Vilnius 2

I should probably say that I didn't really have a guidebook going into Riga or Vilnius, so I just kind of figured things out on my own. It was a fun adventure, mostly because there were a lot of times (especially in Vilnius) where I strolled up to something and thought, "What is going on here?" Case in point: the church in the previous post. I was just walking down this really narrow, quiet sidestreet when all of a sudden this big tower of a building appears, all boarded up, sitting in what looks like somebody's unmowed backyard.

A couple interesting tidbits about Lithuania: They have one of the oldest spoken languages and they have an important anniversay coming up in 2009. It will apparently mark 1000 years since the name "Lithuania" first appeared in written record. Party on.

Vilnius is a soup of construction right now. The Old Town is packed with churches and old buildings of all sorts that weren't exactly given any TLC during the communist era. So now it's fix up time. Even with all the jackhammers, though, this was one of my favorite Old Towns so far. The entrance to Vilnius' Old Town is called the "Gates of Dawn." How can you not have a good time after going through the "Gates of Dawn?"

Two museums that I went to here were the Genocide Museum and the Holocaust Museum. The Genocide Museum is actually a former KGB prison/headquarters that the Lithuanians have turned into a museum about the Soviet Occupation. The fact that they call it the Genocide Museum should give you a pretty good indication of how they feel about said Soviet Occupation.
The Holocaust Museum only takes up a few rooms in a little house, but it's pretty moving. Especially considering that 94% (over 200,000) of Lithuania's Jews died in the Holocaust, many of them mass-execution style in the woods outside Vilnius.

There's much, much more to be said about the Holocaust in Lithuania and Vilnius in general, but I think I'll leave it at that.

Pictures: Top to Bottom: A somewhat rare example of a mint condition church in Vilnius; Vilnius Cathedral (and scaffolding); this spot on the Cathedral Square is where the 1989 Vilnius-Tallin human chain started.