Gintautas Zabiela and the Department of Balts archaeology at the State archaeological museum in Warsaw

ENThe connections between Gintautas Zabiela and the Department of Balts Archaeology at the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw have a long history of friendship and scientific collaboration. I first met Gintas in July 1989, when a group of young Lithuanian archaeology PhDs from the Institute of History of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius visited Poland. They were the late Dr Vytautas Kazakevičius (at that time head of the Department of Archaeology at the Institute of History), Dr Gintautas Zabiela, and Dr Valdemaras Šimėnas, accompanied by six students of archaeology from Vilnius University. They had been invited to Poland by the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, and the local authorities in Puńsk, in northeast Poland, where the Lithuanian minority in Poland is concentrated. The group of guests from Lithuania came to the Polish-Lithuanian border by car, and then crossed the border on foot at Ogrodniki, which at that time was the only functioning border crossing between Poland and Lithuania. [Extract, p. 22]