This Saturday, September 12, from early morning in the Varėna district, in the ethnographic village of Žiūrai, Aurelija and her team will stand at the start of the 24th Lithuanian Mushroom Picking Championship. “What a blessing that this year the forest did not spare mushrooms for the Mushroom Festival,” says the woman whose passionate hobby this year led her to the largest mushroom festival in the United States.
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Before the Mushroom Festival, A. Plūkė was interviewed by Laisvė Radzevičienė and shared with the media.
– Aurelija, you are interested in mushrooms and mushroom picking culture. Are we Lithuanians unique in this regard?
– I have talked a lot with people for whom mushroom picking culture is not as natural as it is for us. At least in my life, mushrooms and mushroom picking have been present since childhood. My mother taught me how to distinguish edible mushrooms. We used to go to the forest together, sometimes caught up in the excitement of who could find more porcini mushrooms, but I also remember how heavy the baskets were and how long the way home was… I remember my mother always saying: we are already heading home, and we kept walking, walking…
My grandmother lived in a village near Kernavė, and I spent a lot of time there in the summers; nature became our playground.
I started to take a stronger interest in mushrooms much later, delving deeper during the pandemic when regular work stopped, and I could spend more time in the forest photographing. Macro photography was like a new perspective on mushrooms; I saw how different mushrooms are, what interesting textures they have. Naturally, I began to look for more information about them.
– Was it easy to find?
– In Lithuanian, we only had a popular booklet “Mushrooms of Lithuania,” and some scientific monographs that are hard to read. Most of the information I found was in English. After reading, I started sharing on social networks. It turned out people were interested. Encouraged by my husband, I completed the basics of mycology at Vilnius University. The studies helped me a lot – I mastered specific terms and learned how to search for information. Eventually, the world of mushrooms captivated me so much that I decided to continue linking my life with them.
– The world of mushrooms is very vast, like all of nature…
– You can find them in almost any environment that seems unrelated to mushrooms. In construction, medicine, wellness, visual arts, music…
Many Lithuanians understand mushrooms quite narrowly – mushrooms are either edible or inedible. I remember when we started creating a TV show about mushrooms, people asked us – how many episodes will you make, what is there to talk about mushrooms? In fact, it is an incredibly broad topic that intertwines with the entire human world.
– Isn’t it a strange paradox – for Lithuanians, mushroom picking is a natural state, a very old tradition, but we look at mushrooms simply. The world seems to understand mushrooms more broadly, even though mushroom picking traditions have survived in few places?
– This year at the festival in America, we talked about this – in cultures where it is common to pick and eat mushrooms, everything focuses on gathering mushrooms for food. Of course, there are deeper things – connection with nature, the forest, the gatherers’ community, part of cultural identity, but simply put – a mushroom is either edible or not. The Mushroom Festival in Varėna is probably the only event dedicated to mushrooms where we pick mushrooms, prepare them, taste them, and socialize.
America is a mycophobic country. Americans do not know mushrooms, are afraid to pick them, afraid of poisoning. It may come from times when mushrooms were associated with witchcraft, magic, shamanism, pagan beliefs. Only recently have individual enthusiasts appeared in America who are interested in different aspects of the mushroom world. They gather together, want to share, tell others about mushrooms, and discover different fields.
– You recently returned from a mushroom festival in America. Is it similar to our Mushroom Festival?
– In August, I visited the Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado. It started 46 years ago with psychedelics: the festival initiators – scientists and mushroom enthusiasts – wanted to talk about mushrooms containing psychoactive substances, study them, and better understand their effects. A scientific perspective emerged, and today a large part of the festival is occupied by cultural programs, parades, music evenings, poetry readings, tasting dinners, educational activities, and nature hikes. Many people gather – mycologists, book authors, doctors, and others curious about mushrooms.
Mushrooms led me to that festival. Three years ago, an American Lithuanian named Daiva, who participated in one of my educational sessions in Vilnius Vingis Park, mentioned the festival to me. Of course, I knew about the festival, but it turned out that this woman has lived in the festival town for 28 years and is quite involved in its activities. It took three years to arrange for me to give a presentation and conduct two educational sessions at the festival. I told Americans about Lithuanian mushroom culture and the mushroom picking tradition of the Dzūkija forests.
– Did you try mushroom picking in Colorado?
– We stayed there for a month, and most of the time we were sorting and drying porcini mushrooms. It happened to be a good year for porcini; we had an impressive adventure picking mushrooms in the mountains. A completely different experience!
We had about three dryers, all three were constantly on. I have American porcini with reddish-brown caps, growing only in the mountains, for the whole winter.
– Walking through Lithuanian forests, can you imagine where certain mushrooms grow? Were you able to find mushroom spots in the mountains?
– In the mountains, you need to go where spruces grow; you won’t find porcini in aspen groves.
Sometimes on a slope, you can find even a small patch, gather it, pour it into the car, and pick again. Then you sit at home and wonder what to do with all of it? Dzūkai say that mushrooms enchant you – you pick and can’t stop.
– Where in Lithuania do you like to pick mushrooms? Do you have a favorite place?
– I don’t have my own forests; different mushrooms grow in different places. I live in the Trakai district, so I often wander in the surrounding forests. When I accompany mushroom picking groups to the forest, I don’t always pick mushrooms myself. In the forests, I talk about the world of mushrooms, mushroom diversity; we go to old forests with lots of decaying wood. This weekend, I hope to gather more edible mushrooms. At the festival in America, I collected many new recipes. I would like to make chanterelle candied fruits and cook chanterelle jam in Lithuania.
In Colorado, I had the chance to taste the fly agaric. It doesn’t grow in Lithuania; its taste is quite specific and probably wouldn’t appeal to everyone.
– Interesting, who decides that a mushroom is edible?
– In the past, people ate what they gathered. Only they could distinguish which mushroom or plant was edible and which was not. They might have had some methods, for example, testing how the skin reacts. People were much more observant than now. To regain such a level of attentiveness as we had, we would need to spend a lot of time in nature. Dzūkai have long said that mushrooms fall from the sky, that they grow where lightning strikes. Such observations today have a scientific basis – mushroom spores fly, and lightning shakes the mycelium, causing mushrooms to start growing. Americans even have apps that show where lightning has struck.
– Which mushroom world – the surface or underground – interests you more?
– Mushrooms are a good example that we often see only the tips, while all the connections, the big organism, are invisible. Mushrooms show us how everything is connected and that nothing exists alone. Even our body is like a forest, an ecosystem where mushrooms, bacteria, viruses live. You cannot separate human DNA from non-human because without that other part, we could not live. These anthropological and philosophical questions also interest me.
The International Mushroom Festival in Varėna – on September 12. More information is published on the Varėna Cultural Center website and the Mushroom Festival Facebook page.
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