Fabela-Rozo productions for theatre
History breathes here, as evidenced by the finds from the 14th century. The Battle of the Scheldt of 1944 is still painfully visible on the exterior facade and in the ceilings of this house.
At this Theatre Workshop of Fabela-Rozo there is also a passenger bench full of stories from the salon boat “SS Oihonna” (1898) from Finland. After that time, the ship sailed the Baltic Sea to Spitsbergen.
In 1906, however, it ran aground with Lenin and Stalin and their entourage on board, on their way to a conference in Stockholm. “Circus Vellamo” with horses and clowns are also on board. Drink and violence see the light of day, but everyone is saved.
Wind smothers the snarling of the great ships,
And the serene gulls are stronger than turbines;
Mile upon mile the hiss of a stumbling wave breaks unbroken—
Yet stronger is the power of your lips for my lips.
This cool green liquid death shall toss us living
Higher than high heaven and deeper than sighs—
But O the abrupt, stiff, sloping, resistless foam
Shall not forbid our taking and our giving!
Life wrenched from its roots-What wretchedness!
What waving of lost tentacles like blind sea-things!
Even the still ooze beneath is quick and profound—
I am less and more than I was, you are more and less.
I cried upon God last night, and God was not where I cried;
He was slipping and balancing on the thoughtless shifting planes of sea.
Careless and cruel, he will unchain the appalling sea-gray engines—
But the speech of your body to my body will not be denied!
John Reed
John Reed (1887) also visits the same Conference: American journalist, poet, communist, (and “playboy”) who, with his book “Ten days that Shock the World”, is an admirer of the ideas of the Russian Revolution.
Jozef Stalin
Vladimir Lenin
Much later, to avoid arrest, he hides on the Oihonna in 1919. But he is betrayed and is sentenced to prison in Finland. He dies weakened in 1920 and is buried (as an American…) in the Kremlin a stone’s throw from those he admired (filmed in 1981 in the film “Reds”) The “Oihonna” is eventually demolished in Antwerp in 1960. The bench eventually finds its way to Aardenburg.
But….who, oh who, experienced these stories on this passenger bench? Let your imagination run wild at: Fabela-Rozo,
Weststraat 21, 4527BR Aardenburg:
A place full of history and theatre!