Vilnius, post-conference
Nov. 17th, 2025 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothThursday 23rd October - more wandering in the wet
I wanted to visit Trakai Island castle, somewhere that both looked lovely and was also an important part of local history: at one point, what's now a small village nearby was the capital, thanks to who was in the two significant castles a few hundred metres apart. But Thursday was rightly forecast to be another wet day, so when others on the Signal group - hooray for not using WhatsApp! - mentioned two options, one of the galleries I'd been to on the Saturday, and the Užupis area, I recommended the first as worth a visit and went to the second with Robyn Ochs, an organiser and someone else who'd been a voting attendee.
The area is just across the small river that gives the city its name and 'declared independence' on 1st April 1997. One road has its manifesto translated over the years into a load of languages, including "A dog has the right to be a dog", "People have the right to be happy", and "People have the right to be unhappy". You can get your passport stamped at a shop just across one of the main entrances as well as buying (not valid anywhere) postage stamps and other souvenirs. There's also plenty of street art.
We ate at a Lithuanian place that felt a lot more 'Lithuanian' than the restaurant for the main group meal and had tea (the others) and a brownie (me) at a Japanese tea place higher up the hill, near 'the border' on that side.
On the way back, we went up another hill, past the last remaining bastion of the city's 16th C walls, and back down through the Gate of Dawn that featured in all those pictures on Saturday. The lunch meant that I wasn't feeling hungry for much more food, so when they went off to pack for their flight or think about where to eat, I went back to the flat.
Friday 24th October - a bit grim
The weather still wasn't perfect, with light rain likely, but this was the day for the castle trip. Google Maps had been a bit rubbish in terms of the public transport options to get to Trakai, suggesting a bus or two. The problem was that there were about three different companies with buses at different times, and it was highly likely that they wouldn't accept a return ticket sold by one of the other ones. If return tickets existed...
With no help from Maps, I quickly worked out that the train would be a far better option. Train tickets in Lithuania are a bit odd or perfectly sensible, depending on which way you look at it. There doesn't seem to be any concept of something like a day return, where you can use any train (with possible limits on which, depending on what you pay). Instead, you book for a specific train and the price seems to depend on how many other people have already picked that. Train fares are not high, especially for 40ish minute journeys like this one, but it clearly doesn't take many previous purchases for that to double or triple.
The other thing was wondering about having the return journey on a forest train, something special this year for a few journeys on the main line between a couple of cities. Hmm, the gaps between any train are 60 or 90 or 120 minutes, which shall I get a ticket for? In the end, I decided not to book a ticket back, but just got one there at around 09:00.
The walk to the castle is fine, even when it's drizzling, but I did not stay long. The main issue is that while I knew that most of what's there is more recent than the castle at Disneyland - even the Soviets were OK with major reconstruction works being finished under them - I was expecting a bit more content. Instead, there's a small museum that's like "Here's a room with some glassware. It has nothing to do with the castle. Most of it has nothing to do with Lithuania. Almost none of it is labelled. Here's a room with some porcelain. It has nothing..."
The keep has something on the history and the reconstruction - but not nearly enough of either for my taste. You can't see views out over the large lake. (I wonder about aspects of the work, because things like many of the windows there are are clearly no use for defence like arrow slits, never mind for letting light in.) You can't go in the tower that's the highest part of the keep. Presumably the walls had wooden ramparts, because there's none now, never mind being able to walk on them. Etc etc.
I'm someone who can happily spend hours at a castle or museum. I was out of this one in just under an hour, having seen everything. It did make me really glad I hadn't bought got a much later ticket back, but could walk back to the station and be in time for a train that'd arrive in Vilnius at about 12:30.
Mmm, what to do? I'd passed the "Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights" on the Saturday, let's go there. It's in a building that the Soviets used as KGB1 HQ after they invaded in 1940, the Nazis took over and made Gestapo HQ from 1941, and the Soviets restored as the KGB HQ in 1944 until 1990 or so. For some reason, the ticket office wasn't taking money, and people were being allowed in without paying. (There was a comment to someone else about paying on the way out, but there was no sign of that happening when I left.) The bottom two above ground floors have an exhibition on what they call the genocide, meaning the Russian attempt to erase 'Lithuania' as an independent state. The German occupation is almost entirely skipped over - this is very much about the KGB's time here.
It's primarily concerned with what happened in the decade after 1944. When the Red Army was getting close in the autumn of that year, there was an attempt by the Polish 'Home Army'2 to capture the city - regain it, as the Poles would see it - before the Red Army did. It failed, and in the aftermath and in the months and years that followed thousands of Lithuanians joined an armed insurgency against the Soviet occupation. It was always completely doomed but lasted until the mid-1950s at a cost of over 20,000 lives (around 2% of the adult male population) and it's this that the museum is really interested in.
