The Baltic Capitals: Part 2 Riga, Latvia

Latvia

Riga

From the very first Riga offered us something Vilniushad not - road systems and traffic hold-ups. Although the population has shrunk from a million in 1990 to 700 thousand now (still 150 thousand more than Vilnius) Riga remains the largest city in the Baltic States and feels genuinely metropolitan.

After a brief detour to the airport to set down and pick up we arrived at the bus station, conveniently situated between the old town and the market.

Arrival the Bus Station

Inside the air-conditioned bus we had been unaware of how hot the air had become. The Baltic States enjoy (and endure) a climate intermediate between continental and maritime. The winters are vicious but the summers are warm, wet and as unreliable as they are in Britain. Vilnius is on the same latitude as Durham and Riga is as far north as Dundee but in summer, they are generally much warmer than their British counterparts. The temperature was in the upper 20s while we were in Riga, the humidity high and the hotel without air-conditioning. Sleeping with the windows open, we were regularly woken by sea gulls squabbling over nesting rights on the roof opposite. Next time I'll take an air rifle.



The Market after hours, Riga

Riga Academy of Science Building

Mainly housed in five huge hangars originally built to house zeppelins, the busy market now spreads into the surrounding area. We trundled our case between the flower stalls, down the seedy street behind and past the Academy of Science. This enormous Stalinist Gothic pile was a gift to the people of Latvia from the ‘workers and peasants of the other Soviet republics’. They must be very grateful; the Academy wins my award for the second ugliest building in the Baltics.



The Riga Academy of Science

A Little History

Only 42% of Rigans are ethnic Latvians while Russians are the second largest group at 40%. Wooden buildings between the Academy and our hotel could so easily have been in a Russian city.



Wooden buildings near the Academy of Science, Riga

Russification of Latvia started in the early 20th century and was further encouraged by Stalin as a way to destroy Latvia’s national identity. The city’s recent population fall comes mainly from Russians choosing – or being persuaded – to go elsewhere.

Russia might have been the latest country to leave its stamp on Riga, but German influence, particularly in the old town, is even more marked. Indeed Riga has been a German city for most of its existence.

The city was founded in 1201 by Albert Von Buxhoeveden, a priest from Bremen. Scandalised by Baltic paganism he arrived in the River Daugava with twenty shiploads of heavily armed men; just enough, he calculated, to convert the people to a religion of love and peace.

The knights of the Livonian Order, as they became known, threw themselves into crusading with a will. Further south, as we have seen, King Mindaugas united the tribes and, for extra security, converted to Christianity. As a result Lithuanians were to jointly head an empire, while Latvians and Estonians spent the next five centuries as the rural peasantry or urban servants of a German elite.

Increasing stability brought merchants flooding in. Riga soon became a mercantile city and, in 1282, a member of the Hanseatic League - a loose alliance of north German trading cities.

House of the Blackheads

The Hanseatic old town covers a couple of square kilometres bounded by the market, the River Daugava and a ring of parkland. Some buildings date from the fourteenth century, the oldest being part of what is now the Museum of Decorative Arts. The most distinctive building is the House of the Blackheads – a name which loses something in translation. The right hand part of the building dates from the fourteenth century, the left hand side was tacked on in 1891.



Lynne and the House of the Blackheads, Riga

But that House of the Blackheads is not the one in the photograph. The original was damaged by German shelling in 1941 and later demolished by the Soviet Union. The present building is a copy constructed for Riga’s eight-hundredth anniversary celebrations in 2001. The Town Hall across the square is another rebuild, but with less concern for accuracy as its neo-classical portal fronts a modern office block.

The Blackheads was a drinking club for bachelors named for their patron St Maurice, a Roman warrior-saint of African origin. Their carousing was legendry and suggests Riga’s current popularity as a centre for stag parties has historical precedent. The old town is well set out for the purpose with dozens of café/bars having tables on wooden platforms along the street, and whole squares, including the sizeable cathedral square, decked over and turned into bars serving drinks, snacks and full meals. Over the weekend we encountered parties from England, France and the Netherlands, but although they were obvious they were not particularly rowdy. How things became later I do not know, but there was a noticeable police presence in the early evening.

