Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Into Lithuania

A representative view from the train.

A bright and early start: there's only one connection from Warsaw to Vilnius each day, and it leaves at 7:55am. My conveyance is a comfortable, spacious loco-hauled beast, the brontosaurus of trains. Though stopping regularly, it powers along to Białystok in a couple of hours, but then stops there for over half an hour (“for technical reasons”, as the website has it). After that, its progress northward is notably slower, and it repeats its lengthy stop at Suwałki. But nothing can stop it as it lumbers towards and across the border. The scenery is much like what I remember from the Riga-Valga train: plains, mostly forests (alternating evergreen and birch), some farmland, occasional marshes, and even a few hills near Suwałki. I've been reading about the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg, a significant defeat for the Teutonic Knights against the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania in 1410, and it occurs to me that it must be around here somewhere, but when I check my maps it turns out that we're far too far east for that (close to Belarus).

I've been to Lithuania before, but only on a technicality: when I was travelling back by coach from Riga to Warsaw in 2019, I stepped off at Šiauliai bus station to stretch my legs for about twenty seconds. My quest to visit all the countries of Europe before my fortieth birthday will end in respectable failure: all the remaining countries – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Cyprus – are currently out of reach for various reasons. So this trip to Lithuania is intended to set the record straight by doing (more) justice to the country.

It feels absurd to be winding my watch forward an hour while trundling through the woods. It strikes me that flying is the ultimate form of transport for the nation-state, allowing one to imagine a clear discontinuity between point of origin and point of arrival. Borders, paradoxically, are a lot more concrete and well-defined when you don't have to actually cross them on the ground.

Mockava.

A through train is not possible due to the switch to broad gauge, and so we have to stop at Mockava, whose station is a nowhere place in the forest. The change is easy – from one side of the island platform to the other – though it's a bit chilly. After a while the Lithuanian train comes in, a DMU, more of an allosaurus.

Lithuanian train.

Both trains are warm and welcoming inside, with power sockets, and catering. This one even has wifi, and is in more of a hurry. After Kaunas, it runs non-stop for over an hour before reaching Vilnius. Here I'm met by the kind and indefatigable A., who takes me in his car for a quick tour of the capital of Lithuania – but that's the topic of another blog post.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Warsaw

Warsaw is bitterly cold when I reach it; not surprising for February, I guess. Emerging groggily from a nice warm sleeper train on which I had had only a small amount of sleep, it takes me a while to orient myself enough to escape the catacombs of the city's central station. Eventually I find myself in the basement of some sort of corporate tower. Having played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 recently (itself developed in Poland), I wonder if this is the point at which I get attacked by killer robots.

I've only been to Warsaw once before, in passing, when I was returning from Estonia. I'd only seen this area of the city, and only in darkness. It didn't strike me then as a lovely place, and, upon seeing it in sunlight, my first impression is confirmed: rectangles of Communist concrete between which a newer growth of capitalist steel-and-glass towers has taken root. Still, the area around stations is often depressing, so I hop on a tram and head to the old town.

Warsaw old town square.

It's still very quiet at 10am. Everyone's probably still in bed, or at church, or both (after all, many services can be streamed nowadays). That gives me the chance to observe the old town uninterrupted. Some of it is more toytown than old town: buildings of different heights, but still apparently built from the same blocks. The comparison to Krakow, where I was last year, is never far from my mind, but that's an unfair one: Warsaw suffered far worse in World War 2, especially after the Uprising in 1944, and almost everything here is reconstructed.

After getting some coffee and eggs, I roam the streets for a while, through the palace gardens, past churches and an unfathomably large theatre. Eventually I buy a ticket to visit the castle, and, grabbing an audioguide, am led through a series of opulent rooms decorated as they were in the time of King Stanisław August, the eighteenth century.

Throne.

Some of the furnishings are later gifts that date to the period, and some of the paintings were saved early in the war, but the reconstruction is still topmost on my mind: the whole building dates to the 1970s, when the Communist government (with understandable reluctance) agreed to rebuild it brick by brick, the original castle having been “blown up” by the Nazis in 1944.

It's interesting to evaluate the Warsaw Uprising from a present-day standpoint. Most today (especially since February 2022) would probably agree that violence in self-defence is justified, the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. Justified violence in the interest of liberation from tyranny is a popular position too, and the Nazi occupation was as straightforwardly tyrannical as it's possible for any actually existing force to be. Yet the outcome was catastrophic: the uprising failed (a fact for which many blame Stalin, apparently) and the Nazi military retaliation led to civilian casualties numbering in the five figures, as well as the wholesale destruction of the city centre. Nor were the resistance fighters angels: some Jewish fighters were murdered by antisemites who were nominally on the same side. The fact that Stalin's forces drove off the Nazis less than a year later makes the whole thing seem particularly futile – though of course that's the magic of hindsight. Was it worth it? Not my place to judge.

There was more I wanted to see, but sleepiness means that I have to retire early. Today I'm on the rails again, heading north.