How Lithuania is exorcising the demons of its dark past

Sometimes, on an autumn day somewhere in eastern Europe, it can be difficult to tell precisely which century has fallen under your immediate gaze. Baroque flourishes, Gothic pomp, neoclassical style – these diverse architectural strands bind themselves into a broad tapestry of churches and palaces, monuments and museums. Are you looking at the 14th century? The 16th? The 17th? Or just the disguised reconstructions of the 21st?

Deep in the heart of Vilnius, on the cobbled side-street of Šv Jono Gatvė, I know roughly where I am. I am admiring the early 1700s. But this is not a chapel, or a cathedral. And it is only the first course. The slices of fish placed before me – sturgeon and eel, garnished with crayfish – were staples of the Lithuanian diet during the 18th century, the waiter says. Thankfully, they do not reveal any such age to my tastebuds, melting on the tongue.

The next two hours will be a gentle exercise in time travel. Embedded in this endlessly pretty capital, just 20 miles from the Belarusian border, Ertlio Namas revolves around a fine concept. A newly Michelin-listed restaurant, it has revived the Lithuanian dishes of former centuries, via authentic ingredients and the culinary skill of chef Tomas Rimydis.

Assorted recipes of yesteryear appear on my plate as the evening progresses. The bread soup with beer and veal was deployed as a warming riposte to the Baltic winter in the 17th century; the pheasant with apples and parsley was a dash of gastronomy in the 19th. The chicken poularde with swede, carrot and cabbage, meanwhile, filled stomachs in the 18th century.

Just about the only century not on the tasting menu is the one that Vilnius has the least appetite to discuss. The last one. Lithuania has been a fixture on the European map since the 13th century, emerging as a sovereign state in 1236, and morphing through various systems – a kingdom here, a grand duchy there – over the course of the Middle Ages.

But 1795 brought the soldiers of the Russian Empire, and commenced a bleak chapter in the story of this north-easterly corner of Europe. The 20th century brought the worst of it. Aside from a time of resurgent independence between the world wars, the country spent much of this period under heavy boots: swallowed by the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1941, in the grip of Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944, and again under Soviet rule from 1944 to 1990.

It is an era which, for all the neoclassical splendour of Vilnius’s gorgeous 18th-century cathedral, for all of Rimydis’s incisive reinventions in the kitchen, still casts a shadow.

It is there in the plaques and street signs which mourn the city’s vanished Jewish population. And it stretches along the main drag, Gedimino Prospektas, all the way west up to Lukiškės Square, and the blocky structure opposite on Aukų Gatve, where the stain is at its darkest. The sign above the door describes the institution as the “Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights”. Colloquially, locals refer to it as “the KGB Museum”.

While the building has a proper function in the 21st century, as part of the Lithuanian court system it seems – to my eye at least – to exude a sickness. I can almost feel it as I step over the threshold, penetrating the soles of my shoes, seeping up my legs, infecting my bone marrow. The two main floors of the museum have been left much as they were when their most notorious occupants abandoned their offices, in 1991.

The corridors are faded and eroded – impromptu pathways worn into the queasy edam-orange paint by decades of self-important footfall, revealing the bare concrete beneath. The steps down long ago yielded to the same officious heels, each stair bearing a curved indentation.

It is in the basement, however, where the ghosts really shriek. Cells stand ajar on either side of the passage, the horrors they witnessed bleeding out towards anyone who peers in.

Cell 11 stands in tribute to Vincentas Borisevicius, a Lithuanian bishop who, having fallen foul of the Soviet machine, was held within it, then executed nearby on November 18 1946. Cell 15 highlights the atrocities of that time on its walls and doors, the space thickly padded to muffle the sounds of torture. The execution chamber itself is the stuff of nightmares, the plaster riddled with bullet holes.

As I emerge from the latter, I hear the jangling of keys, as a museum employee comes downstairs to lock up for the night. But in such a grim context, the noise is momentarily terrifying. I exhale hard as I stumble through the front door, into a dying daylight that many of the building’s “residents” didn’t live to see.

While the KGB bunker has been deliberately preserved as an open sore, another haunted Vilnius landmark has undergone something of an exorcism. Just around the corner, the Lukiškės Prison was another fortified example of Moscow’s clenched fist, built by the Tsarist regime in 1904 and used for the incarceration of political prisoners.

Stubbornly, it survived the fall of the Soviet Union, and was still in use (to hold “ordinary” criminals) until as late as 2019. Since its decommissioning, it has been reborn as a museum and arts centre, its long panopticon wings and penitentiary blocks suddenly alive with sound, paint and studio space. The main courtyard now has a bar and a giant screen for movies.

“The idea has been to take the most locked-up place in the city, and turn it into the most open,” says the friendly young guide who gives me a tour of the premises. Her upbeat tone seems jarringly at odds with the gloom that still shrouds some of the complex.