Riga Protestant Cathedral and the Salaspils Head

Like any medieval city, Riga has churches to spare.  The Protestant Cathedral – there are also Catholic and Orthodox Cathedrals – was started in 1211 by Albert von Buxhoeveden himself and is the largest in the Baltics (it is interesting how many superlatives are qualified by ‘in the Baltics’). In Lutheran tradition, it is somewhat austere inside – except for a remarkable carved pulpit - but the outside is more flamboyant, the redbrick Romanesque building having been added to and adjusted for eight hundred years. The cloisters house a haphazard collection of cannons and bits of old church as well as the Salaspils head. Allegedly found in the town of Salaspils in the nineteenth century this is either a stone idol from the dark ages or a fake.  Whichever it is, I think I know how he feels.



The Salaspils Head, Lutherna Cathedral, Riga

St Peter's, Riga

St Peter’s Church looms over the next square along. Also started in the thirteenth century most of the current building dates from the early 1400s. The 137 m wooden spire, added in 1491, was once the tallest in Europe. It fell down two hundred years later and was rebuilt in Baroque style. For a small fee – actually 3 Lats (£3.75) is quite a large fee for a ride in a lift – you can visit the viewing platform 100 m above the city.


The tower of St Peter's looming over surrounding buildings, Riga

However, photographs made it clear it was not the Baroque tower we were about to climb. When war came to Riga in 1941 the church sustained considerable damage and the current tower is a steel replica of its 18th century predecessor.



St Peter's and its tower in 1941, Riga

To the northwest, there is a view over the old town, the cathedral, castle and River Daugava….

 

The Cathedral, the river and the castle, Riga

….while southeast are the zeppelin hangars of the market, and the Academy of Science.



The market and the Acadamey of Science, Riga

Palace of Peter the Great

Behind the cathedral is the Palace of Peter the Great. It is a modest palace, but then Peter only stayed there for a few months in 1711. He had visited Riga earlier, during his ‘Grand Embassy’ when he toured Europe learning how to turn Russia into a modern state. Unfortunately, local officials upset him, so when he returned in 1709, during the Great Northern War, he is reputed to have thrown the first grenade himself. The demise of the Livonian Knights had seen Latvia briefly absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Empire before being annexed by Sweden, but after Peter’s second visit Latvia, along with Lithuania and Estonia, was to become part of Tsarist Russia.



The 'Palace' of Peter the Great, Riga

In 1744, the future Catherine The Great stayed here. The captain of her guard was the famed teller of tall tales, Hieronymus von Munchhausen. And that is true.

St Saviour's Anglican Church

Walking towards the castle, a brief detour took us to the Anglican Church of St Saviour’s. That there were enough Anglicans in Riga in the 19th century to warrant building a church is surprising; that they imported not only the bricks from England but also the soil to lay them on is amazing. Desecrated during the Soviet period it is now home to an English-speaking congregation, though it was not open when we passed by.

St Saviour's Anglican Church, Riga

Riga Castle

Riga is flat and lacks the commanding height considered essential for a medieval stronghold, so that is not what Riga Castle is. Sitting unthreateningly beside the river, the current building was started in 1491 and, after countless modifications, now looks like the office block it is – at least in part.  We passed the door to the Presidential offices as we climbed the stairs to the Latvian History Museum. We considered dropping in for a chat, but decided against it.



Lynne outside Riga Castle

The girl on the desk was embarrassed to be discovered asleep on duty. Once we had woken her up, we spent an hour in the museum, which covers the history of Latvia from prehistoric times to the Soviet Union. It covers much of the same ground as the Lithuanian National Museum, but is more homely, though still comprehensive and well labelled - in English as well as Latvian.

Trip on the River Duagava

The 1000 km long River Daugava reaches the sea at Riga and like any other tourist city with a major river at its disposal Riga provides the opportunity for boat trips opening up different views of the castle, the city and its spires.


The market and the tower of St Peter's from the River Daugava, Riga

Riga was also home of Lielas Kristaps (Big Christopher), a pagan prototype for the St Christopher legend. Posters throughout the city also hinted at the popularity of the equally legendary Harijs Poters - presumably a relative of Vilnius’ Haris Poteris.



Big Christopher (he's the one in the case), Riga

The Three Brothers

The old town contains many more buildings worthy of more than a passing glance. The Three Brothers are venerable merchant’s houses, the oldest, on the right, dates from the early 1400s and seems to be leaning on its younger sibling to stay upright.



