starting my visit to the Baltics, with 16 days in Lithuania

As the Belarus trip ended at the bus station in the Lithuanian capital, and I have never visited Lithuania (nor the other Baltic states), it seemed like a good idea to spend some time there.  My next firm time commitment involves meeting a group in New Delhi at the very end of June, leaving me some seven weeks to cover the Baltic states - which seemed like enough as these countries are small, but I still felt the pressure to keep moving on from one place to another.

Which meant that I only spent a week in the capital, Vilnius, even though it was a really nice city and a comfortable hostel with nice fellow guests, before I caught the train to Kaunas.  Of course there's the usual point to remember that I don't just jump from one holiday (Belarus) to another (Lithuania), but need a few 'home' or 'down' days - to sleep, do laundry, edit, cull, label and back up my photos, catch up with emails, etc - so my week was by no means a full week.  But I walked many miles to see the various monuments, cathedrals, museums and so on, and also tried to absorb some of the history, which I'd known nothing at all about before this trip.

A country of frequently moving borders, at times independent but spending significant spells under Poland, Sweden and Russia, it was also of course invaded by the Nazis - but also, to my great surprise, briefly invaded by a group of Teutonic Knights with the help of the English!  The Three Crosses Monument in Vilnius, at the head of this post, commemorates the Crooked Castle that used to be on this hill, the highest of three castles in the city at the time, but attacked by the Teutonic Knights in their crusades in 1390. They were joined in this by Henry Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV of England. They seized the fortress in a single, decisive strike, with the English warriors the first to climb the walls of the Crooked Castle, where they hoisted the banner of Henry Bolingbroke.  However the defenders of the Upper Castle (the next target) refused to surrender; a siege dragged on for nearly five weeks, but with the onset of severe weather, the crusading army broke the siege and withdrew to Prussia empty-handed, the campaign a failure.

Not at all due to that historical escapade, but rather to more recent events, the country felt sad.  There are plenty of castles and fortresses to see - but like Kaunas Castle here, they are all reconstructions, rebuilt following the destruction of the originals.  So, okay, you can go down into the original cellars and casemates, but the rest isn't 'real'.  What is real is the history expressed in various museums and exhibitions, with harrowing photos of those rounded up, imprisoned and killed by the Nazis.

Sad tales too of life under Soviet rule. Churches and cathedrals are plentiful, but only recently tarted up and returned to their original purpose, following nearly 50 years under the Soviet Union when religion was banned and churches were re-purposed as warehouses, schools, etc.  There are monuments commemorating the fallen at every turn, and crosses everywhere - the banning of religion does not seem to have dented the faith of the people.  Nor does it seem to have reduced the fascination here with witches, and devils.  From the Devil Museum in Kaunas displaying the original 260 devil statues, masks, etc collected by a Lithuanian artist plus a large number of others donated since, to the Hill of Witches in Juodkrante, with carved wooden characters from Lithuanian folklore and pagan traditions.  The devil’s popularity in the culture is also revealed in apparently more than 5000 legends and fairytales in which he is mentioned, as well as the 400-odd place names related to the devil, such as the Devil’s Hole, the Devil’s Bog and the Devil’s Swamp!

Even on the beautiful Curonian Spit, you are reminded of how many villages have been covered by sand over the years, with serious efforts now to plant forests on the massive dunes (such as the Parnidis Dune I'm standing on in the photo below) in order to stabilise them. 

Not that this negates the beauty of many of the places I visited, although I wonder whether it contributes to the overall impression I got of the people as thin, pinched and miserable?  Or maybe that was just due to the cold weather whilst I was there (6°C, ‘feels like’ 2°C at 11am in mid-May...)?