Statues Without Plinths

A Collection of Plinthless Statues, Starting in the Caribbean and Moving East to the Shore of the China Sea

Introduction

There was a time when effigies of ‘the great and the good’ stood on plinths so pigeons could perch on their heads and the rest of us could look up to them. The ultimate was Admiral Nelson whose plinth – or column - is 52m high. The figure itself is over 5m, but for the sculptor (Edward Hodges Bailey) it must be galling to have worked so hard on something that very few people ever see properly.

Nelson's column, Trafalgar Square, London in November sunshine

I don’t know where or when the fashion started but I think I first saw statues of normal sized people standing on the pavement (or, in this case, sidewalk) in Tacoma, Washington (the western US state, not the eastern city) in 1998. The next summer, in the south of France, we found them in several towns; whichever side it started the idea had already jumped the Atlantic. Over the last twenty years it has spread to most corners of the Earth.

I like these statues. Most (but not all) are light hearted, and I appreciate being able to look a statue in the eye. So here is a selection of writers and musicians, ordinary people and eccentrics, cats, dogs and more. My (arbitrary) rules for inclusion accepts a pedestal up to knee height, but the figure must to be roughly life size. I also feel free to bend my rules whenever I want.

Cuba

No doubt I took some photos in Tacoma in 1998, but prints are so much easier to loose than digital photos, so I will start in the Caribbean, in Cuba to be precise.

Havana
(visited March 2020)

When not physically looking up at a sculpture, there is no pressure to metaphorically look up to the person portrayed, you just have to enjoy their company.

El Caballero de Paris outside San Francisco de Asís

El Caballero de Paris (real name José María López Lledín) stands outside the former Church and Convent of St Francis of Assisi. Brought to Havana from Spain by his parents aged 11, he had mental problems in later life and lived on the street while believing he was a French aristocrat. Despite his loose grasp of reality, his charm and education made him a well-known and popular figure. He died in 1985 aged 85. Such statues, appreciate being touched and Lynne earned good luck, as many had done before, by stroking his beard.

Ireland

Dublin
(visited 25 June 2014 - Joyce and Famine Memorial)
24 June 2014 - Oscar Wilde)

The Prick with the Stick (more formally, James Joyce) is arguably the foremost writer in a city of writers, though he spent most of his adult life on the continent of Europe. I am overlooking his plinth as it is (just) below knee high.

Lynne and James Joyce, Earl Street, Dublin

His statue is one of four with rhyming nicknames. The Queer with the Lear is Oscar Wilde who sits on a slab of quartz (not a plinth) in Merrion Square Park opposite the house of his father, an eminent Dublin surgeon.

Lynne and Oscar, Merrion Square Park, Dublin

We missed The Tart with the Cart (Molly Malone) as she had been temporarily removed to allow for the construction of a tramway, and The Floozie in the Jacuzzi (Anna Livia Plurabelle, James Joyce’s personification of the River Liffey) due to my poor research.

The Famine Memorial stands beside the River Liffey. Most of the statues in this post are light-hearted, but not this one. The group of ragged people and their equally thin dog stand on the quay, almost staggering to the point of embarkation. Dublin has plenty of public art, much of it very good, but this is at another level. You can almost feel these people's misery as they embark on a journey they may well not survive. For some it will be the gateway to a new and better life, but as they stand here, on the very edge of Ireland, they have few dreams and little hope.

The Famine Memorial, Dublin

And here is a photo from behind - I felt the sculptor wants us to see them this way, too. They stand facing the sea with their backs to their old lives knowing there can be no return as the cringing dog realises that he will be left behind.

The Famine Memorial, Dublin

Galway
(visited Jul 2016)

Meanwhile, over on the west coast, the city of Galway also has an Oscar Wilde. He shares a seat with his Estonian contemporary and near namesake Eduard Vilde. They never met and as far as I have been able to ascertain, their lives had little else in common. The sculpture was a gift from the people of Estonia when they joined the EU in 2004.

Lynne with Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde, Galway
The original (minus Lynne) is in Tartu the 'intellectual capital' of Estonia

United Kingdom

I have a 2013 post entitled Commemorating Comedians in Caerphilly, Morecambe and Ulverston - which I whole-heartedly recommend (well I would, wouldn't I). It consists of statues of four comedians and their background stories. One of them has a plinth, the others would be appropriate here but I don't wish to repeat myself, so please click on the link.

