Lithuania

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Kaunas

Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania — 290,000 people at the confluence of the Nemunas and Neris rivers in the geographic centre of the Baltic region. Kaunas served as the provisional capital of independent Lithuania from 1920 to 1939, after Vilnius was occupied by Poland (the League of Nations mandated that Vilnius return to Lithuania, but Poland refused; Lithuania maintained a state of war with Poland until 1938 and operated from Kaunas, which became a modern European capital in just 20 years). The interwar period left Kaunas with an extraordinary collection of Art Deco and Lithuanian National Romantic architecture (the largest concentration of interwar modernist architecture in the Baltics — 700+ buildings) and the Laisvės Alėja (Freedom Avenue — 1.6km, the longest pedestrian street in the Baltics, lined with cafés, galleries, and the monuments of Lithuanian independence). The Čiurlionis National Art Museum holds the complete works of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) — the Lithuanian composer and painter who is considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe (he died at 35 of pneumonia, leaving a body of work that anticipates Kandinsky and Klee). The Ninth Fort (the former tsarist and Nazi fortress where 50,000 people were murdered during WWII) is the most sobering memorial in the Baltics. Best months: May–September.

🇱🇹 Lithuania

Vilnius

Vilnius (population 590,000; the capital and largest city of Lithuania) is the city of extremes: the largest surviving Baroque old town in Eastern Europe (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994 — 1,500 buildings from the 15th to the 18th centuries, including the greatest concentration of Baroque churches outside Rome), the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" (the historic capital of Ashkenazi Jewish scholarship, home to 100,000 Jews in 1939, virtually all murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators at Ponary forest 1941-1944), the city of two Soviet occupations (Soviet 1940-41, Nazi 1941-44, Soviet again 1944-1990) and the self-declared Bohemian Republic of Užupis (the artist neighbourhood that declared independence on April 1, 1999 with its own constitution, flag, president and 12 "ministers"). Vilnius was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — the largest state in Europe in the 15th century (stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea), and the cultural and religious heart of the Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth; the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-1797)) — the greatest Talmudic scholar of the 18th century and the founding figure of the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition (the most influential school of Jewish learning in the modern world) — was born here. The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (Šv. Petro ir Povilo bažnyčia — the Baroque masterpiece of 1668-1704 with 2,000 white stucco figures covering the interior ceiling, walls and columns in the most extraordinary single decorative programme in the Baltic states) and the Trakai Island Castle (the 14th-15th century red-brick castle on an island in Lake Galvė, 28 km west of Vilnius — the most photographed medieval castle in the Baltic states) are the two monuments that most completely define the Vilnius experience.