Dr Liliana Janik

Throughout my life, I have taken unexpected risks, seized opportunities, and benefitted from the generosity of others. I first arrived in the UK from Poland in the mid 1980s, accompanied by my best friend. 

I started to learn English in my nursery followed by private lessons for me and my two cousins. When I once asked my grandmother why the family decided that it was good for us to do it, the answer was that one day we would realise it was useful. I went to primary school near my grandmother's home since my parents travelled a lot. I spent much of time there. The Primary School no. 30 was attended by the most financially privileged children whose fathers worked in the merchant navy, hence they had access to stipends in US dollars when they went onshore anywhere in the world. Those children had western clothing and access to exotic foods like bananas and oranges, delicacies we only usually saw at Christmas and Easter. What I remember the most are the framed cases of tropical butterflies hanging on the walls, the signifiers of wealth and prosperity that could only be obtained by traveling abroad. The other set of children's parents were working e.g., in the shipyards and on fishing trawlers, I belonged to this group. Thinking about this now, the teachers were most accommodating when my mother had consulted them about my inability to read. The teacher told her to start worrying only if I did not start reading by the time I was 13. I developed strategies to hide my shortcomings: after my grandmother had read any text to me twice, I could memorise anything up to a page in length, and so without actually reading a word, it appeared that I could read all the necessary passages faultlessly. 

Gdynia, the town I grew up in is, along with Gdańsk, one of the places where the workers went on the streets in 1970: some of them never come back home alive. We were locked down at school and only allowed out with an adult. I was picked up by the father of my best friend from the yard where we were not allowed to play during martial law. I remember the convoy of tanks moving toward the shipyard and the eerie silence I experienced for the first time.

My secondary school III Liceum Ogólnokształcące was something completely different. It is still one of the best secondary schools in the country, where many of the pupils are taught in English, while others have six hours a week to work on perfecting their language skills. I was in the second category. The school caters for children of parents working for the foreign trade missions located in our port city, and children of people high up in the administration. However, to keep academic standards high, clever children also constituted a large part of the pupils’ cohort. My shortcomings rapidly become apparent: I was thrown out by one of the teachers who decided that my Polish spelling and grammar were disgraceful - fortunately, a place was found for me in a less ‘demanding’ class.  

My language-learning troubles did not leave me when I entered Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. It was the time of Solidarity, and though for the two first years learning a foreign language was compulsory, I did not need to take Russian. Since the exams were based on verbal examinations I had no problem with one exception: my nightmare was Latin. I have to admit I struggled a lot with that.
  
During the five years of university study, since we could all more or less communicate in English, we all were thinking of going to England to see how the world looked on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But only my friend and I actually took up this challenge. Looking back on my own University days brings a sense of responsibility for the students for whom I am now Tutor. I remember the lecturers standing in the entrances to each student accommodation building trying to protect the students against the threat from the police. We went on strike and demonstrated against the government: we were all pro-Solidarity. The reality was brutal. Toruń is an old medieval city with most streets leading to the main square. One evening the streets were closed, the police moved in and starting beating and arresting us. We entered the University church considering it as a sanctuary, thinking that the police did not dare to enter it. Indeed they did not, but as a response to the ongoing worry about what might happen, and to prevent the unthinkable, we left the church. Our male colleagues were arrested and imprisoned. Martial law was proclaimed, the eerie silence returned: the same quietness I experienced again in Girton during the Covid lockdown. Memories started to flashback, and I found myself thinking about the most difficult part of those times, my mother’s disappearance. She was high up in Solidarity, responsible for all Polish natural resources, including from the forest, coal and water. She disappeared so as not to be arrested. We never talked about it. Fortunately for me, my university had no so-called big names. I recall not being particularly impressed by those who were – which encouraged me to see what the other archaeologists were doing and thinking in the West.

My chosen subject in Cambridge was the origins of agriculture in what were still, in those days, the Baltic Republic States of the Soviet Union. It was not an easy time to carry out field research in this region: perestroika started, the Baltic Republics became three independent Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and the Soviet Union turned into the Russian Federation. It was a time of shortages and ethnic tensions, but most importantly for me, it was a time when I was able to build wonderful friendships that have lasted to this day. I also got to experience my first ‘White Nights’, those northern summer evenings when the sun never leaves the sky (curiously, I found myself longing for these while locked down at Girton during the pandemic).

My fieldwork in St Petersburg, studying pottery and other materials excavated from the Pskov region, gave me privileged access to the Hermitage: I was free to explore its galleries of classical sculpture and masterpieces of Western art, as well as the attic storerooms in the Little Hermitage, which had once been the quarters of the Tsar’s servants. Library research took place in the palace of the last Tsar’s grandfather, a few blocks away from the Hermitage itself. Why, you may ask, was I conducting research in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) when my real focus was the archaeology of the Baltic coast? Because all the books I needed, even if they were about Lithuania, were in Leningrad, rather than Vilnius or the other Baltic centres. I did, however, get to spend time in Lithuania, during which I was greatly impressed by the archaeology, in particular by some very spectacular sculptures carved from amber. At the same time, however, I was very aware of the history of colonialism in the Baltic and the uneasy history between Poles and Lithuanians. Poles consider the union with the Duchy of Lithuania in the late 14th and early 15th-century a good political decision, while Lithuanians consider it as disastrous, leading to the loss of independence. While one can understand both sides, I found myself subject to small tensions between the two ethnic groups. I also came to realise how deeply my education was influenced by the Soviet Union’s colonial influences on ethic minorities and satellite countries. 

When I finished my PhD, my first job was as manager of the Pitt-Rivers Laboratory for Archaeological Science in the newly opened McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. I still work in the Department of Archaeology, though I left the Pitt-Rivers Lab some time ago and have since focused my research on the archaeology of art and heritage studies. It is a long time since I became a Fellow of Girton, where I found a home and a whole new dimension to my Cambridge existence, as a Postgraduate Tutor and Director of Studies. In 2019 I became the Deputy Director of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. My background as someone who has been subjected to colonial treatment by a neighbouring country has given me the impetus to initiate new projects on the need to decolonise not only the past but also the present. 

My research in Russian Karelia stopped with the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. I am now focusing on Japan working on prehistoric art and heritage.