Nine days in Lithuania: from a Baroque capital to a wall of sand on the Baltic

The cathedral looks like a Greek temple because it was rebuilt as one. There was a church here from 1251, it reverted to pagan use when the king was killed twelve years later, it burnt down three times after that, the south tower collapsed in 1769, and what stands now is a neoclassical rebuild finished in 1801 with saints along the roofline. Go in for the chapel of St Casimir, which survived from the earlier building and is Baroque at full pressure, black and white marble and silver.

Then find the tile in the paving of the square marked Stebuklas, which means miracle. It marks the southern end of the Baltic Way, the human chain of about two million people that ran from here to Tallinn through Riga in August 1989 to demand independence. People still stand on it and turn around.

End on the hill. Gediminas Castle is the upper of three castles that once stood here, reached by a cobbled path in ten minutes or a funicular from the palace courtyard below. The courtyard at the top costs nothing, stays open after dark, and gives you the old town on one side, the glass towers of the new city across the river on the other, and three white crosses on the hill opposite. Come at sunset.

Vilnius University has been running since 1579 and its old campus is a warren rather than a building: linked courtyards, arcades, staircases, a bookshop, and the Church of St Johns in the middle. Four courtyards and the church are free to walk into, which very few visitors do, and there is a frescoed hall behind them worth asking about at the desk. Go early, while it is still a university and not a monument.

Work east to the river for St Anne's, a small flamboyant Gothic church of about 1500 built out of thirty three different shapes of brick and barely altered since. Napoleon is said to have wanted to carry it back to Paris in the palm of his hand. Behind it on the same lawn, the much larger Bernardine church was built into the city defences and still has the loopholes.

Then walk the length of the old town, down Pilies and Didžioji and Aušros Vartų, past the neoclassical town hall of 1799 and out to the Gate of Dawn. It is the last of nine city gates and there is a chapel built over the arch holding an icon of the Virgin painted in the 1620s, one of the great pilgrimage sites in this part of Europe. You reach it through the church next door, up a staircase, following the headscarves. Mass is said daily in Lithuanian and in Polish. When the chapel windows are open, people stop in the traffic below and kneel on the cobbles where they stand.

The building on the corner of Gedimino was the Gestapo headquarters and then the KGB's for fifty years, and the names of people killed in it are carved into the granite of the outside wall at pavement level. Inside, the offices and the basement are as they were found in 1991: the cells, the padded room, the water cell, and the execution chamber where over a thousand people were shot, now under a glass floor. Two hours, and nothing about it has been softened.

It has one large blind spot worth knowing about. Until 2018 it was called the Museum of Genocide Victims and dealt almost entirely with Lithuanians under Soviet rule; the murder of about a hundred and ninety thousand Lithuanian Jews, most of it in the first months of the German occupation and a good deal of it carried out by local auxiliaries, had a single basement cell. That is beginning to change and it has not changed enough.

Cross the city and the Vilnia stream in the afternoon. Užupis was the cheap flooded quarter behind the old town, and on 1 April 1997 the artists living there declared it an independent republic. It has a president, an anthem, an army of about a dozen, and a constitution mounted on mirrored plaques in twenty odd languages on Paupio gatvė, granting the right to be unique, the right to be idle, the right to be misunderstood, and confirming that a dog has the right to be a dog. The bronze angel in the square went up on April Fools' Day 2002.

Walk up through the park behind it to Three Crosses Hill. Crosses have stood there since the early seventeenth century, were banned by the tsarist authorities in 1869, rebuilt in concrete in 1916, blown up and buried by the Soviets in 1950, and dug out and re-erected in 1989. The view over the old town at dusk is the right way to finish Vilnius.

The train takes just over an hour into a station south of the new town. Leave the bags and walk west, because Kaunas has two centres two kilometres apart and the old one is at the far end.

Rotušės aikštė is the old market square, cobbled and wide, with the town hall standing at its centre: white, tall and tapering, sixteenth century with a Baroque tower added later, and known to everybody here as the White Swan. It has been a town hall, a prison, a theatre, an Orthodox church and a museum, and it now does a brisk trade in weddings. The merchant houses round the square are what survives of Hanseatic Kaunas, which traded down the Nemunas until the wars of the seventeenth century wrecked it.

On the corner stands the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, first documented in 1413 under Vytautas the Great and not finished until 1624, by which time Russian and Swedish armies were on their way to smash it. It is eighty four metres long, the largest Gothic church in the country, mostly red brick with Renaissance and Baroque work added during the repairs, and it was only promoted to a cathedral in 1895.

Walk to the end of the peninsula. Kaunas Castle sits where the Neris runs into the Nemunas and is the oldest building here: a first castle in the mid fourteenth century, destroyed by the Teutonic Order in 1401, rebuilt over two hundred years, and gradually eaten by the river until about a third of it is left. Keep going past it into Santakos Park, the flat green tip where the two rivers meet, and the whole geography of why there is a city here becomes obvious in one look.

Go out to the Ninth Fort first thing, because it colours everything that comes after it and you want the rest of the day to recover. The Russian empire built ten forts in a ring around Kaunas between 1882 and 1915 expecting Germany; when the war came the whole fortress held for eleven days and then surrendered. The Ninth was the best preserved, which is why it was still standing in 1941. Between then and 1944 around fifty thousand people were murdered there, most of them Jews from the Kaunas ghetto, and several thousand brought by train from France, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia specifically to be shot. You enter through the Exposition of Occupations, which covers both the German years and the Soviet deportations that followed, then the fort itself, then the memorial: thirty two metres of jagged concrete raised in 1984 on an open field, and one of the most effective pieces of Soviet monumental sculpture anywhere.

