Vilnius: city of surprises

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 31, 1999

Page: M13

Section: Travel

Europos Parkas became possible only with the 1991 ouster of the Soviets, of course. But there's also a downside, culturally speaking, to ditching communism, and it's not just the multiple McDonald's eateries here: In 1995, Vilnius earned the dubious distinction of becoming home to the world's first memorial to Frank Zappa.

Nearly everything about Vilnius surprised me, starting with the presence of a first-rate sculpture park. My hotel was fine, the food was fine, the architecture and art were fine, the shopping was fine, even the visit to the former KGB detention cells was, in a creepy way, fine.

Getting there was not fine. I was traveling with a small group from Warsaw to Vilnius. LOT, the Polish airline, bumped us from our flight, which meant the organizers of the Baltic States tour I was on had to charter an 18-seat prop plane with stringent space limitations. Our luggage was weighed; the steward who looked well in excess of 200 pounds wasn't. The great communist tradition of overmanning because labor is cheap is still in force, I found: Hence, the half-dozen guys with walkie-talkies at the Warsaw airport who spent an hour thrashing out the problem of getting us from the terminal to the plane, which would have been a two-minute walk. Eventually, they found a bus. In Vilnius, we were the subject of a similarly overmanned dispute: No, we couldn't walk the 100 yards or so from the plane to the terminal.

Things brightened the moment we entered the building. People waiting to meet friends and family held armloads of flowers to welcome them. Traveling freely is still a novelty here, and traveling by plane still has a whiff of glamour and excitement. Arrivals are special occasions. And while the outskirts of Vilnius are filled with leftover Soviet buildings -- bleak, huge apartment blocks with laundry hanging over the rusting metal balconies -- the city center has a fairy-tale charm.

Vilnius is a perfect size for walking. Many of the city's pale stucco neoclassical structures -- painted gold, yellow, vanilla, peach, and rose -- have been lovingly restored, often with foreign money. ``IBM,'' says the sign on one lovely turquoise building. On the facades of some, you'll see a spot where centuries' worth of exterior layers have been peeled away, intentionally exposing the buildings' bones, a reminder that the past is ever present, even when it's covered over.

Vilnius is reclaiming its architectural past. The Soviets had closed the city's beautiful cathedral, and yanked three huge Baroque sculptures off its roof, allowing them to smash on the ground below. Reproductions were put up after the fall of the Soviet regime -- but not without debate. The cathedral architecture is a restrained 18th-century neoclassical, and the exuberance of the Baroque figures was always incongruous. In this case, though, the final decision was to make the cathedral look just as it did before the Soviets took control. Back went the statues.

This is a music-conscious city. One evening I attended a concert given by a local chamber music ensemble called Arsenalas, in the Vilnius Picture Gallery, a 17th-century palace that formerly belonged to the Chodkeviciai family. In a white-and-gold rococo room adorned with a ceramic stove in the corner, the musicians performed a program that included standard Western repertory, Lully to Faure, and also the work of M.K. Ciurlionis, a turn-of-the-century Lithuanian composer and pianist, whose Vilnius home is now a museum where concerts are also regularly held.

You needn't buy a concert ticket to hear music performed well in Vilnius, though. The young student musician I heard playing a Beethoven violin romance on a corner near the Presidential Palace was far above the usual street musician standard. One of his predecessors at the Academy of Music here was Jascha Heifetz.

This is also a religious city, with 40 churches for a population of 600,000. Some were used by the Soviets for purposes other than worship: One became the Museum of Atheism. Many are architectural gems, their vocabularies ranging from medieval to neoclassical. In the so-called ``Gothic Corner'' in the old part of town, for instance, are three churches in that style. The most beautiful is St. Anne's, which boasts a brick facade that looks like lace, with huge, elegant arches threading their way through slender pillars. When Napoleon dropped by en route to Russia, he expressed a desire to bring St. Anne's back to Paris with him.

The 17th-century Baroque Church of Saints Peter and Paul was built on the site that was allegedly headquarters for the cult of the Lithuanian pagan goddess of love, Milda. I learned this from a publication called ``Vilnius in Your Pocket: The Official City Guide.'' Most of the world's big cities have similar periodicals, but I've never found one as complete -- and completely irreverent -- as the Vilnius version, which takes pains to point out, for instance, that Lithuania was the last pagan state in Europe.

A lingering pagan influence might account for the raucous interior of Saints Peter and Paul, a white-on-white stucco extravaganza adorned with 2,000 figures -- laundresses, tritons, characters from local legends and the Bible, an unfortunate chap being boiled in oil, allegorical skeletons reminding you to behave yourself while you've still got the chance, and some folks not behaving well at all. Silent witnesses to all this are the elephant sculptures holding up the church's arches: Their plaster trunks are bound with plaster cloth so they can't blab.

Yes, Vilnius is a religious city -- but Egle Jakubenaite, my guide, also observes that ``basketball is our second religion.'' Lithuania's victories over the Soviet Army team, she says, used to be a particular point of pride.

The oddest manifestation of Catholicism here -- at least from my lapsed-Unitarian perspective -- is the ``Gates of Dawn,'' originally part of the town's fortifications. In the 17th century, Carmelites built a chapel in the wall over the gate, to house an image of the Virgin that they believed had miraculous healing powers. The icon of the Virgin is now surrounded by 15,000 offerings in silver, many depicting body parts people wanted cured: If you had a hurt leg, you got a silversmith to make a silver leg to give to the icon. Pious elderly women still climb the steep stone staircase to the chapel on their knees.

