The darkest evening of the year,
made darker still by Baltic snow,
approached. And yet, in Vilnius,
in cold December, splendour fell
on everything around.
—
At the airport, drifting flakes of white hailed our advent—at last the touch of real winter! The wind which bore those flakes buffeted us, resurrected our senses and prepared us for adventure. Bolting to the city, we refreshed ourselves at our place of rest, and marched east along Gediminas Avenue, which droops a little south as one nears the main Cathedral. Gediminas, Grand Duke of Lithuania (1316-1341) founded this city—hunting, our noble duke broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed strongarmed by fate itself dreamed in a wooded grove of The Iron Wolf shaggy silver and strong, so said Lizdeika, pagan priest, of that sign, “a portent—here build a castle, a fortress strong as iron! There shall be the seat of the Lithuanian princes.”
Gediminas, formerly Lenin, Avenue throbs with activity, like a great urban artery. At one end, the Seimas, parliament, the secular mind; at the other, the Cathedral, Vilnius’ divine heart. Midway down a cavity opens—Lukiškės Square—juxtaposing on each side two institutions whose spirits once permeated the Lithuanian body politic. At the northern point of this moral map the Dominican Church of Apostles St. Philip and St. Jacob stands proudly, gleaming in Roman red. It is a striking example of Vilnian Baroque—founded by a certain Herr Johann Christoph Glaubitz ArchitectLutheranGermanSilesian1700-1767 who with compass and rule erected up to sublime heights twintowers furnished with elaborate stucco ornament and pastel pinks, reds and yellows—calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject an awe-ful out-of-body rush-of-blood-to-the-head propter divinam proportionem.
If that church of Saints be a shining, flashing, divinely-inspired star, then the KGB headquarters on the other side of Lukiškės, formerly Lenin, square is a faded, Luciferian one. That former fortress is now occupied by the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, whose bricks engrave those killed opposing Soviet rule. Mass deportations, kahgehbeh-organised, saw at least one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand removed from their homes. Among them—a kahgehbeh-classic—was paramount leader of the Lithuanian SSR Antanas Sniečkus’ brother. He never made it back to his fratricidal home.
—
Vilnius, or Vilna, or Wilno, Вiльня,Wilna,Вильна,ווילנע,Vilne,Вильнюс hasn’t been very Lithuanian for very long. It has been Lithuanian for a long time. It has not been very Lithuanian. Indeed, on the façade of our first-glimpsed church is an inscription in Polish. Taking just the period from the first Russian Empire census of 1897 until now, we see a demographic whirlwind. 1897: plurality Jewish (2% Lithuanian); 1916: majority Polish (2.6% Lithuanian); 1942: Jewish genocide (20.5% Lithuanian); 1951: plurality Russian and Poles deported (30.8% Lithuanian); 1959: plurality Lithuanian (33.6%); 1989 majority Lithuanian (50.5%); 2021: 67% Lithuanian. Vilnius has long been a jewel of the East—a cosmopolitan gem, refracting its brilliance in every direction.
—
Vilnius’ Jewish history is just as brilliant; yet, like the histories of other Eastern European or Jewish groups, one of great suffering. Its most brilliant individual was the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, or Gra (Gaon Rabbenu Eliyahu). Ranking alongside the likes of Maimonides (Rambam), Joseph Karo (HaMechaber), Isaac Luria (Ha’ari Hakadosh) and Israel ben Eliezer (Baal Shem Tov—founder of Hasidism), the Vilna Gaon remains highly influential in Jewish law (halakha) and Kabbalah. His annotations of the Talmud, Mishnah, and Shulchan Aruch are considered authoritative. Yet where his house used to be, nothing remains but a commemorative bust, in brutalist style.
Nearby there formerly stood the Great Synagogue, now concreted over by a decayed Soviet primary school. The Nazis gutted it; the Soviets demolished it. Redesigned by the selfsame distinguished architect Herr Glaubitz, its Baroque exterior and colonnaded façade hid within a palatial complex raised up by four great columns under which at the Mizrach the Holy Ark (Aron Kodesh) enclosed the holy scrolls. The shul’s floor bloomed with tiled flowers and placed between the four lofty columns was a three-tiered Rococo bimah (pulpit). Here would speak the Gra against the Hasidim—They are heretics! Excommunication after excommunication, herem after herem, the Gra waged religious war against the Hashudim—In the middle of prayer they interject obnoxious alien words, conduct themselves like madmen, saying that in their thoughts they soar in the most far-off worlds! They are like a boil on the body of Israel!1 On those selfsame flowered floors they burnt the Zavaat haRivash (The Testament of Baal Shem Tov), just before they burnt the chametz (leaven) on Passover.
So influential the Gra, so influential the Ashkenazim of Vilnius. Napoleon called the city the Jerusalem of the North for a reason. From Vilnius, where commerce thrived, a network of charity and relief stretched across the Pale of Settlement. In the shtetls the massed Jewish poor were sustained by Tzedakah charity. So too were funded the Lithuanian yeshivot—a system founded by Chaim of Volozhin, student of the Gra. Out here lived the gigantic masses of the East, as Stefan Zweig called them, whose lives were always turmoil and who always burned with ardour. Misnagdim versus Hasidim, urban versus rural, and always under the yoke of imperial domination, it was they who comprised the mob of Theodor Herzl’s mourners who stormed to his coffin, crying, sobbing, screaming in a wild explosion of despair. At these wretched masses, these flocks without a shepherd, the Jews of Vienna, Zweig’s stuck-up compatriots, turned up their noses. Their only concern was the Burgtheater!