Edinburgh
(Visited July 2021)

Greyfriars Bobbyis by far the oldest work in this post. He has stood patiently, with an ever-shinier nose, atop a substantial plinth since 1873. Only it isn’t really a plinth, it’s a double drinking fountain, people at the top, dogs at the base. As Bobby is a small dog, he needs a plinth or passers-by would trip over him.

Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh

Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye Terrier. After his owner died in 1858 the dog kept a vigil at his graveside in the nearby Greyfriars Kirk cemetery, until his own death 14 years later. This demonstrates the heart-warming loyalty of man’s best friend - or perhaps the pathetic neediness of dogs; a self-respecting cat would have raised its tail and stalked away

Burwash, East Sussex
(Visited Sept 2021)

For most of his adult life Rudyard Kipling lived in house called Batemans (currently owned by the National trust and open to the public) just outside the village of Burwash. He now sits in perpetuity on a bench beside the main road through the village.

Lynne and Rudyard Kipling, Burwash

Kipling had the instincts and attitudes of any man of his class born in the latter half of the 19th century. As an unabashed imperialist and the Poet of Empire, he should be out of fashion, but isn’t. He cannot be blamed for the circumstances of his birth, but he should be celebrated for the humanity which shines out of so many of his works. People may argue about his qualities as a poet, but he was undoubtedly one the greatest versifiers in the English language.

Portugal

Loulé
(Visited Oct 2022 and many times previously)

We have been frequent visitors to the Algarve, and for many years Loulé market was our first stop, directly from the airport. In 2006 and 2007 we found the market closed. When it reopened the familiar handsome neo-Classical/Moorish façade fronted a bright, clean and airy new market. Everything was back as it was, only its soul was missing. Revisiting Loulé in 2023 for the first time for several years we found a market trader from the old days, sitting on the steps outside, wondering what had happened to it all.

Bewildered market trader, Loulé

North Macedonia

Stepping lightly from one side of Europe to the other we arrive in a land that was once part of Yugoslavia.

Skopje
(visited May 2015)

Nikola Gruevski (Prime Minister 2006-16) initiated the‘Skopje 2014’ project and ‘Antiquization’. These were exercises in nation-building, promoting a Macedonian identity with unbroken continuity since antiquity and involved, among other things, the building of many large, nationalist statues and memorials. There were two problems. The Macedonia of antiquity, the land of Alexander the Great, was Greek and modern North Macedonians are mostly descended from the Slavic tribes who settled here some 900 year later. Secondly, he spent a great deal of money the city did not have. He resigned after riots in 2016, was subsequently charged with corruption and sentenced to two years in prison. He fled to Hungary and claimed political asylum.

Gruevski’s statues have enormous plinths, but Skopje also has several plinthless statues. A necessary antidote to Gruevski’s bombastic monstrosities, they exemplify a pleasanter and more approachable side of the Macedonian character. The Musicians can be found near ‘Warrior on a Horse’ (under an agreement with the Greeks it is not called ‘Alexander the Great’)

The Musicians, near Macedonia Square, Skopje

While The Divers are on one of the piers of Skopje’s 6th century Stone Bridge. Not great sculpture, perhaps, but it makes you smile, and that is good enough for me.

The Bathers, Stone Bridge, Skopje

Lithuania

Vilnius
(Visited July 2011)

I am always surprised how far east the Baltic States are. Vilnius is actually east of Skopje, but never looks it on a rectangular 2-D map.

After achieving independence from the USSR in 1990 Lithuania had a wealth of statues it no longer wanted, so Lenin and friends were retired to a park near the Belarus border. New statues were raised to various medieval heroes and, in a car park beside an anonymous apartment block in a residential area near the city centre, to Frank Zappa. The bust was erected in 1995 after funds were raised by civil servant Saulius Paukstys. A man blessed with an individual world view and a keen sense of irony, Paukstys commissioned the sculptor of many of the Soviet heroes, to produce the bust. Zappa has no connection with Lithuania, has never visited and before the bust was largely unknown, but the project caught people’s imagination as a wryly ironic gesture in a country that had seen enough of political monuments. (Rough Guide)

Frank Zappa,Vilnius
I know he has a plinth (or column?) but, like Greyfriars Bobby, he would be a trip hazard without it

Armenia

Yerevan
(Visited July 2003)

Mesrop Mashtots (Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց) (362 – 440CE) sits outside the Matenadaran (Մատենադարան) at the top of Mashtots Avenue, one of Yerevan’s main throughfares. The positioning is appropriate, the Matenadaran is a museum and research institute specialising in ancient Armenian manuscripts, and Mashtots is the man credited with inventing the Armenian alphabet (examples above). The (rather weathered) 36 letter alphabet is engraved on the stela to his right.

