Travel to Lithuania, where nature and history meet

I decided to give one of the Baltic states, Lithuania, a try this summer. I was lured by the promise of endless birch forests, hundreds of lakes, and a unique coastline on the one hand, and a rich — and also often dark — history on the other.

The country did not disappoint in either of these two aspects: the first days are spent gathering mushrooms and berries provided by a very generous Mother Nature, foraging through dark and deep forests. I then head to Vilnius, Lithuania’s cute and picturesque capital. I am an ardent advocate of ‘runsploring,’ so I put on my runners and set out from my Airbnb at 7am: not just to see the sites before the tour groups arrive but also to witness a city coming alive early in the morning.

I first head to Cathedral Square, the city’s pulsating heart, where Lithuania’s biggest Cathedral was built on the site of a Pagan temple. I have the square all to myself.

I stand in awe before this grand Greek temple-style entrance, made up of six snow-white columns. Early worshippers start arriving and pass me by as they head inside, but it is something outside that has caught my interest: a tiny tile on the ground about 50 metres away from this grand structure. I observe a person approaching this particular spot, watch her as she steps right on it and stands still for a moment, as if praying. Her lips move — she is whispering to the tile — and then she spins completely around once, then leaves in the opposite direction from the church.

I am intrigued and leave the site without even entering it. The unassuming tile bears the words STEBUKLAS. I turn on Google Translate — a true game changer for today’s independent traveling, even though most people speak English fluently in Lithuania and I would hardly have needed it before.

Google tells me that the word means ‘miracle’ in Lithuanian — a religious miracle I ask myself? But my research takes me back to August 23, 1989, when two million people joined forces by holding hands, creating an unbroken human chain that would span the distance of 675 kilometers, over three countries, starting in Tallinn, passing Riga, and ending here, right on this tile. While it is not the longest human chain to date — that occurred in 2004 in Bangladesh, with 5 million people — it is the longest one to span several countries, namely Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, collectively the Baltic States.

Those humans had come together to demand their independence from the Soviet Union, and they had chosen that particular date as it marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a treaty that was signed on that day between the USSR and Nazi Germany that ultimately resulted in the occupation of the three countries by the Soviet Union.

I head to the Museum of Occupation and Resistance, which is located in the former KGB headquarters, and travel further back in history, to the times that those people were rebelling against on the day that they formed the human chain. I am hesitant to bring my 10-year-old daughter along, but decide to take her with me after all, so together we visit the tiny prison cells, the showers that cleaned the imprisoned resistance fighters only once a month, often with either ice-cold or boiling hot water, dispersed to the inmates arbitrarily, for fun. We see the padded and soundproof torture cell, the execution chamber, all of which had also been used when Nazi Germany’s Gestapo had invaded Vilnius, before the Soviet Union took over. My daughter’s eyes widen in shock and surprise — but it is a lesson well worth teaching her.

Back in our Airbnb, sitting on the balcony that overlooks the golden domes of a magnificent Russian Orthodox Church, we hear gun shots ripple through the warm summer night, in the not too far distance. This is military practice, performed by German soldiers who have been stationed only recently on the Lithuanian border with Belarus, which is only 40 kilometers away — even less as the crow flies.

The fear of war is palpable everywhere here, in the people and in the streets, not only in the capital but even in a remote corner of the country where we had stayed previously, in a log hut by the side of a large lake we had all to ourselves. However, the power of community among the people is just as palpable as the fear. A bus drives by that reads not the name of the final station it is heading to, but rather “Vilnius Ukraine.”

Many buildings sport the Lithuanian and the Ukrainian flag; one of the exhibitions in the former KGB headquarters shows the internally displaced people in Georgia from Abkhazia. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia, even further away, share their borders with any of the Baltic states — and still, it is this dark past that unites them all, the same history that made those two million people join forces over 35 years ago, to express their desire for freedom and independence. A joined effort that proved successful when the Baltic States regained their independence about two years later.

My insights make me travel back to the reverent woman standing on the tile in front of the cathedral: it is said that if you make a wish upon the tile, and do a clockwise 360-degree turn on it, your wish might come true. I am pretty sure I know what it was that the woman wished for...