The holding cells, in particular, come with a literal stench, an ingrained stink of sweat and cigarette smoke, anger and fear that seems to have been fused with the brickwork. Meanwhile in one of the main blocks a cardboard cut-out of Vladimir Putin has been placed behind bars. It is a joke: the Russian bogeyman in custody. But nobody laughs.

And yet, elsewhere, there is colour and light. The former exercise yards are covered in bright murals; this summer witnessed a series of concerts in the central courtyard. In fact, music is everywhere, bouncing off the unforgiving stone. The one-time office of the deputy director is now a rehearsal space for the rock band Twin Dive, filled with amps, pedals and guitars.

Lead singer Robertas Jancevičius wears a grin as he shows me around. He has, he says, recently returned to the city after a spell living in Denmark. Having their own inner sanctum within the old prison has given the band a new momentum, he adds. Previously he sang in English; the next album will be in Lithuanian.

The MO Museum takes up this theme of cultural resurgence. Tucked into the west side of the old town, it is just far enough out that its asymmetrical pile of glass and metal does not diminish the aesthetic purity of the greater medieval whole.

It offers a small but intriguing collection of contemporary Lithuanian art. And if Nijole Valadkevičiūtė’s psychedelic swirls – all quasi-mystical creatures in a desert-like landscape – have an ethereal quality, there is a cool clarity to the works by Viktorija Daniliauskaitė. Her minimalist Black Night series of prints offers a modern take on Baltic folk art, with birds whose long necks might also be snakes, and stark human figures under immense starry skies.

Plenty of this ethos also exists in Vilnius’s most fabled district. Quirkily famous as of April 1997, when a group of Lithuanian artists, tongues pressed to cheeks, declared its secession as the “Republic of Užupis”, this graffiti-tagged district on the edge of the river Vilnia has settled into a semi-maturity since its time as a stag-party haven after the turn of the millennium.

But it wears its creative vibe openly – in the workshops of the Art Incubator, a reclaimed industrial building at the waterside; in the bars and coffee shops on Užupio Gatve; in the fabled “Constitution of the Republic”. The latter, printed on panels, in 44 languages, all the way along Paupio Gatve, is part fortune-cookie whimsy, part hard-won wisdom. “Everyone has the right to be unique,” whispers the fifth tenet. “Everyone is responsible for their freedom,” announces the 32nd – rather more seriously.

But then, Lithuania’s independence of spirit does not just manifest itself in murals and hokey musings. It runs through a food scene that is especially resilient in the case of Halės Turgus. The city’s main market opened in 1906, and did not close for either world war, or for either occupier (although Covid did, briefly, pull down its shutters).

On a warm Saturday morning, it is a feast of possibilities and local favourites. There are delicatessen stalls offering skilandis – the pepper-infused Lithuanian sausage which tends to be sold in football-sized orbs of pork. You can try šakotis, a sweet, butter-heavy cake, baked via the rotation of a spit so the batter oozes to form a curious pronged tree-shape. There are other delicacies, too: shrink-wrapped blocks of apple jam; endless jars of honey.

This variety continues in a slew of restaurants which, as of June, appear in Lithuania’s first Michelin guide. The listing covers not just Ertlio Namas, but its old-town neighbour Augustin – which eschews goulash mundanity for duck skewers with chimichurri, and crayfish with kohlrabi. Stebuklai, whose windows make eyes at the wide plaza of Cathedral Square (Katedros Aikštė), swims nearer to tradition via a pumpkin soup laced with cream, and a risotto alive with wild mushrooms and truffle shavings.

Stikliai tacks even closer to the regional staples, but does so with such flavour that its venison sausages with juniper berries and pork-stuffed potato dumplings withstand all suggestion of cliché.

There is flavour, too, five miles east of the city, where the Sakiškės Brewery busies itself in the confines of what, in the Soviet era, was a dye factory. In some ways, the building feels tied to that period, train tracks still curving past its loading doors. But since 2015, it has pulsed to the thrum of steel tanks making tipples as diverse and alluring as a Cherry IPA, a coconut milk stout, a pickle sour ale, a blackcurrant brut ale, and a corn lager.

Co-owner Gintaras Bingelis mans the tasting bar with a flourish, dispensing beer from the wall of taps behind him, and tales from a Lithuanian lifetime. In his country, he explains, craft-brewing is not just the usual post-millennial fad, but a reclaiming of a heritage – the requisite knowledge and experience having been lost to the flattening of entrepreneurship and invention under the hammer and sickle.

“And this,” he laughs, “is something new we have created. Well, new and old.” He pours two shots of the company’s Malted hibiscus and blueberry mead, a concoction that is as potent as it is sweet. We clink glasses, and in a couple of sips, the distinction between the past and present has become blurry once again.

Essentials

Ryanair flies directly to Vilnius from Luton and Stansted; Wizz Air from Luton. LOT Polish Airlines is an additional option – serving the Lithuanian capital from London City.

Pacai (00370 5 277 0000) – a 17th-century mansion converted into a five-star boutique property – has double rooms from £151 per night, with breakfast.

For more information, see govilnius.lt; lithuania.travel