The Shoah took them all.
—
A short distance from Vilnius lies the town of Trakai. We took an (un)fortunately un-Soviet train there and began our day trip. Situated in a land of lakes, Trakai spills out into the Galvė. The town inhabits a peninsula, smothered on both sides by frigid water. Progressing north up the promontory, we spotted our quarry: Trakai Island Castle—turrets in view. We skirted along the coast, curving up towards the castle. Just before we reached it, having joined the main road where Vytauto gatvė becomes Karaimų gatvė, we discovered a most extraordinary building.
Among the humble dwellings of the town stood a Crimean Karaite kenesa. Just as humble as its surroundings, its wooden structure, styled with yellow paint and simple Baroque ornamentation, contrasted with the intricate synagogues of Vilnius. kenesa derives from the same source as Knesset (Israel’s parliament)—the Semitic root k-n-s ‘to assemble’—and forms the religious epicentre of Crimean Karaite life. This ethnoreligious group speaks their own Turkic language and practices their own Judaic religion. They originated in the Crimea, but, further back than that, their heritage is murky. Perhaps they descend from the nomadic Khazars who converted to Judaism? Perhaps they are Karaite Jews—non-Rabbinical Jews who reject the Talmud—who migrated to Crimea and took up the local Turkic language?
Grand Duke Vytautas brought the Karaim here from Crimea. Fourteenth-century Trakai was a key fortress town, often threatened by the knights of the Teutonic Order. In need of support, Vytautas established this loyal group at Trakai, exploiting their military experience and penchant for trade. For a time, Trakai was Lithuania’s capital and most important city. As the centuries progressed, and the importance of Trakai waned, the Karaim of Trakai faced anti-Semitic persecution under Russian rule. Somehow, they persevered. In rejecting the Talmud, the arch-text of Rabbinical Judaism, they, in effect, rejected identification as Jews. This fact, coupled with their Turkic language, managed to convince the Russian authorities to exempt them from anti-Semitic laws. Accordingly, the Russians absolved them of the ‘crime of Jesus’ murder’ and granted them rights equal to the majority Russian orthodox population. Somehow, again, during Nazi occupation the Karaim escaped tragedy. Karaite leaders petitioned the Nazis for recognition as non-Jews and to be considered part of the Turkish race. They granted it. Except for an ‘accidental’ massacre or two, the Karaim largely escaped the Holocaust. Trakai’s Ashkenazim were less lucky.2
We stopped for a bite to eat at Kybynlar, the town’s Crimean Karaite restaurant. Their speciality is Kibinai, a sort of meat pasty, comparable to the Cornish pasty, Cheburek or Samsa. We tried every option: chicken, beef, lamb and lastly curd and spinach. Each was as hearty as we needed on that freezing day. We had our fill and advanced towards Trakai Island castle. Over two bridges and there we were, in front of the fortress—entrance draped with Ukrainian flag and from the flag pole swaying the Lithuanian state flag (Vytis) which depicts raitas senovės karžygys (a mounted epic hero of old). The castle itself, constructed in the same Baltic red brick found from Danzig to Vilnius to Riga, has three great turrets arranged in an ell-square wall of stone-brick. Behind that wall an expansive courtyard leads to the keep. Here resided Vytautas, the Grand Duke himself, worshipping in its chapel, dining in its banquet hall and resting in its state rooms. From here, Vytautas the Great ranged across his empire, making war against Teuton and Tartar alike.
—
Menu — Restaurant Lokys — Supper for two.
Location: the cellars of a sixteenth-century Brick Gothic building in central Vilnius.
Starter:
A selection of cured meats, including beaver salami, complemented by various cheeses and crackers.
Main courses:
Boar meat roast accompanied by cowberry-wine sauce, sweet pear and potato croquettes, praised by Grand Duke Gediminas himself.
Venison meat roast with boletus and burnt apples, baby potatoes and mint chimichurri.
Puddings:
Rye bread dessert topped with meringue .
Candied pine cones.
All washed down with:
Humulupu IPA.
Gubernija beer.
Local Lithuanian mead!
—
Vilnius had welcomed us with extraordinary hospitality. The Christmas market bathed us in warmth. From the top of Gediminas Hill we watched the fireworks explode in brilliant splendour, raining down upon the city’s spires. Gediminas’ tower—the domain of the Iron Wolf—still stands, eight-hundred years later.
—
https://www.thetogetherplan.com/the-legacy-of-the-vilna-gaon/ and Schochet, E. 1994 The Hasidic Movement and the Gaon of Vilna.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/karaites.
Great piece, echoes many of the same impressions I had when I visited this fantastic city. I hope to soon write something about the nearby Latvian city of Daugavpils that touches on some similar themes.