Prague Journal

Sunday, May 22, 2005.

We spent the morning at the castle at Trakai, the former capital of the principality of Lithuania. Trakai, about an hour’s drive from Kaunas, and just 27 km west of Vilnius, is the most popular destination not only for tourists but also for the inhabitants of Vilnius. Trakai was built on a small island, reached now by a footbridge. In the 1950’s the castle was reconstructed at a great cost, before there were just remains of the old castle. Now there is also a historical museum in the castle. We had the good luck to arrive at the castle at its reopening after closure for the filming of a German movie. In the Trakai courtyard were still Styrofoam sets of castle walls!
From Trakai, we went into Vilnius, Lithuania’s current capital city. Modern Lithuanian history began on 13th January 1991, when the Soviet Red Army attacked unarmed Lithuanian citizens with heavy tanks, while they defended the TV-tower in Vilnius from being captured by the Soviet regime. Fourteen people, mostly young students, were killed. This uprising led to Lithuania’s final liberation from Soviet sovereignty. Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, lies in the far southeastern corner of the country, only a couple of dozen miles from Belarus. It was a stronghold against first the German Teutonic Knights, then the Crimean Tatars. The river Neris flows westwards to Kaunas, Lithuania’s capital earlier this century, when Vilnius and the surrounding area belonged to Poland, and for 17 years these two countries were not on speaking terms. Poland and Lithuania were joined by marriage in 1397; in 1795 Vilnius was swallowed into the Russian empire. Russification followed Polonisation, and many of the churches the Jesuits had so elaborately built, evolving a local baroque style which peaked in the 18th century, were given over to the Russian Orthodox belief. Early in the 19th century Eastern Prussia was one-half Lithuanian speaking (and Protestant). These people started to use German as their mother tongue during the 19th century and were expelled as Germans after the Second War, when Eastern Prussia was divided between Soviet Union and Poland. Before WWII Vilnius was one of the great Jewish cities of Europe, and the center of Yiddish publishing. New streets and buildings in its center mark the site of their ghetto: 150,000 were killed by the Nazis.
We parked our car near the Gates of Dawn, at the southernmost point of the old city. This last remaining part of the old city wall (much of the fortifications in Vilnius were destroyed by the Czar’s army in the 1800s) was converted into a chapel in 1671. A main draw of the chapel is the gold and silver icon of the Virgin Mary, which is revered by Catholics in the region, from Poland to Belarus. The chapel is a mecca to thousands of pilgrims every year. As an act of devotion, some climb the cement steps to the icon on their knees.
We strolled through Old Town, visiting several churches, monasteries, and statues. Part of the Holy Spirit Monastery has been rented to the Italian Ambassador in order to raise money for the church. The Dominican Church is thought to be haunted. During a plague that swept the land in 1657, a cellar in the monastery was used to accommodate an overflow of corpses. In the late 1800s, area residents began to complain about incessant moaning coming from the cellar area, where, upon investigation, police found hundreds of mummified, long-forgotten bodies. It is said that faint, eerie wailing can still be heard by those passing by the Church in the early morning hours.
One of Vilnius’s most distinctive churches is St. Anne’s Church, a fine example of Gothic architecture from the 16th century. When he came through Vilnius, Napoleon is said to have been so taken by St. Anne’s that he wanted to haul it back to Paris and set it down alongside Notre Dame. Looking up, we could see the Hill of Three Crosses. Historical rumor has it that seven Franciscan monks who foolishly tried to convert Lithuanian pagans were murdered here. Four were tossed into the river while three were hung out on the hill to dry. The first crosses were erected in the 1600s to honor the martyrs. Stalin had them torn down; the prewar crosses rest at the foot of the mound where new ones were raised in1989.
We walked to Castle Hill, the site of the oldest settlement in Vilnius, though there isn’t much left to show for it. In the 14th century, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt he saw an iron wolf howling on this hill, which towers over the old city, between the Neris and Vilnia Rivers. The wolf’s cry signified to him that a great city would arise at this location, and he proceeded to construct it. From the original settlement, Gediminas Tower is the only major remnant of the 13th century Upper Castle still standing. There is now a history museum inside the tower. At the base of the hill is a series of barrel-shaped structures covering the excavation site of the city’s ancient castle, the Lower Castle, which was the residence of the nation’s grand dukes for more than three centuries. Next to the hangars is a cathedral originally built as a temple to the thunder god Perkunas. By the 19th century, after scores of transformations, it had been almost completely revamped in neoclassical style. After the Soviet takeover in the 1940s, the Communists turned the church into an art gallery. It was converted back to a church in the late 1980s. The church is still the resting place for many famous figures in the history of Lithuania-Poland, including royalty. Flanking the cathedral is the bell tower, one of the city’s leading landmarks and a favorite meeting place for local Lithuanians.
Our last stop of the day was the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, just northeast of the old city, prominent for its bright-green the domed exterior. This church was originally built in the 14th century, but was then rebuilt in Baroque splendor in 1668, commissioned by Michael Casimir Pac, Grand Hetman of the Lithuanian armies. His tombstone, inscribed hic iacet peccator (here lies the sinner) is embedded in the wall to the right of the entrance (Pac died in 1682, before the church was fully completed). Although strangely painted from the outside, from the inside this church is truly breathtaking. The walls from top to bottom are alive with frescos in animal and human forms—no two of them exactly the same. Over 2,000 stuccoed figures crowd the vaults, representing miscellaneous mythological, biblical and battle scenes. One of the noteworthy adornments is a huge chandelier made from brass and glass beads and fashioned in the shape of a ship, made in Latvia in 1905. The some 200 artists who worked on the interior were directed by the Italian masters Pietro Peretti and Giovanni Maria Galli. There are even elephant motifs decorating one of the archways!

posted by JWinn @ 11:09 PM