Lithuania Day 6
After failing to make breakfast this morning we discovered that our first choice of destination today was over 3 hrs drive away. Without a car or ability to drive this was pretty much out of the question. A shame really because it looked really exciting, we wanted to visit the Hill of Crosses. Story has it that a man with a very sick daughter fell asleep on a hill had a dream that if he put a cross on the hill his daughter would get better, lithuanians have always put great stock into the translation of dreams so he planted the cross, his daughter made a miraculous recovery and people have been putting crosses on the hill ever since.
During the Soviet occupation, the soldiers removed burned and melted most of the crosses during the day and in the night Lithuanians replenished the crosses, this cycle continued as a symbol of resistance. In 1990 there were 55,000 crosses, today you can buy crosses from vendors near the hill to add to the collection.
Our second plan involved hiring bikes from the hotel and visit the TV tower. On the face of it may not sound particularly interesting, however this is basically where independence was regained for Lithuania.
In 1990 although the country announced its independence from Soviet rule, it then suffered dreadfully economically, and the faith of the people in their new independence was stretched. Early 1991 saw the introduction of food rationing with inflation rising to 100%. Protesters and supporters of the communist party tried to raid parliament in outrage, but were deflected. The countries new leader anticipated an attack and called for all independence supporters to surround prominent and important buildings in Vilnius.
The KGB were still in Lithuania at this time and the Soviet army responded to the protests by sending tanks to try and take advantage of the unrest to reclaim the city. Tanks and troops manage to seize a lot of buildings in Vilnus and capture other city’s in Lithuania. They stormed the surrounded TV tower at 1:25am on january 18th killing 14 people. The last pictures transmitted from the tower were of a Soviet soldier running toward the camera to switch it off.
The next morning the Lithuanians were so appalled at the events of the night before that 50 000 joined together around the Supreme council building in solidarity of the fallen, Soviet troops withdrew. A peace treaty with Russia was signed at the end of January and following this there was a landslide referendum in favor of an independent state.
It turns out however that although being the largest building in the Baltic states you cant actually find it unless you already know where it is on a map. You cant just cycle in the direction and hope you will always be able to see it. Learn from our mistake here. Below is a map of our attempt, this gMaps pedometer trace is where we should have gone. The white circle marks the TV tower.
Despite the roundaboutyness of our route we had a lot of fun. Simon got to see some of the Russian Orthodox churches from my adventure the other day, we explored the much more affluent areas of Vilnius with some very swanky houses and saw the Parliament building. Upon giving up on a pitiful attempt to reach the TV tower we enjoyed having a recky round the old town (a UNESCO world heritage site).
On the way back we decided to visit the KGB museum, not a fun excursion but interesting nevertheless.
The Museum is in the building that once housed the KGB headquaters so a lot of the furniture and exhibits the museum creators found in the building and have preserved. We saw some interesting looking spy machines for tapping phone conversations and there is lots of informative information about the little heard of Partisan freedom fighters. Being relatively recent history there are also lots of interestng photos and personal memorabilia and stories.
By far the most disturbing part of the museum is the enormous basement where you can wander around the cells, torture chambers, exercise areas (pictured above) and execution rooms of the Soviet secret police. Everything is just how it was left when the KGB was moved out of Lithuania in 1991, it is impossible to put into words quite how eery and shocking the feeling of being in there. This was not helped by the museum curators switching off the lights when we were deep in the cells ready to close up, I had to stop a lady from locking Simon in the Execution rooms! It is the second but hopefully the last time I will run out of a museum in fear.
Tonight Simon and I plan to recover from our scary museum experience by eating a lot of Argentinean ste-ack, we are then off to meet Rita for cocktails somewhere in the many bars in Pilies street.