The Three Brothers, Riga

The Metzendorf House

The Menzendorf House is a rather misleadingly named museum. The Menzendorfs were coffee merchants who prospered here at the at the turn of the 20th century, but the museum has been furnished in the style of its 16th century owner, Jurgen Helm.

St James’ Barracks date from the Swedish period and are slowly being colonised by upmarket boutiques.


St James' Barracks, Riga

Great Guild and Small Guild

The Great Guild and the Small Guild looked after the interests of the German tradesmen. Latvians were eventually allowed a Guild of Fishermen and Boatman, with all the lack of prestige the name suggests. The Art Nouveau edifice opposite the rather dull Great Guild building was allegedly constructed by a man blackballed from the Great Guild. In revenge he placed two black cats on his roof offering their backsides to the Great Guild, though he was later persuaded to turn them round. It is a good story, though not necessarily true, but the cats are remarkably lifelike.



The Black Cat Building, Riga

The Barricade Memorial

The parliament is also in the old town. The building is appropriate for its purpose, a bit dull but not as dramatically ugly as its Lithuanian counterpart. Nearby is a memorial to those who died on the barricades in 1991 as Latvia wrested its independence from the crumbling Soviet Union.


Barricade Memorial, Riga

The Feedom Monument

The Freedom Monument was erected just outside the old town during Latvia’s 20 years of inter-war independence. Surprisingly, the Soviets never demolished it, and less surprisingly, it was the scene of the first independence demonstrations in 1987. As in Lithuania, some Latvians saw the 1941 German invasion as liberation from the Soviet Union and in the 1990s the statue became the focus of gatherings of former SS volunteers.



The Freedom Monument, Riga

The Latvian Riflemen and the Museum of the Soviet Occupation

Not all of Latvia’s Russian population welcomed independence. The dour granite statute of The Latvian Riflemen across the old town from the Freedom Monument provides a focus for their grievances. Created by the Russians in 1915 the Latvian Riflemen fought with distinction in the First World War but, after taking needlessly heavy casualties, became politicised and sided with the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Red Latvian Riflemen were used in the failed Soviet take over of Latvia in 1919, and fought throughout Russia in the subsequent civil war.



The Latvian Riflemen, Riga

Current attitudes to their memorial are mixed. The statue is still there, but The Latvian Rifleman’s square is now a car park, and their museum, between the statue and the House of the Blackheads, has become the Museum of the Soviet Occupation.

The museum is a strange black cuboid on stilts that, despite strong opposition from the Lithuanian Parliament and the Latvian Academy of Science, gets my vote as the ugliest building in the Baltics – and for some way beyond.



The Museum of the Occupation, Riga - the ugliest building in the Baltics

Inside, it covers much the same ground as the Lithuanian Genocide Museum, inevitably so as the history of oppression and deportation under the Soviet occupation is very similar. Although it lacks the drama of the KGB cells in Vilnius, the museum is thoughtful and well laid out with a rather more measured tone - and at least this time the Jews get a mention. 35 000 Latvian Jews were murdered in 1941 alone.

Kvass and the Market in the Zeppelin Hangars

Our final day started in the market, a huge bustling place where flowers, vegetables, dairy produce and meat all have their own area – though hand-knitted socks seemed available everywhere. Red ‘caviar’, the roe of salmon or trout, is very popular. Prices in the old town were higher than in Lithuania, though still below western European levels. The prices paid by real Latvians in the market were considerably lower.



The meat market in a zeppelin hangar, Riga

We had only previously drunk kvass in Russia, but found the distinctive little yellow bowsers dotted around the market. Brewed from bread, this very mildly alcoholic drink has some relationship to the ‘small beer’ that was the English staple when most water was too dangerous to drink. Kvass almost went the way of small beer after independence, hit by the double whammy of Coca Cola and improved hygiene regulations. The kvass makers have now cleaned up their act and fought back to such an extent that Coca Cola has become a loss making business in Latvia. Local kvass is produced from either regular rye bread or black bread. The fresh, cool yeasty drink we enjoyed at the market had the unmistakable pumpernickel flavour of black bread.



