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.”
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.”
The cepelinai looked like a pair of bedroom slippers: two potato dumplings filled with ground meat, sort of Little Nemo in Slumberland Peking raviolis. At Neringa they were delicious, served in an onion-cream sauce. Edward seemed disappointed. “Are you sure they’re delicious? Have another bite. It’s bad luck to leave a piece of cepelinas on your plate.”
In fact, we didn’t have a bad meal in Vilnius. At }emaiˇciai, which specializes in traditional Lithuanian cuisine, we had a dish called Landlord’s Skillet, meat on potatoes and cabbage, charcuterie-style. At Freskos, in the town hall, we ate steak and veal liver among theater memorabilia, and at Tores, across the river in the U~upis Republic artists’ district, we discovered that pork neck tastes better than it sounds, as we looked down on the lights of the city from the enormous terrace. Nearby, a table of Irish visitors sang “Ol’ Man River.”
Unfortunately, Edward had not forgotten the pigs’ ears. “We’ve got to get you a pig’s ear,” he said affectionately, the way I imagine a 1950s husband might have said, “We’ve got to get you a mink coat.” “We’ll order one as a beer snack. They come smoked and cut into strips.”
So I caved. We went back to }emaiˇciai, to the warren of rooms in the cellar. (There are many lovely restaurants and bars in the old stone cellars of Vilnius, with ridiculously steep low-ceilinged stairs. Be warned: It is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven than for a fat man to make his way into some of these places.) If the pig’s ear were cut into strips, I reasoned, it wouldn’t be so upsetting. But it arrived completely recognizable, a single julienned pig’s ear, the world’s easiest jigsaw puzzle. I bit into a piece. I’m a game girl.
I can’t recommend the pig’s ear.
I’ve hesitated to use the word charming, which, when applied to places in travel writing, generally means, “pretty, but lacking Michelangelo’s David, the Eiffel Tower, etc.” It’s sort of a such-a-pretty-face for places. Still, some cities are novels—it would take you a long time to feel you’d gotten to the real end of them—and some, like Vilnius, are closer to short stories, no less important or exciting because of that. Their pleasures are in circling back, in recognizing streets and sights, in discovering and then rediscovering alleyways and shortcuts. One day we turned into a courtyard off Auaros Vartų and found it inhabited by carved wooden creatures, oddball birdhouses, even a Madonna snuggled into a tree—all the work of Jonas Bugailiakis, a Lithuanian folk artist whose atelier features a sort of hodgepodge museum that pays homage to his father and grandfather, who were also wood-carvers. It’s hard not to be charmed by a city where you can find a Madonna in a tree. That night we bumped into the singing Irish visitors at another bar and told them we thought they’d been in fine voice the night before.
Walking down the street with Virginija on our last day, we passed a crowd of people. A small girl at the head of it pointed at us and then waved. Soon they were all waving. It was the parade of the famille de Trop, back from seeing the monk and now touring the city, like us. One by one they recognized us, and turned and waved, and we turned and waved too.
“You see!” said Virginija happily, thinking the locals were being picturesque. “This is why they call us the Italians of the Baltic! We’re so friendly!”
We almost hated to tell her.