Lithuania

It's love at first sight in Vilnius, where the price is right and the sights are glorious

Author: By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 9, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Travel

Even if Lithuanian Airlines had not upgraded us for the 50-minute flight from Warsaw -- apparently, we had to conclude, because we were the only Americans on the seriously underbooked flight.

But it had done so, and we did fall in love, during a weeklong stay in a city that reminded us -- as it had many turn-of-the-century emigrants -- so much of Boston.

The convoluted, cobblestoned streets of the Old City wind past dozens of exuberantly Baroque churches. Narrow archways open into 18th- and 19th-century courtyard houses. And in the closing days of summer, the stroller was never far from a sidewalk cafe.

In an odd way, the fact that we kept coming upon places and spaces from different angles -- something that always happens in Boston but rarely in cities built on an east-west/north-south grid -- made them, and the city, more familiar.

My wife's maternal grandparents had come from Lithuania during the great wave of immigration during the late 19th century. While all contact with family members still in Lithuania was lost during the war, Sara delighted in telling people we met in Vilnius that, according to her research, one-third of Lithuania's population was living in North America in the early 1900s.

So with those dimly-remembered family ties, Lithuania had always been on our ``should-go-someday'' list.

There are no direct flights from Boston to Vilnius, but Lithuanian Airlines, created when newly-independent Lithuania gained control of some 20 former Aeroflot planes, flies to most European cities, and we connected in Warsaw.

We arrived after dark, but had made arrangements through Litinterp -- another remarkable product of Lithuania's five years of independence -- for a bed-and-breakfast in the Old City.

That turned out to be a spacious room on the top floor of a handsomely restored courtyard house owned by Stanys Patkauskas, an English-speaking archeologist on the staff of the state archeology institute, and his wife.

Breakfasts -- which we shared with three other guests, Americans in training for World Teach assignments in other Lithuanian cities -- were heavy on the eastern European meat and cheese model, but a filling start for a day of exploring.

And all this for just $25 a day at the exchange rate of roughly 4 Litas to the dollar.

The glory of Vilnius is its Baroque churches.

Christianity came very late to Lithuania, and its people were practicing a form of nature worship well into the early 16th century. ``We were the original tree-huggers,'' as someone put it, and there is a looming sculpture of Perkunas, the thunder god, in the park behind the cathedral.

What all this means is that by the time Lithuanians began building churches, they had missed out on the great church architectural styles of western Europe, the Romanesque and the Gothic, and were just in time to connect with the Baroque -- and the result was a Baroque wilder and more individualistic than found in western Europe.

The apartment where we were staying was just across a narrow cobblestone street from the early 17th-century Church of All Saints, and we decided to attend Mass there on Sunday morning.

By then, after visiting several other churches, we were getting used to the Technicolored fantasy of putti, draped and undraped, and saints swept up in swirls of clouds. But as I looked around, I was startled by the unfamiliar figure over the main altar, much too beardy for a Catholic saint.

``Who's that?'' I whispered. ``Elijah,'' Sara replied shaking her head in amazement. ``Don't you see his wheel of fire?''

And over the next few days we found other such surprises. Four doctors of the church, Augustus and Gregory, Anselm and John Chrysostom, appropriately flanked the main altar in the Church of St. John, which leads into the galleried courtyard of Vilnius University, but had been captured in what can only be described as inappropriate moments of levity: heads tilted, knees lifted, elbows akimbo.

Elsewhere there was Mary Magdalene -- and a coiled snake -- at the foot of the cross, a Christ crucified on a living tree whose clusters of fruit contained saints' reliquaries, and a Kelly green and lime green color scheme surrounding a main altar.

One of the greatest of Vilnius' Baroque treasures, the Church of Sts. Francis and Bernadine, was plundered during the Soviet occupation but is being restored. We were able to wander in, one afternoon, and watch the work in progress -- the carving of replicas of the destroyed altar and choir stalls and the uncovering of long-hidden, 15th-century frescoes.

But the exuberant glory of Vilnius' churches could not completely blot out that grim feeling that always comes over me in eastern Europe -- the feeling born of the realization that it was in this corner of the world that the greatest horrors of our time had occurred.

I mentioned this one day to our host Stanys Patkauskas when I bumped into him on the street. He nodded agreement, then said that a uncle had been executed -- he mimed the statement by pointing a finger to his temple. And under Soviet occupation, he said, ``Members of my family were sent to Siberia.''

For visitors from Boston, the absence of Jews was the strongest reminder of the city's tragic past.

Boston's historic connection with Vilnius is commemorated in the Vilna Shul, the Beacon Hill synagogue built in 1919 for Jews from Vilnius and other eastern European communities who lived in the old West End.

Before World War II, Vilnius was very much of a Jewish city, known as ``the Jerusalem of the North'' for its rich cultural and intellectual life. Jews made up half the city's pre-war population, and there were no fewer than 96 synagogues in the city.

That life -- the people and their culture -- was all-but destroyed during the three years of German occupation. Only a few thousand Jews remain in Vilnius, and only one synagogue -- and that one not the grand synagogue that was itself one of the city's Baroque treasures but a modest brick structure built in the 1890s.

