Three days in Kaunas: a temporary capital that built a permanent city in twenty years

Rotušės aikštė is the old market square, cobbled and wide, with the town hall standing in the middle of it. The building is white, tall and tapering, put up in the sixteenth century and given a Baroque tower later, and everybody here calls it the White Swan. It has been a town hall, a prison, a theatre, a Russian Orthodox church and a museum, and it currently does a brisk trade in weddings. The merchant houses round the square are what is left of Hanseatic Kaunas, which traded down the Nemunas until the wars of the seventeenth century wrecked it.

On the corner of the square is the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, first documented in 1413 under Vytautas the Great and not finished until 1624, by which time the Russians and the Swedes were on their way to smash it up. It is eighty four metres long and thirty four wide, the largest Gothic church in Lithuania, mostly red brick with Renaissance and Baroque additions worked in during the repairs. It only became a cathedral in 1895.

Walk to the end of the peninsula. Kaunas Castle sits at the point where the Neris runs into the Nemunas, and it is the oldest building in the city: a first castle in the mid fourteenth century, destroyed by the Teutonic Order in 1401, rebuilt over the following two hundred years, and gradually eaten by the river until only about a third of it is left. The round tower holds a gallery. What you are really there for is Santakos Park, the flat green tip of land beyond it, where the two rivers meet and the whole geography of why there is a city here becomes obvious in one look.

Walk east along Laisvės alėja and read the buildings. This is the boulevard the temporary capital built itself along, a mile and a half of it, pedestrianised, lined with limes, and the modernism is not a museum piece: banks, ministries, cinemas, apartment blocks, all still in use, and it went onto the World Heritage list in 2023 as an unusually complete example of a small country designing an identity in a hurry.

The Church of the Resurrection stands above the boulevard on the hill and is the emblem of it. 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; the Soviets used it as a radio factory for forty years. It was finally repaired and consecrated in 2004. Take the lift or the stairs to the rooftop terrace, which is flat, open and gives you the whole city.

The Čiurlionis museum is back down the hill in an Art Deco block of the 1930s that is itself part of the story. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis died in 1911 at thirty five, having been both a composer and a painter, and having produced several hundred pictures that look like nothing else in European art of the period: symbolist, musical in structure, arranged in sonatas and fugues, and often very small. The building also holds the war museum, whose sad treasure is the wreckage of Lituanica, the aircraft in which two Lithuanian Americans flew the Atlantic in 1933 and crashed six hundred and fifty kilometres short of Kaunas.

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. Sugihara wrote transit visas by hand, ignored the instructions from Tokyo about checks and destinations, and kept writing them, reportedly out of the train window as he left. A family could travel on one visa, so the number of people who got out because of him runs into the thousands. He was dismissed after the war and died in obscurity in 1986. The house is now a small museum and it is a very quiet place.

The Russian empire built ten forts and nine batteries 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, and most of it was demolished or repurposed afterwards. The Ninth Fort, north west of the city, was the best preserved, and that is why it was still standing in 1941.

What happened there is the reason to come. Between 1941 and 1944 around fifty thousand people were murdered at this fort, most of them Jews from the Kaunas ghetto, and several thousand more brought here by train from France, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia specifically to be shot. A group of prisoners forced to burn the bodies escaped on Christmas Eve 1943 and got word out.

You enter through the Exposition of Occupations, which has the ticket desk and covers both the German years and the Soviet deportations that followed. Then the fort itself, with the cells and the corridors, and then the memorial: thirty two metres of jagged concrete put up in 1984, standing alone on an open field, which is one of the most effective pieces of Soviet monumental sculpture anywhere. The tunnels can only be seen on a booked tour.

It is six kilometres out on the Vilnius road, reachable by city bus or a short taxi, and it is close to the airport, which makes it a workable last stop rather than a detour. Do not plan lunch immediately afterwards.