Mesrop Mashtots, Yerevan

The Fat Cat. I am breaking my own rules here, the plinth is small enough, but the figure is many times life size, but if you are going to portray a Fat Cat it has to be a very large and very fat cat. I hope this is a political statement, but I don't know if fat cat has the same meaning in either the sculptor's native Colombia, or Armenia.

Fat Cat, Yerevan

Georgia

Tbilisi
(visited August 2014)

The Tamada.

Modern Georgia includes the ancient land of Colchis, where Jason and the Argonauts rowed to steal the Golden Fleece.

The myth of the Golden Fleece has historical origins. Many of the streams flowing down from the high Caucasus bear gold, and it was traditional extracted by damming the flow with fleeces so the shiny metal adhered to the sticky untreated wool. This practice may date back to the 3rd millennium BCE, and archaeologists have found huge quantities of golden grave goods, many of which can be seen in the National Museum in Tbilisi. Among them is a seated figure, less than two centimetres tall, holding a drinking horn.

Tamada and us, Tbilisi

The supra (feast) is an essential part of Georgian culture and every supra need a tamada, (toastmaster) who proposes toasts for others to elaborate upon and so keep the wine flowing. Cast in bronze, many times the size of the original, the little fellow has become Tbilisi’s permanent honorary toastmaster. Every visitor to the city poses with him, those small enough sitting on his lap.

China

With a long eastward leap we reach the final country of this post, and two very different cities.

Pingyao
(visited Sept 2014)

600km southwest of Beijing, Pingyao is an old, walled Qing/Ming city, an artfully pickled oasis among the usual Chinese urban sprawl. We visited during the mid-autumn holiday when the town was packed and the Chinese tourist machine was turned up to eleven.

During our perambulation on the city wall we met the night watchmen…

The Night-watchmen, Pingyao city walls

…and the city governor holding a writing brush and about to get down to work. Nothing is taken too seriously here.

The city governor gets down to work, Pingyao

Hangzhou
(visited Nov 2016)

200 km southwest of Shanghai, Hangzhou is the centre of a metropolitan region of over 10m inhabitants. It is the home to Alibaba, one of the world's largest retailers and e-commerce companies and the fifth-largest artificial intelligence company. If Pingyao is China’s past, Hangzhou is its future. Street statues here are not primarily to amuse, though they may make older people smile.

Workers, Hangzhou

For many they are images of a past they do not remember.

Street market, Hangzhou

I have more, but this as probably as much (or more) than most would want at one sitting, so I shall stop. I do like these statues, I like to see who or what the locals wish to commemorate, or how they view their past. Most are not intended to be taken too seriously while one is very serious indeed, but all add to the interest of the towns or cities they call home. And can I have a bonus point for for a post which references Greyfriars Bobby, Frank Zappa and Alexander the Great?

Possibly also of Interest

Statues Without Plinths (2023)
Socialist Realism: In Praise of Bad Art (2022)
The Boxes of Carvoeiro (2016)

Sculptors and Dates of Installation (when known)

Liverpool
Duke of Wellington by George Anderson Lawson, 1865
Havana
El Caballero de Paris by José Ramón Villa Soberón, 2001
Dublin
James Joyce by Marjorie Fitzgibbon, 1990.
Oscar Wilde by Danny Osborne, 1997
Famine Memorial by Rowan Gillespie, 1997
Galway Wilde and Vilde by Tiiu Kirsipuu, 2004
Edinburgh
Greyfriars Bobby by William Brodie, 1873
Burwash
Rudyard Kipling by Victoria Atkinson, 2018
Loulé
Market Trader by Teresa Paulino and Pedro Felix
Vilnius
Frank Zappa by Konstantinas Bagdonas, 1995
Yerevan Mesrop Mastots by Ghukas Chubaryan, 1968
Fat Cat by Fernando Botero
Tbilisi
Tamada by Zurab Tsereteli, 2013

The Baltic Capitals: Part 1 Vilnius, Lithuania

Lithuania

Vilnius

7000 years ago tribes migrating westwards from the Ural Mountains reached the Baltic Sea. They would, one day, become the Estonians. In 3000 BC another group of wanderers arrived, pushing the earlier migrants north into what became Estonia and colonising the southern section of the coast. They were the ancestors of the Lithuanians and Latvians.

