Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Vilnius

Vilnius impresses me almost from the start. The grand entrance hall of the station draws your eyes upwards. When I arrive, a string quartet is playing in this space, and people have stopped to listen. It's dark by now, but buildings are well lit, and I'm able to see a lot of the city from the car. We drive down narrow cobbled streets and under arches. This part of town was transformed into a ghetto by the Germans during the war, simply by erecting gates across the mouths of some of these streets. Lithuanian Jews suffered horrifically during the war.

The architecture is a beautiful mixture, with quite a lot of baroque and also nineteenth-century eclecticism. The centre is dominated by three buildings: the neoclassical archcathedral, the recently reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes, and, rising above both of them, the Gediminas Tower.

Tower.

This tower sits on a hill that was constructed hundreds of years ago, and is all that remains of a larger fortification. In times past the hill was covered in trees, but more recently these have all been removed, and at the same time parts of the hill have started to collapse, needing to be patched up with concrete or metal struts. The sight puts me in mind of the hapless partygoer who wakes up on the sofa after a party to find that his erstwhile friends have shaved his head. But the tower itself is cute, and from the top of it there's a magnificent view over the city, speckled with snow.

View over Vilnius, looking towards the university.

The university, established in 1579, dominates its quarter of the old town, and its elderly buildings have been kept in fine condition: A. had taken me to see the frescoes and ceiling paintings the previous evening. In the afternoon, after a lunch of “zeppelins”, we visit the Palace of the Grand Dukes, a museum that, like the castle in Warsaw, is almost completely reconstructed, with the exception of the extensive foundations visible in the basement. Today it's mostly a museum, with parts of it serving for state functions. I can read here about Gediminas himself, along with Mindaugas, Algirdas, Kęstutis, Vytautas, Jogaila and others who play a role in the book I'm reading about the last years of the Teutonic Knights. A sense of history is clearly important to people, and even more so if it's accompanied by the appropriate pomp and circumstance.