Come back into the city for the reason Kaunas exists as it does. From 1920 to 1939 the government, ministries, banks and embassies were all here, because Poland was holding Vilnius, and a provincial town of a hundred thousand people built itself a capital in nineteen years: around forty buildings in a clean interwar modernism borrowed from Bauhaus and the Nordic countries, most of it on and around Laisvės alėja, the long pedestrian boulevard. UNESCO listed it in 2023, and unlike much listed architecture people still live and work in all of it.

The Church of the Resurrection stands above the boulevard and is the emblem of the whole thing: a vast white concrete box with a single square tower, designed in the 1920s as a national monument to independence, structurally complete by 1940 and then requisitioned, and used by the Soviets as a radio factory for forty years before being repaired and consecrated in 2004. Take the lift to the roof terrace.

Finish at a small house on Vaižganto street. Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese vice consul here in 1940, with thousands of Polish and Lithuanian Jews trying to get out and almost no route left except east across the Soviet Union and through Japan. He wrote transit visas by hand, ignored Tokyo's instructions about checks and destinations, and kept writing them, reportedly out of the train window as he was leaving. A whole family could travel on one visa. He was dismissed after the war and died in obscurity in 1986.

The coach west takes about three hours through flat farmland and forest to Klaipėda, which was Memel and Prussian for six and a half centuries before Lithuania annexed it in 1923 with a small and deliberately deniable force of volunteers. Germany took it back in 1939 and it has been Lithuanian again since 1945, with almost none of the German population left. The town shows it and is not pretty in the way Vilnius is: a grid of low half timbered and yellow brick merchant houses laid out after a fire flattened the place in 1854, and a working port with cranes visible from the middle of it.

Theatre Square is the middle of it. The statue there is Ännchen von Tharau, Anna Neander, who lived from 1615 to 1689 and whose wedding produced a doting poem by Simon Dach that was later set to music and became one of the best known German folk songs. Hitler spoke from the theatre balcony behind her in March 1939. Look down and sideways as you walk these streets: the city has scattered small odd bronzes through them, a mouse, a chimney sweep, a dragon, most with a rubbing superstition attached.

Klaipėda Castle is more outline than castle. The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order built it in 1253 at the harbour mouth, successive powers knocked it down and put it back up for five hundred years, the last time in 1763, and after that even the Prussians could not think what to do with it. One bastion and the moat survive, with a museum inside on the very complicated question of who this city has belonged to.

The Black Ghost is on the quay by the footbridge. It is a hooded bronze figure hauling itself out of the water with a lantern, put up in 2010 and based on a story from 1595 in which a sentry on the castle wall was warned by an apparition that the town's grain and timber were running short. Unnerving in daylight, worse after dark.

Take the passenger ferry from the old town terminal, five minutes across, then the N1 bus or a hired bike, and go south. The spit is a strip of sand between one and four kilometres wide with a road down the middle, pine forest on both sides, the freshwater Curonian Lagoon to the east and the open Baltic to the west, and it runs ninety nine kilometres, half of it Lithuanian and half in Russian Kaliningrad. It is on the World Heritage list.

The first stop is Juodkrantė, twenty kilometres down, and the Hill of Witches. From 1979 Lithuanian woodcarvers began setting sculptures along a path through the pine dune above the village, and there are now more than eighty: devils, witches, a dragon, figures from folk tales, and a slide for children carved as a monster. It was a way of keeping a national tradition alive under Soviet rule while looking like harmless folk art, and it works both as that and as a walk in a wood. Free, forty minutes.

The Grey Dunes are the strangest thing on the spit. These are the dead dunes, rising to nearly sixty metres and fixed in place by a thin skin of soil and lichen, and beneath them are four villages that the sand buried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after the forest holding it down was felled for shipbuilding. A one kilometre boardwalk runs from the car park and you must stay on it. The wind carries sand constantly.

Nida is the end of the road, five kilometres short of the Russian border: a village of blue and brown wooden fishermen's cottages with carved gable finials. Thomas Mann built a summer house on the hill above it and spent the summers of 1930, 1931 and 1932 there writing part of Joseph and His Brothers. He never came back, because by 1933 he could not. The house is a museum now, small and plain, with the best terrace view on the peninsula.

Smiltynė is the northern end of the spit and technically part of Klaipėda, five minutes across on the passenger ferry, and it is where the city goes to the beach. The Lithuanian Sea Museum occupies the Kopgalis fortress there, a nineteenth century Prussian coastal work built round a circular courtyard, and holds the aquariums, the marine life and the maritime collections, with a dolphinarium alongside on a separate ticket.

The other reason to cross is the beach. Ten minutes over the dune from the ferry landing puts you on open Baltic sand facing west with nothing between you and Sweden, and it is broad, empty by any Mediterranean standard, and swimmable at about eighteen degrees on a good July day.

In the afternoon, walk the paved track south along the shore to the South Pier, the nineteenth century breakwater at the very tip of the spit, where people go to watch the cargo ships thread the harbour mouth. In a westerly it is wet and worth it.

Klaipėda's clock museum is a hundred metres from Theatre Square and is a better last hour than it sounds: a large collection of timepieces from sundials to the twentieth century, in a house with a formal garden and a sundial of its own outside, and a carillon in the tower that is played on weekends.

From here it is twenty five kilometres north to Palanga airport, three hours back to Kaunas by coach, or four and a half hours to Riga if you are continuing round the Baltic rather than flying home.