Arriving in Vilnius

5000 years later Lynne and I arrived and descended the steps outside Vilnius’ modest airport. It was not raining, but it was clearly only a gap between showers. Picking our way through the puddles, we followed signs to the station. It turned out to be as modest as the airport, nestling beside a single-track line at the bottom of a deep cutting. We had, it seemed, just missed the hourly train.



Vilnius Old Town from the Castle

A fine drizzle filled the air as we trundled our case back towards the airport. There was only one bus stop, the shelter crowded with a gaggle of homeward bound airport workers. ‘Does this bus go to the city centre?’ Lynne asked in English. We are not fans of the Anglophone indifference to other people’s languages, but the prospect of encountering three different languages in a week had been a touch daunting. That is a pathetic excuse, but the best we can offer.

Latvian and Lithuanian are the only surviving languages of the Baltic group, a sub-group of the vast Indo-European language family that covers everything from Hindi to Welsh (though not Estonian). We soon learned that speaking a language from a related branch of the Indo-European family cut no ice. We were treated to some of the blankest blank looks I have seen anywhere. After a few seconds embarrassed silence the lone traveller among those waiting – or at least the only person with a suitcase – piped up with a querulous ‘I hope so.’ We hoped so too and joined the queue.
 

We did not have to hope for long, a bus turned up almost immediately with ‘Stotis’ (station) on the front and that was where we wanted to go.

Our journey through the rainy outer suburbs seemed more like time travel than a bus ride, transporting us instantly back to the 1970s. Vilnius is not large and ten minutes later we reached the station, or rather stations as the train and long distance bus stations sit either side of the local bus terminus.

Sheltering under a tree, we tried to decide which way to walk. I thought one way, Lynne championed the other, but the more we looked at the map the less there was of it - the paper was dissolving in our hands. We retreated to a less permeable shelter. After further study I had to admit Lynne was right, which was galling as she readily admits to having no sense of direction.

Vilnius Old Town

It might have been a short walk to our hotel just outside the Old Town, but it was a long way to drag a suitcase through what had become a serious rainstorm.

An hour or two later, dried, rested and refreshed we ventured into the Old Town through the Gate of Dawn (P Floyd’s piper was absent, presumably sheltering from the weather). There were few people on the streets, even though the rain had eased, and it felt strangely deserted.  Restaurants were open though, and we found dinner – the Baltic staple of pork and potatoes – with ease.



Outside The Gate of Dawn, Vilnius
(The opening in the white painted building)

King Mindaugas and King Gediminas

Next morning we returned to a less deserted Old Town. July the 6th is the day Lithuanians commemorate the Crowning of King Mindaugas. We were to see many people in national costume and countless children wearing red cardboard crowns and waving cardboard swords.



King Mindaugas outside the National Museum
Vilnius

The Baltic states are isolated from the rest of Europe by bogs and forests, and the Dark Ages lingered long here. Lithuania remained pagan until the 13th century when a powerful chieftain named Mindaugas united the tribes and adopted Christianity - mainly in the hope of winning wider recognition. His scheme succeeded and in 1253 a papal representative crowned him King of Lithuania. He was murdered by pagan nobles ten years later, but by then Lithuania was well on the way to becoming a major regional power.  In the 14th century, King Gediminas founded Vilnius and extended Lithuanian rule into Russia and Ukraine. In 1382, when the Polish King died without an heir, King Jogaila, Gediminas’ grandson, was offered the Polish throne.

