Vilnius: City of Strangers
Vilnius Contested CityIn a modern Europe Vilnius can seem peripheral. Mr Briedis, however, begins by noting that when French geographers recently plotted the mid-point between Europe s cartographical extremes, they found the continent s true centre was a derelict farmhouse just outside the city.  Foreign visitors have left few written accounts, but Mr Briedis uses them all as sources. A hapless papal delegation provides the first. In 1324 it tried and failed to persuade Lithuania s great pagan ruler, Gediminas, to adopt Christianity. He showed no desire to forsake Perkunas the thunder god, berating his visitors for their intolerance. Why do you always talk about Christian love? he asked the pope s men. Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?  Lithuania eventually adopted Christianity, along with a dynastic deal with Poland, in 1387. A cathedral was built on the pagan temple, the holy fires doused and the sacred groves felled. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania flourished. At its height in the 16th century it was a vast multiconfessional empire, stretching to the Black Sea, with no fewer than six legal languages, including Hebrew and Armenian. Even as that declined, the Vilnius style of Baroque architecture ripened in glory, a splendid autumn in one of Mr Briedis s many well-turned phrases, that paid a gracious farewell to its phantom golden age .  The most poignant chapter is on cemeteries past and present, many of which were desecrated by the Soviets. Mass graves are still unearthed in Vilnius. They hold victims of Stalin s NKVD, of the Nazis, and as in one recent example thousands of fallen soldiers from Napoleon s shattered Grande Armée. Vanished civilisations and lost empires leave a city stalked by horror and steeped in wonder. --The Economist