And so to Vilnius (via Copenhagen)

We visited Vilnius, capital of Lithuania and our last and favourite of the three Baltic capitals, in May 2010. I originally booking a direct flight with Aer Lingus, who then re-considered this route and cancelled the flights.  There were then no direct flights from London, so we flew with SAS from Heathrow to Copenhagen, hung around for a couple of hours (thankfully Copenhagen is a lovely airport in which to spend time) and then flew to Vilnius.  We were able to use Airmiles which sweetened the 10 hour process (including check in and time changes) and there was another less obvious benefit in visiting a European capital city which doesn’t have direct flights from England: no stag parties!

We liked Vilnius a lot: apart from the lack of drunken stag parties, it is a very green city with lots of trees, parks and public gardens – apparently green spaces cover over 46% of the city. There are also many pretty churches in Vilnius which survived Soviet occupation; elderly ladies in national dress played music in the Cathedral Square and Vilnius lacks the dour feeling which can permeate some of the former Soviet cities and also lacks too many concrete Stalinist public buildings.

Vilnius felt modern and free-thinking in the way Amsterdam can feel and its locals shared with the Dutch a love of bicycles.  We observed – with no explanation that we could think of – a huge gathering of cyclists, mostly young, one late afternoon/early evening, cycling round and round in the Cathedral Square.   Was this a silent protest?  Was this a silent cycle rally (like a silent disco?) or was it a way young people met in Vilnius? We’ll probably never know.

Another quirky area in Vilnius  was the Uzupis Republic, an artist’s district located on a bend of the river Vilnele which was like the artist’s district in Dresden which we visited a few years later. Uzupis seemed to us a 20th Century hippy space but we learnt it has been the creative centre of Vilnius for centuries and the residents take part in the annual Montmartre Fair in Paris.  It is home to many art galleries and workshops as well as places to eat and drink and the residents are guarded by an angel in one of the squares and there is also a mermaid to be seen on the river bank. The Republic is also home to the smallest church in Vilnius, the church of St Bartholomew.

In Vilnius we stayed at the Artis Centrum Hotel chosen, as usual, for it’s central location (the clue is in the name) where we paid 240 euros for 3 nights bed and breakfast.  The city is compact and we could walk to everywhere we wanted to see, starting off – as we often do – with a hop on hop off bus tour to give us an overview.

One of the places where we hopped-off was the former KGB headquarters and what a chilling place that is.  It is unnerving partly because of its appearance and location as it bears a distinct resemblance to a department store on Oxford Street, not hidden away in a back street as we would have imagined. It had originally been a prison, and was then used by the Gestapo during WW2 and after the war when Lithuania became part of the USSR the KGB took advantage of the ready-built cells and torture chambers.  When we visited it was called the Museum of Genocide Victims (now renamed the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fighters) and has been left as it was, as if the former inhabitants had left just before we arrived. There were padded cells and cells too small to sit down or stretch out in, and one which had a small central concrete circle surrounded by a “moat”.  We read that a prisoner would have to stand on the concrete circle and when s/he fell with exhaustion s/he would fall into what would be icy water and have to climb out and back onto the concrete stand, now in wet clothes in the bitter Lithuanian winter.

There were photos of some of the people who were known to have gone through the building and those known to go in but not return, as well as statistics and photos of the very many Lithuanians who were deported to Gulags in the Soviet Bloc.  There were areas with bullet holes in the wall or blood stains. There was only one other visitor while we were there which made it especially chilling, to walk around the dark and damp underground areas more on less on our own, knowing that above ground only a few yards away people were shopping and socialising and definitely not wanting to relive the grim days in their recent history.

We took a day trip out of Vilnius and visited the old town of Trakai, one of the former capitals of Lithuania and a place very popular with tourists and locals alike. It is a town formerly of much historical importance but now visited for the Castle which is situated in a lake, and reached by a bridge.  It’s a very pretty setting and we had lovely sunny weather but apart from that, we found it rather dull (my husband expressed this more strongly in his holiday diary….)

The only thing I could mark Vilnius down on was the local food, which was far too bland for my palate – based on root vegetables and pork in common with most northern European countries; I felt everything I tasted needed Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce or even a good twist of black pepper….

We paid £164.22 in cash in addition to our airmiles for the flights and the Hotel Artis Centrum was £202.79 for 3 nights bed and breakfast.  We spent an additional £437.15 on food, drinks and transport, so £804.16 in total for the trip.

 

Berlin during the Cold War

In my post on Moscow, I said that Moscow and Berlin are, for me, “frozen in time” as my very strong memories of both cities relates to a time in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s , before the “Iron Curtain” and the Berlin Wall came down, and as I have not visited them since, in my memory they are still in that state, when Berlin was governed by the post-war agreement which saw the armies of Britain, France and the USA living in the city, watched across the river by the Russians.

