Return Ostrava Arrivals
  Radovan Lipus

There are cities defined by the sea. The port. The ships that sail into the city, the aroma of spices and exotic wood. The cries of stevedores and seagulls. There are cities defined by the ebb and flow of the tide. Seashells left behind on a sandy beach, the pungent smell of dark seaweed drying in the flickering sunset like the last remains of the day.
There are cities defined by emperors and kings. Proudly built to a grand design, strictly dominated by the royal castle, the palace or the bishop’s cathedral. Cities of silent Gothic gargoyles, faded green Baroque cupolas and fountains that bubble and surprise you. Cities of shaded gardens. Finely inscribed manuscripts with yellowing pages in Renaissance libraries, globes still incomplete, missing parts of continents or entire archipelagos.
There are cities defined by warlords, generals and strategists. At a tight bend in a fast-flowing river, a fortress towers up on a jutting spur, hunched up to its neck in the rocks. It squints at its surroundings through arrow-slit eyes, with jet-black cannon barrels for pupils. The people here are barrack-dwellers, and the regular chessboard grid of streets retreats only to make room for a squat church tower – not designed for praising God, but as a look-out for the approaching foe. Elsewhere, the flat terrain is sliced through by systems of defensive trenches and canals. Viewed from the air, the constellations of bastions and ravelins are clear to see. Cities laid out with clarity. The unit of distance here is the range of gunfire.
There are cities defined by river-fords. Merchant routes. Crossroads. A simple, straight imperial road. A central market. Bulky merchants’ houses with cavernous public halls arched over by diamond vaults. Cities of warehouses – salt, grain, cloth. Cities of cellars, stacked with oak barrels – Spanish wines, the colour of darkened, drying blood.
There are cities defined by what lies beneath them. Silver mines. Copper and gold. Diamonds. Coal.
These cities are defined by arrivals. Arrivals of people. Although far inland, they are created by waves. Waves of arrivals. The tide of arrivals, washing thousands of destinies up from the depths of the petrified Tertiary sea, up onto the black coal beaches. Thousands of destinies – countless crustaceans, cephalopods, stingrays, lost hermit crabs, bewildered anemones, transparent jellyfish, huge predatory creatures of the deep, solitary giant whales. Cities of quivering bared muscle. At the very moment of their birth, and yet just a moment away from extinction. Cities that were never established with official ceremony, and so are never declared defunct. Texture. Structure. Tissue. A city made of this tissue is Ostrava. Not dynastic. Not patrician. Not a seat of official power. Aristocratically plebeian, with no blushes. Direct, with no formalities. Created by layers and sediments of individuals and families, coming here from Galicia, Slovakia, Greece, Austria, Vietnam, Korea, Germany, Poland. Coming for bread. For existence. For survival. For dizziness. For wealth dreamed of. For illusions shattered.
Ostrava’s urban fabric is un-European, more reminiscent of America in its agglomeration, melted and alloyed together from a motley assemblage of villages, farms, factories, mineshafts, housing estates and towns. Its soul, too, is an alloy – of diverse ores and rocks, fused together in the burning heat of history’s incandescent fire. With courage, strength, determination and wantonness, this topsy-turvy piece of the world, bent and crooked, has been wired together with pylons, pipes, railways, strips of forest, fields, overpasses and four-lane highways – wired together and christened The City of Ostrava. Its people, too, have been wired together – people with wildly different and extraordinary destinies, often incompatible and competing against each other, yet bound together by their individual fates and the buffeting storms of history and politics, the ebb and flow of time. In Poruba, the grand Stalinist city of the 1950s, identical apartments one above the other can be home to a proud ex-miner – still a fervent communist and comrade, a former RAF pilot – only recently rehabilitated by the courts, a grey-haired Greek emigrant, a Vietnamese market trader, and a respected heart surgeon who was posted here from Prague many years ago. They meet on the same staircase, they ride in the same elevator. From their windows they see the same trees, the same car parks. The same sun rises and sets above them.
Ostrava is a city created by arrivals. Tides. Flows. Torrents. Floods of arrivals and flurries of departures. A city not defined and anchored by cathedral spires or crenellated battlements, nor by networks of elegant boulevards. Its terrain is staked out by factory chimneys, pit-head towers, water works and gasometers. Its coordinates are the people who came here from somewhere else. Here and now. There and then.
Ostrava’s arrivals are clusters of stories – some now cooled, some still hot from the fire of destiny, a slag-crust of stories layered up on a high, still-smoking waste-heap. On the sacred mountain of Ema, from whose peak sulphurous smoke constantly rises to the heavens, like a question directed at God, like a report on the flammable victims of our lives. In Ostrava, in Central Europe, in a city on the ancient amber route, with coal under our feet and the flames of the coking-plant above our heads. In Ostrava – a city created by arrivals.