In one of several parallels with the relationship between England and Scotland, the new King of Lithuania and Poland was quick to desert provincial Vilnius for the bright lights of Krakow, the Polish capital. The union of Poland and Lithuania lasted, with ups and downs, until the 18th century and at its largest extent ruled an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The Gates of Dawn



Inside the Gate of Dawn
Vilnius

The Great Northern War (1700-21) put an end to Polish power and Lithuania was eventually absorbed into Tsarist Russia where it stayed until the Russian revolution. During the inter-war period of independence, Vilnius was actually in Poland and the Lithuanians set up a temporary capital in the second city of Kaunas.

It is no surprise then that Vilnius looks and feels Polish and, unlike Lutheran Riga and Tallinn, remains staunchly Catholic.

St Theresa's Church

The Madonna of the Gate of Dawn lives in a chapel on top of the gate. She is happy to receive visitors except during Mass, and this being a holiday, a priest and choir were busy doing their stuff. We popped into the adjacent St Theresa’s instead. Like many major buildings in the Old Town it dates from the mid-1600s – fires having dealt with most earlier constructions.



St Theresa's Chrch, Vilnius

Anthony, Ioan and Eustachius, Church of the Holy Spirit

Next door is the site where, in 1347, three Christians named Anthony, Ioan and Eustachius were hanged on the instructions of the pagan Grand Duke Algirdas. When Algirdas converted to Christianity he built a chapel over the execution site, which no doubt made Anthony, Ioan and Eustachiuis feel much better. In the 17th century that chapel was rebuilt as the Church of the Holy Spirit.  Anthony, Ioan and Eustachiuis  now lie under a green cover in a glass case in front of an inappropriately frivolous green iconostasis. Mass was under way, but being Russian Orthodox it was part service, part performance and the congregation wandered in and out, just like the tourists. We paused to listen to the singing. I sometimes wonder what happens to a young man who feels called to the Russian Orthodox priesthood but lacks the obligatory booming bass voice.



Anthony, Ioan and Eustachius and the geen iconostasis
Church of the Holy Spirit, Vilnius

Vilnius Town Hall

Several more churches line the main road through the Old Town, but it would be tedious to list them all. There is also a square containing the town hall, an imposing neo-classical slab of a building.



Lynne outside Vilnius Town Hall

We saw several film posters announcing the imminent arrival of one Haris Poteris – presumably a relative of the Garry Potter we had previously met in Russia. All Lithuanian masculine nouns end in ‘s’ and Lithuanians are happy to change anybody’s name to fit their system, just ask Mikas Jaggeris.

An unprepossessing side-street by the university - founded in 1569 and the oldest in the Baltics – took us to the presidential palace. The lane opened onto a square with the palace opposite. Being the national day a dais and several chairs had been set out and soldiers and sailors were casually marking out where they would stand when the parade started. A television outside broadcast unit was setting up while on the edge of the square a father and his small son were kicking a football. The absence of officious ‘security guards’ was refreshing.



Sailors marking out their places otside the Presidential Palace
Vilnius

Cathedral Square

Continuing north we reached the end of the Old Town in Cathedral Square. The cathedral, once described as a cross between ‘a Greek Temple and a Polish civic theatre’ is not one of Vilnius’ most impressive churches. King Mindaugas built the first church here, obliterating an earlier shrine dedicated to Perkunas, the Lithuanian god of thunder. We would encounter evidence that Perkunas is still miffed. The baroque ‘lighthouse’ which stands, slightly out of true, at the western end of the square serves as a belfry, but was once a tower in the city wall. The square contained another outside broadcast unit, several groups of women in national costume and a statue of King Gediminas, the founder of the city.



The Cathedral and its 'leaning lighthouse'
Vilnius

Between Cathedral Square and the River Neris is a low hill on which the castle once sat. We followed a path that wound up to the top of the hill. It was a short walk, though a small funicular railway – as modest as the airport and its station – crawls up the back of the hill.




King Gediminas in Cathedral Square
Vilnius

Vilnius Castle

A rebuilt tower on the summit is the sole remnant of the castle. For a modest fee you can enter the tower, see models of the original castle and a few suits of armour, and climb the spiral staircase for the best view of Vilnius.



All that remains of Vilnius Castle

From above, Vilnius appears a very green city. The roofs of the Old Town spread away to the south, low wooded hills bounded the city to the west while north, across the River Neris, we saw the glass towers of an appropriately modest business district. It was midday and far below we heard the sound of cannon fire. It might have been a revolution but was, we guessed, the national day celebrations. We could not see them, so we had to imagine the women in traditional costume dancing in Cathedral Square.