'Obviously', in Stalin's time the Soviet forces' answer to the insurgency was brutal and as well as stories of mass deportations etc, there are assorted photos of the corpses of brave noble Lithuanian fighters shot and left to rot in villages... without any mention, as far as I can remember, that they also carried out assorted atrocities, both against the Red Army and anyone suspected of supporting the regime.
The basement has the cells used by both the Germans and Soviets. They're seriously grim, even before you notice that the partly hidden sign by the two tiny cells by the staircase down where people were held for a couple of hours on arrival that, in Stalin's time, there were six cells for that, all far too small to sit down in. (I wouldn't be surprised if they inherited them from the Gestapo because such things existed in their prisons, but they were quite capable of thinking of such things themselves.) After the office for the officer on duty and the room where those arrivals would be photographed, the cells start.
One is in 'up to 1947' style, with the comment that they'd be 15-20 people held there, with no furniture, the window almost entirely blocked from the outside, and with all the light coming from a bulb that was on 24 hours a day. Most of the rest are in '1960s-1980s' style, when they'd have had up to three people in the same small sized cell, sleeping on beds and with some cupboards and shelves to store plates etc.
After several more cells - one has some bags of shredded documents the KGB left behind when they left at the start of the 1990s, another a guide to who was who in the KGB, and one has a cardboard figure of Putin in prisoner uniform - there are things like the room for the guards, plus the assorted punishment cells. The worst of these were a couple with a tiny metal stand in the middle of a recessed floor. That'd be filled with water, so if/when you fell off the stand in the darkness, you'd be soaked in cold (summer) to freezing (winter) water. Another room recreates one of the padded cells used for prisoners whose cries were too annoying for the guards to want to listen to.
Around the middle of the corridor, there are some stairs up to the courtyard. Turn left, and you're in the exercise space. Again, a notice mentions that things were improved after Stalin's death, from prisoners allowed around ten minutes of silent exercise walking around a small enclosed space a day to up to an hour, including being allowed to sit down or do other forms of exercise. Had you just gone straight across to another door, it was down to the execution chamber where over a thousand people were shot in the back of the head. There are bullet marks on the wall they'd have faced and some of the mass graves were the bodies were dumped are still unknown.
Leaving after two hours there, I reflected that it the museum is disturbing in unintended ways too. On the way there, I passed a memorial and info boards at the edge of a small park about the WW2 Jewish ghetto the Nazis arranged to have set up (it was by what had been the entrance to it). I don't think it's mentioned on them, but it turns out that it was Lithuanians who dealt with most matters regarding it, including being responsible for the guards around it.
Even without that, those boards had more on that period than this museum did: one of the cells has an 'Oh, yes, this also happened here too' display around a Star of David, but it clearly is an afterthought compared to the main focus. A quick look suggests that I'm not the only one to think this is a bit dubious and it turns out that at least one of the men celebrated on one of the outside walls collaborated with the Nazis in 'actions', i.e. massacres, against the Jews.
On the walk back to the flat, I had a burger at the very nice place I'd found on Saturday and then visited that 'very special to Lithuanians' chapel in the Gate of Dawn. It had several people praying and the attached church also had a healthy sized congregation for a service.
Saturday 25th October - back home
The flight was at lunchtime, and the airport was an easy bus ride away so it was a very relaxed time until I thought for a second that I'd left my wallet back at the flat just before going through airport security. In contrast to UK ones, Vilnius airport doesn't want to rip you totally off - a bottle of water to take with the decongestant that enables me to go on flights was €1.60 rather than the €7 Ryanair want, for example.
It was, again, wet and I was amused that if the rain is in the right direction, paying for the front row on Ryanair gets you a very, very wet seat. That's the last good thing to say about it apart from the way that we arrived on time, which meant some waiting around before the train I'd booked. I went back and forth on the shuttle between the airport and the station a few times...
Back in Newark, I got off the train and - because the wind was from the NW - was immediately confronted with the smell of the sugar factory that's just outside the town. Ah, home.
1. Over the years it had multiple names, but if I keep swapping the name according to the date, even I'd get confused.
2. The underground resistance responsible for, amongst other things, the equally doomed Warsaw Uprising in August that year and, throughout its time, not always being welcoming to Jews attempting to escape the Holocaust. The Lithuanian collaborators wanted it wiped out too, along with remaining bits of Polish culture in the area.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-18 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-22 09:30 pm (UTC)I did skip the way that the Poles went 're-establish diplomatic relations, despite our Vilnius grab' in 1938 and the Germans made their own ultimatum the next year and grabbed most of the country's coastline on the basis that it had been part of East Prussia before 1918.
Yeah, hooray for the Channel / North Sea and the Royal Navy...
Oh - the UK played its part in the failure of the insurgency too: amongst other things, Kim Philby told the Russians all about the attempts to support it from outside.