Only a few weeks after we had left Vilnius -- heading east for a week in St. Petersburg -- it was reported that a priceless library of Yiddish and Hebrew books that had been smuggled to safety during the Holocaust was languishing in a Vilnius church. The Lithuanian National Library acknowledged it lacked funds to maintain the collection properly. This news has touched off interest in Lithuania by Jewish groups in the West and at least one American tourist agency, New York-based Isram Tours, is now sponsoring tours to Vilnius.

Whatever the outcome of efforts to save the collection of Yiddish books, a Lubavicher restaurant is struggling to open on the edge of the old ghetto and a cultural museum in the old Yiddish theater is slowly organizing a collection of artifacts found in the ruins of the city's destroyed synagogues and schools. We were enchanted by a collection of ``Purim dolls,'' brightly-dressed wooden figures of characters from the biblical story of Esther.

There is also a small Holocaust museum -- housed in a frame building that had been a KGB office during the Soviet era. It was there we learned that from a manhole in the courtyard of the house where we were staying some 200 Jews escaped through the sewers to join partisan groups in the forests south of Vilnius the day before the ghetto was liquidated in early 1944.

While the range of things to buy -- and things to eat -- is somewhat limited, it is a pretty safe bet that more amber earrings and necklaces are sold in Vilnius' street market in a day than in all the jewelry stores of Boston in a month.

The market sets up every morning in a block-long arcade, halfway between the neoclassical Town Hall -- now being restored for what locals call a ``we are not sure yet'' museum -- and the grand cathedral square.

From the dozens of amber merchants it was possible to buy -- at astonishingly reasonable prices -- any variety of amber pieces as well as chunks of uncut amber gathered along the shores of the Baltic Sea's ``amber coast,'' 180 miles to the northwest, and smaller chips containing the fossilized bodies of insects trapped millions of years ago in the amber resin.

Other street merchants offered crocheted lace caps, linen blouses and jackets, leather bags and belts -- and Red Army uniforms and insignia sold off by Soviet soldiers before they finally left Lithuania in 1992.

On our first night in Vilnius we discovered that it is a city to rank with Warsaw and Krakow for memorable meals of game.

At the Lokys (The Bear), located in the brick cavern of an early Gothic building, we were able to order both wild boar and elk (that evening's substitute for venison) -- at $23 (plus tip) for both of us, including vodka and wine. Unfortunately, we were driven out before dessert when someone decided to play increasingly raucous games with the restaurant's sound system.

We fared better, as far as atmosphere is concerned, on other nights when we happily ate in neighborhood restaurants and in the outdoor cafes wedged into the corners of buildings or tucked away in courtyards like the Medininkai -- and were treated, one evening, to an unseen pianist in a rehearsal room overhead in the Philharmonic Hall practicing something of Messian.

While the choices tended to be limited to what filling we wanted in the bliniys (caviar was a better bet than sausage), prices, including a glass of vodka averaged under $10 for the two of us.

We tore ourselves away from all this twice during our stay for day trips to Kaunas and Trakai, both via buses that the Soviets should have taken back with them.

On arrival in Kaunas, city, we followed recommended procedure and took a local bus into its Old City, and then, after wandering about for several hours, walked back to the main bus station along the 2-mile-long pedestrian mall lined with shops, art galleries and cafes.

Trakai is where families from Vilnius go on summer weekends to swim, sail or lie in the sun. The major attraction there, a handsomely-restored 14th-century castle, turned out to be an unadvertised half-hour walk from the bus depot -- but fully worth it for the glimpse of frame houses built by Europe's first ``guest workers,'' the Karaites, a Turkic tribe brought to Lithuania in the late 14th century.

The castle, built to defend Lithuania's medieval capital from the Teutonic Order (the same knights that fall through the ice in Eisenstein's film ``Alexander Nevsky'), stands on an island in a lake large enough to be the site of international sailing and rowing regattas. Indeed, it was a delight to see, from the castle's watchtower, sailboats reaching down the lake with spinnakers set.

If Vilnius sounds like love at first sight, it was. And that was in no small measure the result of happening onto Litinterp, a private agency created after liberation to provide translation and interpretation (hence the name) services to the hoped-for influx of businessmen from western Europe.

Its founders, three brothers from Belgium, had guessed right, said Grazina Alijosinte, the young university graduate who runs the Vilnius office. Very quickly, they opened offices in Kaunas and the seacoast town of Klaipeda and began recruiting bed-and-breakfast hosts. They now publish a series of bimonthly ``in your pocket'' city guides as well as operate a chain of supermarkets.

Alijosinte said that her father, a Soviet-era official, had insisted on her attending a special school where she would learn English. ``His friends asked him why bother,'' she said, ``since Lithuania was closed to the world. But he insisted. He saw that in the future, people who didn't know English would have trouble finding a job.''

That may not have happened yet, but soon after getting its independence from the Soviet Union, Lithuania declared English -- instead of Russian -- to be the nation's official second language. If nothing else, that makes Lithuania an easy place to visit.

Exchange rate: The Litas (Lt.) is pegged to the US dollar, and the exchange rate is roughly four Lt. to $1.

Two useful guidebooks: Rick Steves' ``Baltics and Russia'' (John Muir Publications, $9.95) and ``Guide to Lithuania'' by Raza Avizienis and William Hough (Globe Pequot Press, $14.95). Also, ``Vilnius in Your Pocket,'' a combination guidebook and events listing published bimonthly by Litinterp (4 Lt./$1)