When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay—a sort of Vilnius, anyhow; a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital, to illustrate his second novel. I watched it take shape in his studio—the cathedral, the old battlements on top of a hill overlooking the city, the Soviet-era television tower. I studied it the way I’d studied photographs of 19th-century relatives, because in fact Vilnius is where some of my 19th-century relatives were from, before they landed in central Iowa. My mother’s family didn’t speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn’t want to worry their children about the war. Vilnius was the only place my grandmother ever specifically mentioned. She proudly assured me that we were related to the Vilna Gaon, the famous Talmudic scholar of the 18th century. She showed me a painting of him as proof, never mind that the painting had been done by her sister Blanche in the 1970s, with big Margaret Keane eyes, or that nearly every Lithuanian Jewish family makes the same claim. I looked at the streets of Edward’s clay Vilnius and expected to see miniature relatives walking down them. Vilnius seemed like a fairy-tale place to me, unbowdlerized and European: dark, beautiful, imaginary, familiar.
“Someday we’ll go to the real place,” said Edward. He’d lived there off and on for about a year, working as a playwright. “We’ll eat cepelinai. They’re a national dish. Enormous blimp-shaped dumplings, named after zeppelins.” That didn’t sound promising. “And pigs’ ears, of course. Your dinner arrives, and you can say hello to it.” He mimed speaking into his dinner plate. “Hello! Hello!”
“My forebears never touched the stuff,” I answered, shuddering.
Three years later, even our flight from Paris seemed like something from a children’s book: We were surrounded by an enormous French family—mother, father, aunt, uncle, half a dozen look-alike daughters, a handful of sons-in-law, and dozens of grandchildren—more of them as the trip went on, it seemed, as though they’d been smuggled on board in pockets. They were off to visit a relative who’d become a monk in Lithuania, explained the aunt, who sat next to us. To celebrate, they began to sing.
“It’s the von Trapps,” said Edward.
“They’re French,” I said, “so it’s the de Trapps.”
“It’s the de Trops,” said Edward.
Vilnius turned out to be the fairy-tale city I’d hoped for, recognizable from Edward’s model but visible now in Technicolor: red tile roofs, yellow stucco buildings, dozens of church spires, and bounded on all sides by green forest. The city is 16 miles from the geographical center of Europe, about 20 miles from the Belarus border, and the architecture is a mix of styles—Italianate, Baroque, Gothic, Neoclassical—with a 16th-century Old Town, a beautiful colonnaded cathedral, and seemingly hundreds of people who would like to sell you Baltic amber, set in pins or strung on necklaces or shaped into little trees or glued onto rocks to resemble hedgehogs. There’s always a castle on a hill in a fairy tale: Nearby is Castle Hill, with Gediminas’s Tower, built in the 14th century by the grand duke Gediminas, the city’s founder. According to legend, Gediminas took a nap at the foot of a hill near the junction of the Vilnia and Neris rivers. He dreamed of an iron wolf with a howl as loud as that of a hundred wolves. His priest interpreted the dream: Gediminas should found a city on the spot, which would be as indomitable as an iron wolf and as glorious as the sound of a hundred of them.
Since then, the city has been part of tsarist Russia and Poland. Napoleon and his troops marched through twice, once in triumph on their way to Russia, and then in defeat on their way back. In World War I, Vilnius was occupied by Germany; it was later annexed to Poland. During World War II, it was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, and then by the Soviets again. In the late 1980s, the Soviet policies of glasnost and perestroika inspired the Lithuanian reform movement sąjudis; in 1989, to protest 50 years of Soviet rule in the Baltic countries, as many as 2 million Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians linked hands to form a human chain from Vilnius to Riga to Tallinn, a distance of almost 400 miles. Though the Soviets clamped down—14 independence fighters were killed at Vilnius’s television tower in 1991—by September of that year, the Soviet Union had recognized Lithuania’s independence and the country was admitted to the United Nations. Two years ago, it became a member of the European Union.
So it isn’t just the architecture that gives Vilnius the air of a fairy tale. The city has the lovely, invigorating, sometimes wistful feel of a place still waking up from a troubled enchantment.
“We are moving so fast we feel like we are sitting on a rocket,” said our guide, Virginija Anskaitene, a longtime resident of the city, as we stood in front of the cathedral. She pointed toward our feet: “Look here.” On a tile set among the others, inlaid glass letters spelled the word stebuklas, Lithuanian for “miracle.” The tile—it’s considered unlucky to reveal its exact location—commemorates the human chain, which Virginija was part of. “You can stand here and make a wish,” Virginija said. “Sometimes there is a line for wishing.”
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