Vilnius' appropriately modest business district across the River Neris

We had stood on top of the tower in bright sunshine but, as we began descending the hill, rain started to fall. With a dozen others we ducked into the funicular station.

The sunshine and showers were reminiscent of a British April, but the showers were torrential and the sunshine, when it came, was seriously hot. Twenty minutes later we ate lunch with an umbrella shielding us from the sun.

Lunch in the Old Town

The standard beer snack throughout the Baltics, translated on menus as ‘garlic bread’, is deep fried dark bread splattered with crushed garlic.  We opted for a more elaborate ‘brewer’s platter’ which partnered the garlicky fried bread with salami, cheese, a sprinkling of Pringles and strips of smoked pig’s ear. I ate pig’s ear stew once in Portugal and did not entirely enjoy the strip of gristle in every mouthful. This pig’s ear was a soft and smoky strip of unctuous porkiness.



Lynne and a 'Brewer's Platter'
Vilnius

Lithuanian National Museum

Our walk round castle hill to the National Museum was interrupted by a tantrum from Perkunas, the god of thunder. We raised our umbrella, huddled under some trees and watched the rain bounce off the road.



The main street of Vilnius old town

The Lithuanian National Museum is a large and well laid out collection tracing local history from the arrival of the wandering tribes to the present day. Most impressive was the collection of wooden statues and crucifixes which once stood at crossroads and at the entrance to every village.



Wooden statues once found at crossroads and the entrance to villages
Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius

After the museum a long walk in search of the semi-legendary Skonis ir Kvapas tea house (we found it, but it was closed for refurbishment) resulted in us drinking cappuccinos in a café on the central reservation of Vokieciu Gatve, a dual carriageway with more grass in the middle than tarmac at the edge.

The Holocaust, Ghettoes and the Jewish Community

It is quiet now, but once ran through the centre of Vilnius’ Jewish quarter, and during the Nazi occupation was the dividing line between the city’s two ghettoes. The northern ghetto was ‘cleared’ – meaning its 10 000 inhabitants were murdered - in September 1941. The 29 000 people selected for the southern ghetto were the more able bodied and they were put to work.  The ghetto was closed in June 1943 and the 10 000 survivors dispersed to labour camps. The ghetto areas have since been flattened, rebuilt and revitalised - it is not so easy with human beings.

Next day we walked around the Old Town on our way to Gedimino Prospektas, the main drag of 19th century Vilnius. Outside the tarted up Old Town Vilnius looks much poorer. Many of the buildings have a faded grandeur while others are just faded; the same might be said of the people.


On the way we passed the city’s last remaining synagogue which serves a Jewish community of some 3,000 people.



Vilnius' only remaining synagogue

An Egg on a Plinth amd Frank Zappa

There is also this egg on a plinth, of which more later.



An egg on a plinth
Vilnius

A little further on, in a car park beside an anonymous modern apartment block, is a bust of Frank Zappa. It was erected in1995 after funds were raised by a local musician. Despite Zappa having no connection with Lithuania and being largely unknown, the project caught people’s imagination as, according to the Rough Guide, ‘a wryly ironic gesture in a country that had seen enough of political monuments’.



Frank Zappa,Vilnius

Gedimino Prospektas

Gedimino Prospektas remains the heart of official Vilnius, as opposed to the tourist Vilnius of the Old Town and the shiny modern business area across the River Neris.  It is a long straight road, surprisingly narrow for a main thoroughfare and, like the rest of the city, relatively untroubled by traffic.



Gedimino Prospektas, Vilnius

Genocide Museum in the old KGB Building

We were heading for the Lithuanian Genocide Museum which is housed in the former KGB headquarters. The building was easy to find - it is large and has the names of KGB victims inscribed in its stones. The museum is on the far side and the only signs are round the corner, so we blundered in through the front door and into the Lithuanian National Archives. After a bewildering few minutes we found our way out and round to the right place.

The use of the word ‘genocide’ might lead you to expect the museum was concerned with the fate of Lithuania’s Jews. Not so, it is entirely about the sufferings of Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviet Union.



