We got back in time from Soleczniki to visit the Vilnius town centre with a local Polish lady to guide us. The old city is filled with charming municipal buildings, enticing arched gateways leading from narrow winding streets into secluded courtyards, interspersed with sumptuous Catholic and Orthodox churches, classical academies, crumbling pre-war residential blocks and ruritarian palaces of culture, We approached it from the railway station and that led us from the south on a downward slope through a narrow womb like dark aperture covered by dark yellow plastered brickwork.
As we emerged on the other side of this short tunnel we found we come under the very beating heart of the old city, the venerable pointed gate, the Ostra Brama, which houses the holy medieval icon of the Mother of God. This is a centre of pilgrimage and homage for thousands of Catholic pilgrims, the basis of countless legends of miracle cures as pilgrims kneel in large numbers facing the large elevated window embedded in a sky blue facade with flat white pillars. The air of veneration still gives this tight little street in front of the gate an aura that carries you down the sloping street into the rest of the city. Left and right of us we passed churches holy to Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Orthodox, including a gorgeous baroque St Theresa and the gaudy rococo fronted Basilian Monastery, where, in a quiet courtyard, we were shown the place where the student Adam Mickiewicz was imprisoned,
From the dominant colonnaded classical frontage of the town hall, the city streets roll down further towards the cathedral square and the banks of the Vilenka River, rolling north to join its larger sister river, the Vilija. In these winding streets encrusted with bijoux shops, filled with amber jewels and hand painted clothes and trinkets, we walked hand in hand with the past Polish romantic poets and writers, and the partisans who fought against the Tsar in the January Uprising of 1863 and against the Germans in the 3 day liberation of Vilnius in 1944, before the liberators were themselves disarmed and deported to Siberia. Here walked the Polish Jesuits and academics who had created the early XVIIth century university with its many halls and courtyards. Yet earlier here in front of their palaces trundled the liveried coaches of powerful magnates and princes, the Radziwills, the Ostrogskis, the Oginskis, the Pociejs, the Pac and Chodkiewicz dynasties, whose wealth and unparalleled arrogance endowed churches, theatres and universities, but corrupted the body politic of the old Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This was the beloved city of Marshal Pilsudski, who was prepared to start a war to ensure it remained in Polish hands. Here too were shadows we Poles were less aware of, the Lithuanian artisans and writers who dreamed of an independent Lithuania, free of Russian and Polish oppressors. Here on pretty Pilies Street they first courageously declared Lithuanian independence.
From the cathedral square the streets become wider, the traffic more intense. But the ghosts were still with us as we gazed at the classical faade of the Cathedral, where all Lithuanian Grand Dukes were anointed from the times of Vytautas, when the first christian cathedral was founded on this site in the XIVth century and incorporated in the newer structure during later reconstructions. Here Sigismund Augustus flirted with Barbara, while the remains of his uncles, St Casimir and King Alexander, also rest here. Alongside is the reconstructed ancient palace of the Grand Dukes and beyond the true nucleus of the pagan city, the castle keep from founders Gedyminas and Keistutis, high up on a hill dominating the city from above the cathedral. On the other side of Vilija tributary a forested city park surrounding four peaks, including the Three Cross Hill, all of them higher than the hill bearing Gedyminas' bastion.
Vilnius stimulates the imagination, its discrete beauty and modest provincial pride, conceals the splendours, tribulations and tragedies of a small nation which emerged from the sprawling confused legacy of the former Grand Duchy, quarter Polish, quarter Belarusian, quarter Jewish, quarter Lithuanian. So many of the buildings and monuments we had seen had been bombed and gutted by fire, then rebuilt and renovated, and so many of the older people had been killed, imprisoned or traumized by war, occupation, massacre and population displacement. That trauma had been passed on to their children, behind whose hospitality and gentleness lies latent the sorrow and the national prejudices of the past. For these were the bloodlands, where brutal occupiers invaded, Jews were liquidated in the Holocaust and neighbour turned against neighbour, so that there was no family untouched by war, whether as persecuter or persecuted, or even as both.
We wandered the streets in smaller groups until late into the evening, encountering its ghosts and ensnared by its charms, even as the shadows of night enveloped us.
Next morning I packed my suitcase, left it at the hotel, and ventured again into that magical city retracing the steps of yesterday and finding new amazing sites such as the late renaissance Dominican Church with a riotous rococo interior, where Pope John Paull II met the Polish community, or the dominant Greek Catholic church of St Constantine and St Michael with its five gilded domes. It also gave me the opportunity to make some more purchases for Albina, namely warm gloves, a hand painted silk scarf and an enamelled pendant handpainted with a white bird, all intended as a thank you for allowing me to make the journey to Lithuania.
Back to the hotel for my suitcase and home directly to London City Airport by LOT airlines again.
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