Inside and Outside Vilnius

When I touched down at Vilnius airport the sun was shining brightly but the air had become decidedly nippy. I was able to catch a local bus into the city, because I was already holding the Euros needed to pay the bus driver. I had bought them in the Slovak Republic, the only other country I had visited so far that used Euros for its currency. I got off the bus when I thought I had reached the city center. Unfortunately, Vilnius is a very big city with several areas that could pass for its city center, and I left the bus much too early. I wandered around for a while, saw a river in the distance, walked a mile or so down a hill, crossed the river, and found my hotel.

While Vilnius exhibited several forts, an Old Town with cobble stone streets, ancient buildings and churches, and even a touristy open air market, tourism appeared to be only an after thought for making money here. The business of Vilnius is, well, business. The historic area forms only a very small part of this city of 550,000 people. In many ways this city seemed to resemble cities in the United States of about the same size. My hotel hosted several corporate conferences while I was there, and its hallways were often crowded with people wearing business suits and plastic covered name tags while trying to network their way to a promotion or their next job. There were, of course, a few “rebels” trying to stand out by wearing business casual attire. 🙂

I spent the rest of the morning exploring the Old Town and looking for a warm hat to buy. I hadn’t expected the weather to turn this cold so early in October. I had moved only a few hundred miles north of Lviv, but day time temperatures were about 25 degrees colder here.

I couldn’t find a hat that was different from any I could buy in the U.S., or that was made here in Lithuania, so I spent the day walking around the Old Town with my hoodie up.

I had seen so many old buildings, cobbled lanes and ageing churches earlier in my journey, that I really didn’t find any that I wanted to write about. One experience, however, was truly unique. In one of the squares a woman had drawn a white circle on the ground and spent the day slooowly walking around the circle. Next to the circle was a donation box and a sign which said that she was demonstrating how everyone experiences time differently, and that anyone was welcome to join her in walking the circle at his or her own speed. I watched her for a moment and then decided that she had a lot more time to walk in circles than I did. I quickly moved on to view the rest of the more interesting though totally unsurprising Old Town sights . 🙂

O.K. Clearly Vilnius didn’t excite me very much. The kaleidoscope of experiences that Lviv had provided me was a hard act to follow. Desperate for some interesting pictures I sought out what had become my “go to” source for local information, my hotel’s desk clerk. She mentioned a sculpture garden on the edge of town, and the Frank Zappa memorial, but I felt that tourists had probably already photographed these sites in every possible way. I asked if there was any place I could photograph that represented the heart and soul of Lithuania. Without hesitation she said “Go to Rumsiskis. There’s an open air museum there that demonstrates how our ancestors lived.” She said it covered so much ground that she had spent more than four hours there on a school trip, and still had not been able to see it all, and that I wouldn’t run out of things to photograph. She was right. Unfortunately, it was a third of the way across Lithuania, and I would have to take a bus to get close to, though not actually at, the museum. The bus station was across the river about two miles from my hotel, and the Rumsiskis bus stop was about two miles from the museum. A light rain made the walks to and from these locations particularly miserable. When I finally reached the museum, It looked like it was closed. Only one car sat in the parking lot. I saw some movement in a booth near a turn-style. There was an old lady sitting inside it with the lights off and a space heater at her feet. The car in the parking lot was hers. She didn’t seem very happy to see me, since she probably would have to stay in her cold, dark booth until I exited the museum. I paid her and she gave me a map. I then spent the next five hours wandering around the museum taking the pictures posted below. I didn’t see another tourist until I entered a little cobblestone village and found an operating replica of a Lithuanian inn four hours after the old lady gave me my map. The only other people I saw were workmen repairing some buildings and an elderly artist.

While I was free from any tourists interfering with my photography, (or museum staff for that matter), there were some drawbacks to using the museum as a photo site. First of all, nearly all of the buildings looked pretty similar even though they were sourced from all over Lithuania. They were all made of unpainted wood, or logs. (The 19th century village area was the one exception). This coupled with the overcast and damp weather produced some rather dull and monotonous photos. Many of the houses also may not have had as much historical value as they first seemed, since people continued to live in these types of dwellings well into the 20th century, and the examples exhibited might not have been more than 40 or 50 years old. The museum provided little information about the history of the buildings or about the people of Lithuania and I only ran into one person who could answer questions and he was an artist rather than a historian who wanted to talk only about his art, and his own family history.

I have since learned that the history of the Lithuanian people is about as foggy as its climate. Tacitus did write about a people who lived on the Baltic who gathered amber that eventually ended up in Rome. He called them the Aesti. They may or may not be the ancestors of modern Lithuanians. Lithuanian history then goes dark for about 800 years. Agriculture came late to the country, and most of the population continued to live as illiterate hunters, fishermen, or subsistence farmers who left no recorded history during that period.  The Lithuanian language is little help in determining who the earliest Lithuanians were. It is an Indo European language that contains many archaic elements similar to those found in Sanskrit. There are also many resemblances to Slavic Languages but linguists can’t agree if the Lithuanian and Slavic languages developed from a common ancestor or if the Slavic elements entered the language through later contacts with Polish Slavs. No Lithuanian writing earlier than 1503 has been located, and there was plenty of time for the language to import Polish influences when Poland and Lithuania merged in 1386 (see below).