I visited Berlin about 4 times, each time to visit and stay with my friend from University days, Lelly Bebb, who was teaching British Army children with Berlin one of her posts in Germany. I visited at least once on my own, at least once with my husband, at least once at Christmas and at least once with both my mother and my husband (in 1983).  The reason I am not clear about how often I visited was not the mists of time so much as the mists of alcohol.  Berlin at that time had a slightly frenzied, “seize the moment; live for today” feeling which seemed to encourage drinking, the cheap prices in the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) and the American army store equivalent the PX (or Post Exchange)  almost made it compulsory and Lelly was a very good hostess.  She would check before we arrived what we liked to drink, what brand of cigarettes we smoked (this was the smoking era) and when we arrived at her flat she would plonk onto the coffee table in front of us a demijohn of our chosen spirit, a pack of mixers and a carton of 200 cigarettes, with the order that we were to make our own drinks when we felt like them. It would have been churlish not to have done so.

The Berlin wall was something that tourists always went to see, to ponder over the barbed wire, the dogs, the watch towers with armed guards and the wide “no man’s land” between what were in fact not one but two walls.

We went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum where you could learn about the ingenious ways some East Germans had used to escape to the West in hidden compartments in vehicles and other devices, and in one instance in an especially lowered sports car which could just about race under the barrier between East and West.  Unfortunately with each successful escape, there were many more unsuccessful ones and each ingenious plan which had worked led to tighter restrictions so the plan would not work a second time.  Many people were shot trying to escape – there was no arrest and trial,  just a death sentence executed on the spot.

We went on the obligatory tour of the East by coach where as we went through the checkpoint we had to hold up our passports at the coach window and turn over each page, one after the other very slowly so the GDR (German Democratic Republic) soldier could inspect them carefully. Once inside the East we marvelled at how drab it looked and at the view of sights such as the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden from the east side rather than from the more familiar west side. We could get off the coach and had to change a certain amount of Deutschmarks into East marks. We didn’t find anything to spend them on apart from a somewhat average cup of coffee so drank  coffee and went back on the coach to the contrast of the lively West Berlin with shops on the Ku’Damm full of the latest fashions and any material goods one might want to buy.

Lelly had a very comfortable flat, suitable for her rank as a “Major”.  I have put her rank in inverted commas as she was a civilian teacher, but the army needs to find a suitable rank for everyone so they know what “quarters” to give them and who should salute them.  The British army would keep busy by going on manoeuvres which often involved young soldiers with camouflage paint on the faces and twigs in their helmets achieving whatever task had been set them – usually involving crawling along the street on their elbows – and then traveling back in more comfort on the ordinary civilian buses.

The Christmas we spent in Berlin set the soldiers on duty another task – that of rescuing our turkey!  Lelly’s sister, Glynis, was also teaching in Berlin at the time and lived in a flat on the same landing as Lelly.  We were sharing the tasks involved in the usual Christmas lunch, with Glynis being responsible for the turkey and gravy (and I know I was on roast potato duty).  We were drinking champagne cocktails in Lelly’s flat when Glynis, who had left us for the moment to baste the turkey, returned to say she had locked herself out of her flat!  Luckily, a call to the duty soldiers led to two fit young men breaking into Glynis’s flat in no time at all.  The turkey was rescued from incineration, my roast potatoes had more time to brown, and the soldiers returned later to repair the damage. I hope we added a modicum of excitement to their day on duty.

WW2 still seemed a very recent event when we were in Berlin.  Rudoff Hess, formerly the Nazi Deputy Fuhrer was still imprisoned in Spandau in Berlin, and maintained his record as Spandau’s last prisoner as the prison was destroyed after Hess’ death in 1987. (Interestingly, Hess also had the honour of being the last prisoner to be kept in the Tower of London).

The Berlin blockade, when the Soviet Union blocked all road, rail and canal access into West Berlin for almost a year during 1948-49 – bringing about the first major international crisis in the Cold War – was still a recent memory for many of the inhabitants of Berlin. The blockade was broken by an impressive and very effective airlift where the RAF, French and aircrew from the USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia made 200,000 runs into West Berlin during a 3 month period to drop food and fuel to the Berliners. In fear of it happening again, Lelly and her colleagues were ordered to keep at least 6 month’s of food, fuel and other supplies in the freezers and cupboards provided in the basements of their flats.

We were in Berlin one summer when the Queen’s birthday ball was held, which involved dressing up, much drinking (of course) and fireworks by the riverside.  As the Russians were on the other side of the river, they had to be forewarned of the explosions, in case they decided WW3 had broken out…. this feeling of living on the brink, moments away from potential disaster, added a frisson of excitement to my visits to Berlin which I have not met elsewhere.

I have no record of what I spent on my visits, perhaps not surprisingly.  My accommodation in Lelly’s guest bedroom was free and my flights into Berlin Tempelhof airport were subsidised and involved a chit or permit which Lelly had to obtain before we could visit her. The amount spent on food and drink and other entertainments is all a happy blur.