Eurotrip: The Baltics (Part 1)

The promised blog updates are now beginning! In some ways, it's difficult to summarize a long time like this (27 days plus the time in Georgia), but I'm going to do my best. We began in Tallinn, Estonia (right across the Bay of Finland from Helsinki) and basically went south through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and then over to Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and then back to Georgia. This will be the first installation, roughly the first week of our trip which was spent in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).

We began in Tallinn, the capital in Estonia. Tallinn is a beautiful old city that has been wonderfully restored, as pictures below depict. As it happens, though, it was cold, rainy, and everything was closed due to it being Midsummer's Night Eve. So we wandered around the Old Town with an umbrella but we couldn't go inside anything. Despite that, we really enjoyed Tallinn and would love to go back. On the second day, we ended up going to a theater see our first English movie in more than a year (Prince Caspian), then ate deep crust pizza, both of which were really exciting for us. :) As it was our anniversary and lots of things were closed (including at least half of the restaurants), we decided to instead celebrate our anniversary in Riga a few days later.

After Tallinn, we went on to Tartu, the second largest city in Estonia. Tartu is a university town, and was a charming town that had a very beautiful Town Square with lots of green parks and interesting statues, in addition to a very interesting museum about traditional Estonian life.

From Tartu, we took a bus to Riga, the capital of Latvia. In Riga, we took several walks around the Old Town and New Town, both of which are quite large. In Riga, things were open, which was good. :) One of the most moving parts of our visit to Riga was the Museum of Occupation, which concentrates on both the Soviet and Nazi occupations, which occurred continously from 1939-1989. This museum was excellent although the English audioguide was almost too detailed. The museum had memorable displays all the details about the occupations and about the resistance movement, in particular. I didn't realize that Latvia had a very active resistance movement until 1957 (we were to learn in Vilnius that this was true of all the Baltic countries). Riga's New Town has, perhaps, the most extensive and best preserved Art Noveau architecture in all of Europe, and certainly in Eastern Europe. We also went up in St. Peter's and got a beautiful panoramic view of Riga. That night, we dressed up and went to the Skyline Bar, on the 26th floor of the Reval Hotel Latvija, to celebrate our third anniversary.

On day 5, we moved on from Riga to Vilnius (capital of Lithuania). In Vilnius, we wandered around the Old Town without a particular list of things that were “must sees.” We did end up seeing everything we wanted to see, except for the Castle (the hill to the castle was closed and the funicular was broken, unfortunately). Vilnius was a little rougher at the edges than either Riga or Tallinn. Probably the most moving thing we saw, again, though, were the KGB Cells. These cells had been restored to what they looked like under Stalin's command during the Soviet occupation. We didn't see much of the other exhibits in the museum (it took us a lot longer to get to it than we anticipated, so it closed too soon for us to see the majority of it), but what we did see was moving. The two rooms that stick with me most concretely are two different rooms used for punishment, one for solitary confinement and one for direct torture. The first was a solitary confinement room where the floor was completely filled with cold water up to several inches (or ice during the winter). There was a very small platform that prisoners had either to balance on or otherwise stand or sit in the cold water. The second room with a room with padded ceilings, floor, walls, and door, and was used for torture. The padding ensured that the victim's screams wouldn't be heard. What was especially surprising was that a notation on the worst rooms indicated everything was changed almost as soon as Stalin died. Although I knew things got slightly better, I didn't realize that it was Stalin's impetus alone that kept the most heinous aspects functioning. The other surprising thing was a map of all the gulags in the USSR, and realizing that there was a gulag just outside of Kutaisi (Georgia's second largest city), although we've never heard anything about it inside Georgia (which, I suppose, shouldn't be much of a shock in a country with not one but two active Stalin museums). The Baltic response to their Soviet legacy is very, very different than Georgia's, which is a theme I will come back to at a later point.

However, our second day in Vilnius we took a small daytrip out to the most idyllic place we visited on our trip. Trakai is a small town just outside of Vilnius with not only an island castles but also a rare Middle Eastern sect, the Karaites. 380 Karaite families came to Trakai around the beginning of the fifteenth century to serve as bodyguards for the Grand Duke of Lithuania, but only 63 Karaites remain in Trakai, and only 280 in all of Lithuania. The strictly adhere to the Torah and reject the rabbinic Talmud, although their script is very similar to Arabic (they study the Torah in Hebrew, however). There was a small historical museum about Karaites and we tried a traditional dish of theirs, kibinai (meat-stuffed pastries, sort of like empanadas), which were unbelievably delicious. But the real reason people come to Trakai is for the fairy-tale island castle. It certainly ranks in the top 2 castles we visited on our trip—it has all the usual castle requirements, like a drawbridge, outer walls, tiny staircases, and the like. Exploring it was lots of fun, and additionlly, they had an archery range where Brenden got to shoot a crossbow. It was a relaxing day, walking around the lake, the castle, and the little tiny town.

Due to the blog's dislike of more than 4 pictures in one post, I'm going to post two blog entries for the photos of the Baltics. The first four pictures are explained now:

1)The Town Square in Tallinn
2)The oldest part of the Old Town in Tallinn
3)The famous “kissing lovers” statue/fountain in front of the town hall in Tartu
4)An example of beautiful Art Nouveau architecture in Riga's New Town (remarkably, this is an old tentement building)