Lynne drinks Kvass, Riga Market
This 'distinctive yellow bowser' is wearing a confusing blue overcoat

Riga and the Holocaust

Beyond our hotel and away from the old town we found the remains of the Great Synagogue. Destroyed by fire in July 1941, the ruins are now a monument to the thousands who died in the holocaust. The names listed on the memorial plaque, however, are not those of the hundred people inside the building when it was set alight, but of the four hundred or so Latvian Rigans who risked their lives hiding their Jewish fellow citizens.



The remains of the Great Synagogue, Riga

Our walk from the synagogue to the Art Nouveau district the locals call Centrs took us through some less salubrious areas and past the Russian orthodox church of the Annunciation.



Bus queue in Gogol Street, Riga

The Art Nouveau district is, reputedly the finest in Northern Europe, many of the buildings being designed by local architect Mikhail Eisenstein, whose fame was rather outshone by his son, film director Sergei (Battleship Potemkin) Eisenstein. Apart from the regular pattern of wide streets - a marked contrast to the medieval alleys of the old town - it does not strike the casual observer’s eye like the much larger Art Nouveau district of Barcelona.

The Museum of Latvia’s Jews is on the third floor of the Jewish Community Centre in the Art Nouveau district. The story is told largely in photographs.

Jews made up over ten per cent of Riga’s population in the pre-war years. The photos are largely of prosperous families doing what prosperous families do, going to the seaside, having picnics, posing outside their homes. The pictures would be banal were it not for the realisation that only the old people at a 1903 family picnic would die natural deaths, and that the whole of a football team lined up for their pre-season picture were destined to be murdered.

Film clips of the shootings, though well-known, are anything but banal. Mass killings ‘in a forest in Latvia’ sounds extraordinarily remote when sitting in the Staffordshire countryside. When it happened in a forest not 10 km away, a forest we had seen from the tower of St Peter’s Church, the immediacy is chilling.

The names on the monument at the synagogue are here as well, but fleshed out with photographs and stories. Some of the hidden Jews were discovered, with terrible consequences for them and their hosts, others remained in hiding to the end of the war. A number of the people photographed are still alive and it is remarkable to think that the old woman at the next table at the restaurant may, perhaps, be one of these heroic people. More chillingly, the old man at another table may be one of those who volunteered for the SS and took part in the killings. And the man of my age at yet another table could be a former KGB officer, though he is more likely a blameless Polish electrician on a bus tour. There are still fissures in Latvian society that are best not probed too deeply.



Beer snacks in Esplanade Park, Riga

Russian Orthodox Cathedral

We had lunch in Esplanade Park before popping into the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Nativity.



Inside the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Riga

Eating and Drinking in Riga

Lunch in Riga involved beer snacks, with the inevitable garlicky fried bread playing a major part as it did in Vilnius. In the park we had fried squid rings with it while elsewhere we had a mackerel fillet on a thick slice of bread, or a seafood medley, lightly floured and fried.

Dinners in Riga were not memorable, but wholesome and reasonably priced. The Baltic staples of pork and potatoes – with or without cheese - were well represented on menus but there were other choices available; Lynne particularly enjoying a carp in cream sauce. Dinner was always accompanied with a breadbasket of the highest quality. The black rye bread, often with inclusions of nuts or fruit, was memorable, but the garlic butter that invariably came with it seemed rather inappropriate.

Drinking in Riga inevitably means beer. The local brews, like those of Vilnius, being heavy, darkish lagers in the Polish style. There is also Riga Black Balsam. At 45% alcohol, this black viscous liquid looks like it should be sweet but is actually very bitter. It is said to be an acquired taste. Lynne gave up at first sip, but I persevered and several days later, when I finally emptied our 20 cl bottle, I was sorry that it had all gone.

Next day the Simple Bus Line, which had brought us from Vilnius, whisked us on to Tallinn. Their comfortable air-conditioned buses are operated with commendable efficiency, but requiring employees to wear a badge bearing the single word ‘Simple’ does bring a smirk to the lips of those with English as their first language.

Our journey north took us briefly beside the Gulf of Riga, but was largely through forest. Again the well-maintained two-lane road passed through no towns or villages before the Estonian border, which was marked, as Schengen borders should be, by nothing more than a ‘Welcome to Estonia’ sign.

See also

Part 1: Vilnius

Part 3: Tallinn

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