Qui Transtulit Sustinet

Arrival in Vilnius

June 26, Vilnius, Lithuania

My first few hours in Vilnius were a whir of sweaty confusion. After checking into a guesthouse located in a former monastery next to the 16th century Gates of Dawn I went to the train station to see if I could arrange a visa for Belarus. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing – paying a lot of money to the visit one of the most depressing countries in the world but then again I figured that if I was ever going to visit Belarus, then this was that opportunity and took the plunge, coughing up 97 euros for the privelege to enter what Condi Rice memorably called “Europe’s last dictatorship.”



The weather in Vilnius was horrible the whole time I was in the area, cold driving rain with periods of drier, but hardly less unpleasant, grayness but I could immediately see that the Lithuanian capital is completely different from the Hanseatic cities of Tallinn and Riga. Replacing the austere Lutheran churches and tidy guild-houses is an ornate Baroque splash – a 17th century cityscape of monumental Catholicism. The architectural change, along with a noticeably darker population, makes Vilnius feel like the Rome of the Baltics. Vilnius – the Catholic and Baroque city inhabited by a people reknowned for their piety, zeal, and superstition. Yes, Vilnius is different.



I spent most of the afternoon relaxing in the hotel but I did take a quick stroll around the area, passing some of the major sights and noticing the massive amount of construction in the Old Town center in anticipation for 2009 – Vilnius’s turn as European Capital of Culture that coincides with the 1000th anniversary of the first written mention of Lithuania (by a German monk complaining about the pagan warriors who ate a bunch of his friends). Lithuania was the last European people to adopt Christianity, in the late year of 1387, and their devout Catholicism is imbued with a pagan zealousness that manifests itself through the ornate wooden crosses that the people erect everywhere – by the side of the highway, as a memorial for the martyrs of independence, or behind the massive white neo-classical cathedral, itself a sacred space for the Lithuanian thunder god. Eventually their paganism became a bit of an embarrassment and ditching the old gods, the Lithuanians, who at this time inhabited most of the swath between the Baltic and Bessarabia and not the small boundaries of the present Republic of Lithuania, hitched themselves to the Poles and started one of the great partnerships of European history that lasted until the partitions of the 1790s.

posted by Andy Schloss @ 12:30 PM