift through the archives, we realized that it wasn’t worth limiting ourselves to the massive cloud of unity that hovered over the three Baltic states on August 23, 1989. You may have heard that many patriotic Kaunas residents didn’t manage to reach certain sections of the road – they got stuck in traffic jams… But E. Katinas made it.
He also managed to capture the return of the Liberty Statue, created by Juozas Zikaras during the interwar period, to the War Museum Garden in February of that same year. As well as the first rally organized by the Lithuanian Reform Movement (Sąjūdis) to save St. Gertrude’s Church, which took place in June 1988. It’s symbolic that the photographer, born during World War II, managed – carefully, with respectful distance, but always sensitively – to document our country’s path to freedom until March 11th. How many more fascinating, valuable, and unseen moments are in his archive? I hope we get to find out one day.
