In front of us was Gedimino Prospektas, Vilnius’s main boulevard and shopping street, which the city has rebuilt; behind us was the “lower” castle at the foot of the hill, which is being reconstructed, though no one is exactly sure what it originally looked like. Skyscrapers have grown up on the other side of the river, and—inspired by Paris Plage, the beach constructed every summer on the banks of the Seine—the city has instituted a beach on the banks of the Vilnia. A pamphlet from the tourist bureau lists events in every month of the year, including festivals of folk art, film, music (separate festivals for classical, traditional, pop, and jazz), dance, theater, poetry, folklore, and even, in July, police orchestras.
But mostly, Vilnius is a city of churches, as Virginija showed us. There are 43 of them, predominantly Catholic and Russian Orthodox, left standing during the Soviet era because they proved to be such useful, well-built places. The cathedral was used as an art gallery; St. Casimir’s was the Museum of Atheism. “Did you go?” we asked Virginija, and she said, “There was nothing interesting there.” Others were used as warehouses and storage space. Many have been restored, including the cathedral, with a sumptuous chapel dedicated to St. Casimir, the patron saint of Lithuania—you can’t imagine that it’s been anything but a house of worship. St. Anne’s, a Gothic confection made of multicolored bricks, had a backup of five or six bridal parties, when we passed, waiting to have their pictures taken in front (any tour guide will tell you that Napoleon thought St. Anne’s so lovely he wanted to take it back with him in his pocket). The interior of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit, on Auaros Vartų Gatve., is jade green, salmon pink, and sky blue. Down the street is the Baroque Church of St. Theresa, which includes the astonishing chapel inside the Gates of Dawn, part of an old fortifying wall that straddles the street. On one wall is a gilt-covered icon of the Virgin Mary. The other walls are covered with nailed-up silver votive offerings, hundreds and hundreds of them—legs, hearts, feet, hands, arms—left by pilgrims in gratitude or hoping for a miracle. Making wishes, in other words. The chapel glowed, all the metal reflecting the sunlight from the window overlooking the street. Through the window, we saw people stopping to pray to the icon as they walked home, looking up and crossing themselves.
But I found the unrenovated churches just as spectacular in their own way. They showed that it takes time to wake up from a decades-long spell. The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete vivid crucifix painted over the altar. The seats were plain wooden benches; bricks were piled in corners; a makeshift confessional, with a screen and a kneeler facing a chair, sat near the entrance. The building was partly damaged in 1812, when French soldiers used it as a granary; during Soviet rule, it housed an archive. It has the dignity of a building—of a living thing, in fact—that has had violence done to it but remains on its feet.
There is less visible ruin to see when it comes to Jewish life in Vilnius, but that is only because the ruin was so absolute. Vilnius was once known as “The Jerusalem of Lithuania” because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. Between the wars, one third of the population of the city was Jewish.
A tour of Jewish sites now is mostly a tour of disappearance: the ghettos, one small, one large. The old synagogue was replaced by a Soviet-era kindergarten. The former house of the Vilna Gaon has a statue to honor him. There is the Jewish State Museum and a small Holocaust museum; a monument to Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul General in Kaunas, Lithuania, who forged transit visas for 6,000 Jews; and a Jewish cemetery where people leave notes—wishes, again—on the Vilna Gaon’s grave. The only remaining synagogue was shut while we were there because of disputes between the Jewish community and a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi who had been occupying the building with his followers. A few miles outside town is the grimmest site of all, the memorials at the Paneriai Forest, where, during World War II, most of Vilnius’s Jews were taken and shot and thrown into pits. The train line still runs through there, though the day we went, exploring the forest felt like walking on the surface of a terrible and deserted moon.
If you go to the Paneriai Memorial, I recommend an antidote, Europos Parkas, an open-air contemporary art museum north of the city. In 1987, Gintaras Karosas, then a 19-year-old art student, began to clear some neglected forest for a sculpture park. He installed the first sculpture in 1991. There are now more than 100 works by artists from more than 30 countries, including Dennis Oppenheim, Sol LeWitt, and Mag-dalena Abakanowicz, as well as the world’s largest sculpture made of television sets, a labyrinth of old TVs made by Karosas. The park is beautiful, peaceful, impressive. It’s a relief to know that there are ongoing wonders in the forests outside Vilnius, not just historical horrors.
For a while I managed to outrun all pigs’ ears. On our first night, we ate dinner at the Neringa restaurant, an enormous 1950s Soviet-built place with wood-paneled walls and blue mosaics that was a hangout for Vilnius’s intellectuals. Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem about Neringa (he spent time in Vilnius in the early 1970s; his fellow Nobel laureate in literature, Czesław Miłosz, was partly raised in Vilnius and educated at the university there). “Ah,” said Edward. “You’ll have to have the cepelinai.”
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