Lynne and the former KGB building, Vilnius

It is possible to detect, in all three states, a feeling that the sufferings of the Baltic peoples has been largely forgotten and the audio-visual display went into this in great detail. In 1939 the Nazis invaded western Poland, while the Soviet Union, under the terms of the then secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was allowed a free hand in eastern Poland and the Baltics. Britain and France declared war on Germany but totally ignored the actions of the Soviet Union. This inconsistency is never questioned in Britain (and declaring war on Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously would seem, at best, fool-hardy) but its effects on the Baltics was dire.

In 1940, 10 000 Lithuanians, political activists, intellectuals and anybody who got in the way, were transported to the gulags. In 1941, when Hitler turned on the Soviet Union the Germans were, at first, treated as liberators, but it soon became clear they were just another occupying force. In the next two years over 90% of Lithuania’s quarter of a million Jews were murdered. Anti-Semitism had been virtually unknown before the Nazis arrived and many Lithuanians risked their lives to shelter their Jewish neighbours. Others, encouraged by propaganda linking the Jews with the Bolsheviks, joined in, rather too enthusiastically, with the killings. The museum skips this and jumps to the Soviet re-occupation after the defeat of the Nazis.

Armed resistance continued well into the 1950s, meanwhile over 100 000 people, often randomly chosen, were transported to Siberia in an attempt to destroy Lithuanian national identity.
This was undoubtedly one of Stalin’s greater crimes, and shamefully acquiesced to by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, but it pales into insignificance alongside the murder of the Jews. Lithuanians were transported ‘beyond the Urals to the ends of the earth’, as they like to say, but their equating of Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk with the Mouth of Hell and Lithuania with the Garden of Eden fails on both counts.

I do not wish to make light of Lithuanian suffering, which was real and long lasting, and the KGB cells below the exhibition were chilling in the extreme. There were, isolation cells, punishment cells, a purpose built execution chamber and cells which could be flooded with icy water leaving a small and precarious concrete perch from which the prisoner must, eventually, fall. And, to be fair, we had already walked past the Synagogue, the Tolerance Centre and the State Jewish Museum. We had intended to visit them as well, but there is a limit to our appetite for death and misery.

Lithuanian Parliament Building

A few hundred metres further down Gedimino Prospektas is the Lithuanian parliament building. Although stunning in its ugliness, for me it only takes third prize in the All-Baltic Ugly Building Competition.


The Lithanian parliament building - the third
ugliest building in the Baltics 

Blynai
 

It was nearing lunchtime so we walked back to the old town for a beer and some blynai. Most Baltic specialities are common to all three countries, but these pancakes are exclusively Lithuanian. Lynne’s were stuffed with bacon and spinach, mine with cheese and mushroom and all covered in a rich cream sauce. They were pleasant and cheap, but a bit bland for my taste – ‘better with a chilli’ as I so often find myself saying.

St Anne's Church

St Anne’s church is a remarkable late gothic redbrick church and we dropped in on our way to Uzupis, Vilnius’ arty quarter. When Napoleon passed through Vilnius he expressed a desire to move the church to Paris, brick by brick. It is still in Vilnius, though.



St Anne's Church, still in Vilnius

Uzupis

We passed the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, Lithuania’s national poet (who was Polish) and were about to cross the tiny River Vilnia into Uzupis when Perkunas, the thunder god, threw another tantrum, so we visited the nearby Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Mother of God. It was not particularly interesting, but it was dry.

Uzupis declared independence from Lithuania on the first of April 2000. This independence is little more than a sign on a bridge and a state of mind, but it was meant as an ironic statement on the nature of independence in an interdependent world - and this in the city that put up a statue to Frank Zappa just because of the things he was not. There is much to admire in the Vilnius attitude.



The Uzupis 'border'

Uzupis feels like a village, its centre marked by a statue of an angel blowing a trumpet. According to the Rough Guide the angel hatched one night from the egg that stood there before. I have found no other source for this story, but we had seen the egg earlier in our wandering.



The Uzupi Angel

Ironically, a house in the this square was the childhood home of  Felix Dzerzhinsky, a leading figure in the early days of the Soviet Union and founder of the Cheka, later to become the KGB. There is no monument, and most Lithuanians would be happy to point out that Dzerzhinsky was actually Polish.

On the way back we passed, yet again, under the Gate of Dawn. This time we were able to visit the Madonna who turned out to be quite photogenic, as well as affording us an excellent view from her balcony.



