At home and abroad

Never before has so much time passed between my leaving San Diego and producing a post for this blog. Steve and I set off from home 8 days ago (9/7). But we began with a five-day detour through the Midwest to take part in the long-anticipated wedding festivities of a niece. We didn’t board our Finnair flight to Vilnius till Sunday evening (9/11); we settled into our home-exchange apartment in the Lithuanian capital this past Monday afternoon.

Since then, my fitness trackers tell me we’ve walked close to 20 miles, trying to cram in as much as possible. As we’ve done so, I’ve been mulling over the power of expectations.

Observation #1: Overly high hopes can lead to grumpiness.

I’d expected our visit to the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Vilnius (yesterday afternoon) to be a highlight of our stay. My Lonely Planet guidebook declares, “If you only see one museum in Vilnius, make it this one.” The palace dominates the grounds of the country’s grandest plaza, Cathedral Square, and its origins go back almost 700 years. I figured it would give us a crash course on the juiciest chunks of 11,000 years of local history.

What a letdown! We paid a euro each for audioguides to “Route #1” — one of four programmed pathways through the giant complex. We are conscientious little tourists, so we hit the buttons at dozens upon dozens of numbered stops, staring glassy-eyed at sections of ruins in the basement, models of the palace grounds, chipped stove tiles and other trinkets from hundreds of years ago.The narrator droned on and on but never mentioned any of what sounded like the really fetching parts of this history: archeological finds that go back to 9000 BC; pagans who roamed these forests and were the last hold-outs in all of Europe against Christianity; epic casts of bloodthirsty grand-dukes. We glimpsed these things from wordy posters on the walls. But they were almost indigestible.

After about two hours, exhausted in a lonely section of an upper floor, we found panels that stopped us, open-mouthed. They explained that the grand-dukes centuries ago began spending most, then all, of their times in Krakow (Poland was part of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania back then.) The ducal digs in Vilnius fell into ruin, and around the beginning of the 1800s, when a Russian tsar conquered the territory around Vilnius, someone tore the whole palace down and sold off the bricks. Only after Lithuania regained its modern independence in 1991 did folks start talking about rebuilding the complex to regain and celebrate their ancient heritage. From what we could tell, they only finished up about 2018. So everything we were seeing was a modern re-creation.

I felt a bit less frustrated when I learned that. It’s all so new! Maybe over time the folks here will get better at sharing their story with visitors.

Observation #2: Low expectations can lead to unexpected delights.

I didn’t expect the Baltic region to stun me with its wonders. Unlike Turkey (which did), Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were never countries I lusted to visit. But it’s a corner of the world about which Steve and I know almost nothing. Its recent history is intriguing: free for 30 years after so many years of occupation and oppressive overlords. In two weeks (all the time we had) we could cover a lot of ground. I figured it would be… interesting.

Held to that low bar, Vilnius did a fine job of entertaining us. A horde of eye-popping churches dot the old city center (the only part we explored).

Despite the constant threat of rain, we managed to walk for hours, including to Uzupus, a quirky artists’ enclave that declared its (unofficial) independence in 1998. Its “Constitution,” engraved in more than a dozen languages, adorns one of the streets. The English version makes for amusing reading.

In Gediminas Castle, on a hilltop at the heart of the ancient settlement……I stumbled upon a couple of delights. A case set in the floor in one niche housed the skin of a strange creature studded with silvery needles. When I asked a guard if she spoke English, she looked embarrassed and said she didn’t know much. But she knew the creature’s name: wolf.

An audiovisual display on another level showed me that someone in Lithuania knows how to make history interesting. Huge panels that looked like the tower’s windows displayed what appeared to be panoramic scenes from the castle’s history: a fiery battle; views of the growing town.

But it was a single paving stone in the vast Cathedral Square that moved me the most, almost to tears. It bears the impression of two bare feet. No placard explains it. You have to know the story; know that it marks the end of the human chain that formed in 1989 and stretched north from here across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, ending near the coast there. Something like two million people formed it by holding hands in solidarity and defiance of their Soviet overlords.

It could have ended in bloodshed, become a Slavic Tiananmen Square. Instead it kicked off the drive to independence that liberated all three of the Baltic states a few years later. Proving yet again that sometimes things turn out better than you might expect.