Vilnius was once a center of Jewish culture, too, but Jewish Vilnius was virtually obliterated by the Nazis. There were once over 100 synagogues here; now there is one, the Choraul Synagogue, built in 1904 and restored three years ago. Its ornate peach-and-blue interior has an almost Moorish feel. But, sadly, it also feels like a relic. The caretaker says that only 15-20 people attend services here regularly, and that he, at age 75, is the youngest of them.

One of the many things I loved about Vilnius is that I could afford it. Much of Europe has become too expensive for Americans who want to shop; Lithuania hasn't. On the street you can find an array of well-made crafts, including baskets, amber jewelry, handmade clothing, and bracelets and buttons made from woods with intricate graining. For $5, you can buy quite a nice basket from the woman who made it, who will be enthusiastic about selling her wares without being so aggressive that you're uncomfortable.

Outside the handsomely rebuilt Island Castle in Trakai, Lithuania's former capital, a half-hour drive from Vilnius, is a row of stalls selling dresses and sweaters crocheted from Lithuanian flax. They're chic, they won't wrinkle, and they cost next to nothing. I paid $20 for a dress with full-length vest. I've actually worn the outfit back home, as opposed to the complete wardrobes I've lugged back from places like Senegal and Indonesia, clothes that turned out to look ludicrous outside their country of origin.

I'm always afraid that ``amber'' will turn out to be plastic, so in Vilnius I bought mine at a legit-looking place in the center of town, called the Amber Sculpture Museum. (It's the kind of museum where the ``exhibits'' are all for sale.) There was something irrationally comforting about the high-overhead premises, and the shop has a far broader range of styles than the street vendors do. In an attempt to educate their clientele, the shop's personnel offer pamphlets with interesting translations from the Lithuanian. One claimed that the most significant deposits of amber ``occur only on the shoes of the Baltic Sea,'' which made me check the owner's footwear.

My tour of the Baltic States, organized by the travel company Abercrombie & Kent, included all three capitals -- Vilnius; Riga, the capital of Latvia; and Tallinn, in Estonia. En route from Vilnius to Riga was a stop at the famous Hill of Crosses, where for centuries pilgrims have come to put up crosses that now number in the hundreds of thousands -- crosses tiny and huge, in various shapes, made of materials from birch twigs to steel, packed so tightly together that columbine and ferns struggle to find space to grow among them. The Soviets repeatedly bulldozed the crosses, only to find the hill blooming with more of them soon after.

In Riga, I admired both the Art Nouveau architecture -- much of it designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of the filmmaker, Sergei -- and the most beautiful suspension bridge I've ever seen. And I was lucky enough to stumble on a choir rehearsal in the Dome Cathedral, which has a famous organ with 6,718 pipes. The choir would have sounded fine anywhere, but in this setting they were celestial: I've never experienced finer acoustics than in this cathedral that dates from the 13th century. Tallinn is intensely competitive about organs, and my guide, while acknowledging that the one in Riga is larger, claimed that the organ in Tallinn's cathedral makes a sound that echoes two seconds longer.

It was Vilnius, though, that made the biggest impression on me, maybe partly because I stopped there first, but also because Egle was such a great guide. (My guide in Tallinn had kept her Soviet-era totalitarian lack of humor intact, along with a tendency toward the literal. ``Now we are turning left'' was her idea of fascinating information to pass along to tourists.)

Its historic center may have been restored to movie-set perfection, but Vilnius still bears scars left by Nazis and Soviets alike. Egle pointed out the edge of a forest on the outskirts of the city, where people once went to gather mushrooms and berries: It's also where thousands of Jews and intellectuals were taken by the Nazis to be shot and dumped into mass graves.

It's Russia's unpredictability that Lithuanians fear now. ``We live on a box of powder,'' Egle said, and it wasn't detergent she was talking about. Pointing out some Stalinist sculpture that remains in situ still, she said, ``We shouldn't get rid of all of it. We can't erase 50 years of Soviet presence here.''

But they've turned part of that presence into a tourist attraction -- the KGB Museum, a converted turn-of-the-century courthouse where thousands of Lithuanians endured interrogation before being shipped to Siberia. A former inmate now gives tours of this chamber of horrors that was used as a prison right up until Lithuania gained independence in 1991. Upward of 20 prisoners inhabited the same small cell, he said, where they slept standing up, leaning against one another. Prisoners were allowed to wear only underwear in the unheated isolation cells. Showers were allowed once a month, the temperature of the water controlled by guards who could make it scalding or freezing. One torture cell could be flooded with cold water so prisoners couldn't lie down to sleep. And so on.

For all this, the guide says the KGB prison was nothing compared to Siberia, where he spent 15 years in a climate where the temperature bottomed out at 50 degrees below zero. This elderly gentleman looked remarkably hale and hearty, given what he'd endured. His secret? ``Siberia was like living in a refrigerator,'' he said. ``It preserved me.''

My visit to Vilnius was part of a tour called ``Poland, The Baltic States, Finland and St. Petersburg,'' organized by the Illinois-based travel company Abercrombie & Kent. The price for the two-week tour, which I highly recommend as an introduction to a part of the world few Americans know well, is $5,995. The A & K number is 800-323-7308.

I flew on British Airways, which has frequent service to both Vilnius and Riga. Call 800-AIRWAYS.