The Madonna of the Gate of Dawn
Vilnius

We only had some 60 litai (£13) left and we set out that evening to see if we could have dinner without resorting to plastic. Inside the touristy Old Town we ate pasta with bolognaise sauce and coronation chicken (though the menu used different words), drank two half litres of beer and still had a pocketful of change. Vilnius is not an expensive city.



The view from the Madonna's balcony -
just this once there is no tour group being lectured by a guide

Trundling our case to the bus station next morning was easy in pleasant sunshine. Our comfortable air-conditioned bus left on time for the 300 km trip north to Riga.

We drove through central Vilnius almost without noticing – it is the least urban of cities – and followed the country’s only motorway as far as Panevezys. We crossed flat farmland mainly given over to cereals and rough pasture, and saw farm buildings in the distance, but nothing that could have been called a village. We passed through no settlements either on the motorway or on the two-lane road up to the Latvian border and just once glimpsed a wooden statue like those we had seen in the museum.

Elaborate customs sheds mark the border, but as both Lithuania and Latvia have signed the Schengen agreement the road by-passed them and there were no formalities – or should not have been. Cars passed freely but we were waved into a lay-bye by a policeman. He walked down the bus glancing briefly at passports or identity cards – doubtless he would have unmasked any international terrorists instantly.

A diversion through the Latvian border town of Bauska showed us many wooden buildings, some of them surprisingly large. There were also stone houses, some whitewashed, others in pastel colours their roofs being often corrugated iron or plastic tiles.

Thereafter Latvia looked much like Lithuania - though the road passed through a more forested area – until we reached Riga.

See Also

Part 2: Riga 

Part 3: Tallinn

A Load of Baltics

The Baltic States and What I Learned from Stanley Gibbon's Stamp Catalogue

Like many children, I collected stamps. I was always envious of my friend Christopher who had a far bigger and better organised collection, but then Christopher received help from his father, who was a proper grown-up philatelist, while my father was only normal.

Every year Christopher’s dad would acquire the new edition of the Stanley Gibbon’s Stamp Catalogue, and the old one would be graciously passed to me. It was such a big and important book it came in its own cardboard box.

I realise now that I was actually more interested in the catalogue than in the stamps. I would spend hours leafing through the book looking for exotic countries I had never heard of. I do not know how many eleven year olds are aware that Ifni, Heligoland and Trieste have, at one time or another, produced their own stamps, but I found it a source of wonder. I located them in my school atlas, but searched in vain for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. I had also discovered a pre-first world war atlas in my grandmother's house which showed dozens of strange countries like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but even that did not show Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania.

The Baltic States

Estonia

My inability to locate them was unsurprising. The three Baltic states were absorbed into Tsarist Russia in the eighteenth century and only gained independence in 1920 after fighting a three-cornered war with an already defeated Germany and a distracted Soviet Union. Independence lasted two decades and produced the postage stamps I had seen in the Stanley Gibbon’s catalogue. In 1940 they were invaded by the Soviet Union as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and then by Nazi Germany when Hitler abrogated the pact. The defeat of the Nazis involved re-invasion by the Soviet Union, followed, in 1945, by re-absorption. The three small states disappeared from the eyes of anyone not searching a stamp catalogue for countries they had never heard of. They reappeared in 1991, wresting their independence from the crumbling Soviet Union. They all managed the transition from command economy to liberal democracy with relative ease, joined the EU in 2004 and became, almost from nowhere, part of the European mainstream.

Latvia

So now they are easy to visit, indeed the lure of cheap booze have turned Tallinn and Riga into slightly reluctant hosts to a thousand stag and hen parties. Even so I could still not remember which was which until my colleague Mark kindly pointed out that the states are in alphabetical order, north to south, and even then I remained uncertain about which capital belonged to which country.

Lithuania

The Baltic States were places we had never been and knew little about so it seemed a good idea to visit them. So Lynne and I set off to see all three, or at least their capitals, in ten days. They are small countries; on the official measure of small countries, the Wales, Latvia and Lithuania measure 3W, while Estonia is only 2W - though none of them can match Wales’ 3 million people. They also have fewer sheep.

As we travelled from south to north, the next three posts are:

Vilnius, Lithuania
Riga, Latvia
Tallinn, Estonia