Russia's Kaliningrad Digitizes Kant's Works

A woman walks on a street during snowfall in Moscow, Russia, 30 November 2023. EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV
A woman walks on a street during snowfall in Moscow, Russia, 30 November 2023. EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV
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Russia's Kaliningrad Digitizes Kant's Works

A woman walks on a street during snowfall in Moscow, Russia, 30 November 2023. EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV
A woman walks on a street during snowfall in Moscow, Russia, 30 November 2023. EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV

In a once-German corner of Russia, an ambitious project to digitize hundreds of rare and ancient books is under way.
"The principal mission of libraries is to preserve books," said Ruslan Aksyonkin, an expert at the culture and education center at Baltic University in the city of Kaliningrad.
"A huge project is currently under way in Russia aimed at scanning all pre-Revolution [of 1917] books."
In Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast and separated from the rest of Russia, around 450 books dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries, some more accessible than others, are to be digitized.
The centerpiece are the books that once belonged to German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, best known for his "Critique of Pure Reason" of 1781 - a ground-breaking but dense 800-page treatise on the relationship between knowledge and experience or perception.
Kant spent his entire life, from 1724 to 1804, in what was then the Prussian city of Koenigsberg, and the project is part of citywide celebrations of next year's 300th anniversary of his birth.
Little of the city Kant would have known is left today, much of the historic center having been flattened by British air raids in 1944, in World War Two, Reuters reported.
After Germany's surrender, the city was ceded to the Soviet Union and resettled with Soviet newcomers, while its German population were expelled.
Even so, modern-day Kaliningrad remains fond of its most famous German resident, despite the abstruseness of his ideas.
The city's university bears his name, and Kant's tomb and a small exhibition on the philosopher have pride of place in the restored German cathedral.
"There are very few authentic items linked to Kant," said Marina Yadova, deputy director at the cathedral's museum. "But we do have certain items, and they are Kant's works published during his lifetime."
Some of the books being digitized, unopened for centuries, contain dried leaves or handkerchiefs, as well as scribbles in the margins of their fragile pages.
"Ancient books can be particularly finicky. They're not always stable. Typically, they're very thick, often with more than 600 pages," said Aksyonkin.
"There are books that seem resistant to scanning."



UN Puts 4th Century Gaza Monastery on Endangered Site List

The Saint Hilarion complex dates back to the fourth century. Mahmud HAMS / AFP/File
The Saint Hilarion complex dates back to the fourth century. Mahmud HAMS / AFP/File
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UN Puts 4th Century Gaza Monastery on Endangered Site List

The Saint Hilarion complex dates back to the fourth century. Mahmud HAMS / AFP/File
The Saint Hilarion complex dates back to the fourth century. Mahmud HAMS / AFP/File

The Saint Hilarion complex, one of the oldest monasteries in the Middle East, has been put on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites in danger due to the war in Gaza, the body said Friday.
UNESCO said the site, which dates back to the fourth century, had been put on the endangered list at the demand of Palestinian authorities and cited the "imminent threats" it faced.
"It's the only recourse to protect the site from destruction in the current context," Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, told AFP, referring to the war sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel.
In December, the UNESCO Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict decided to grant "provisional enhanced protection" -- the highest level of immunity established by the 1954 Hague Convention -- to the site.
UNESCO had then said it was "already concerned about the state of conservation of sites, before October 7, due to the lack of adequate policies to protect heritage and culture" in Gaza.
The Hamas attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel's retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.