Lithuanian culture seems to have resisted change throughout much of its early history, one example being its retention of paganism much longer than the rest of Europe. In fact, it took a bloody and drawn out crusade conducted by soldiers returning from the more famous crusades in the Middle East to finally convert the country to Christianity in the 14th century. This wasn’t an easy task, because by that time, Lithuania had developed a potent military force. In 1386 Lithuania merged with Poland through a royal marriage, and this combined country soon became the largest country in Europe and a major power. This arrangement lasted for the next two hundred years.

I didn’t know any of this as I wandered from one village or farmstead to the next at the museum. Without any context to guide me, I just took pictures based on how I felt at the moment. While much of what I saw was gloomy and predictable, I occasionally stumbled onto moments of austere beauty like the picture below.

I generally like the peace and quiet that occurs when I move around by myself, but after three hours I was starting to become uncomfortable with my isolation. It felt almost like the museum wasn’t actually open and I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I was relieved when I came upon a cottage with smoke rising from its chimney. I could see through a side window that an old man was sitting inside. He saw me as I started up the outside porch steps. He crossed himself and moved from behind the counter where he was sitting. When I got inside he grabbed my hand and began shaking it. He started talking in Lithuanian but switched to a halting form of English when he realized that I couldn’t understand him. The hut was filled with bone carvings, black wrought iron sculptures and fire place utensils that he had made. Everything was for sale, but nothing was small enough to fit in my backpack. He led me about the room explaining how he made every item. After describing each item he would ask if I would like to buy it. I demurred. He told me that he had studied art in Estonia before the second world war, and that he and his family were sent to Siberia by the Russians in 1949. He brought out pictures of his family from before the war and while they were in the Russian Gulag. He was a nice man, and I was sure that I was the only customer he would have all day. I wanted to help him out but didn’t know how. I finally told him I would buy something if it would fit in my pocket. His face lit up. “Yes, Yes”. He scurried back behind the counter and opened a drawer. He pulled out several cardboard boxes containing small pieces of amber that he had tumbled himself to remove any attached stone that was not amber. He showed me his tumbler and what amber looked like before it was tumbled. He said his amber had not been heated, and warned that many unscrupulous amber merchants in Vilnius heated their amber to remove surface flaws. Since amber is petrified resin it will melt a bit if heated and the flaws will disappear. Unfortunately this method darkens the amber, and he said that the best amber was light colored, and that tourists were often over charged for the dark, inferior kind. I asked if he had any with an insect inside. He became ebullient. “Yes, I have some. Less than 1% of all amber has an insect inside”. He brought out two more little boxes. He gave me a magnifying glass to look at the two samples. I chose the one pictured below. I expected him to charge me an arm and a leg for it, but he asked only for 15 Euros. The amber I saw for sale in Vilnius started at about 70 Euros and went up from there, and yes, some of it was darkened amber.

Just down the road from his hut was the 19th century village where I saw some museum workers come out of a little inn. I hadn’t eaten anything all day so I entered to see if they were still serving lunch. They weren’t but they said they would make something up for me. Everywhere I visited in Eastern Europe I found that museum food was tasty, culturally accurate, and reasonable. Here they served me hot beet soup, rye bread topped with sour cream and a chunk of cold cod fish, and some kind of juice made out of native berries. I’m not an expert on traditional Lithuanian cuisine, but I believed it was authentic and fit the historical period of the building I was in. I was hungry and it went down quite easily. When I finished I went back out on the street feeling like I was really back in the 19th century.

I made my way through some other areas of the museum, but had to shorten my visit because it was starting to get dark. Like the hotel desk clerk, I couldn’t see it all, even in five hours.

I walked back out to the bus stop in a pouring rain and waited there for an hour before figuring out that only buses heading West stopped there. After asking several older people who had no idea what I wanted, a young person getting off the bus to Kaunas directed me to the eastbound bus stop. By the time I got back to Vilnius it was dark. My feet were wet, my coat soaked through and I was thoroughly  exhausted. I imagined my self as one of Napoleon’s soldiers trudging back from Russia toward the food and warmth of France. (In my case, to my hotel’s French bistro). I crossed the city, made it back up to my room, and immediately headed for the bathroom. Standing in front of the toilet I looked down at my sports watch. I had walked more than 18 miles that day, much of it in the rain. My chest swelled with pride and I felt my whole body glow with the brilliant satisfaction that can be felt only by an earthly Apollo. I still had the fitness of my youth. I was 21 again! “Hah! I blow my nose on the sleeve of Father Time”  I then looked beyond my watch into the toilet. I was peeing blood! From somewhere deep in my mind I heard a spectral voice snicker, “Heh, heh, heh. 21 are you? Who’s laughing now, sunshine”.