Back On Line

Good Morning! Labas rytas!

Yes, Liz and Mike are back with news after 10 days of not being able to sign in to do our posts. We don't really know why our problems happened, but we are grateful to our son-in-law EJ for finally figuring it out for us. Thank you, EJ!!

We're in the process of letting everyone know that to find the blog now you have to use winterinvilnius2.blogspot.com - the old address won't work anymore. The title of the blog is the same, but we've had to change the web address. Very sorry for the inconvenience!

The first item of importance is the weather! While many parts of the USA have been clobbered with winter weather, a dramatic thaw came through here early Christmas morning. The temperature went up at least 20 degrees (F) within six hours, so we were greeted with rain on Christmas morning, along with very slippery sidewalks and streets.

So you see, above, that the snow on the roof of our attic flat is mostly gone, but enough is left to make an impact on any passersby below. (And yes, that is an old brick wall looming up above our skylights - we hope we're out on a walk somewhere when it comes crashing down. I guess they've left it up there because it's so picturesque.) In our courtyard the snow is piled in the corner while the walkway is pretty clear - just a few patches of ice.

One of the big events of last week was an excursion by mini-van to Trakai, the medieval capital of Lithuania, about 25 miles southwest of Vilnius.

The island castle probably dates from about 1400, when mostly pagan Lithuania was still resisting the assaults of the Teutonic Knights. The knights - mostly German - and their allies could substitute a "crusade" against northern peoples like the Lithuanians instead of the bother of going all the way to Palestine to fight Muslims.

Our tour guide, Julia, in the center, spoke very good English and was our personal guide, as the other three tourists were Russian and had their own guide, once we reached Trakai.

If we'd been there later in the winter I'm sure we could have walked across the ice, but it wasn't quite hard enough yet, so we had a very nice, cold walk across a bridge to one island and then another bridge to the castle.

There were lots of children coming and going. The big common room in the castle was decorated for a Christmas party for the kids.

I suppose it was a little bizarre to have blow-up Santas and Frostys in a medieval fort, but it seemed like a good use of a room that always was used for feasts and entertainments. So batches of screaming first-graders seemed perfect! (We didn't stay long!)

It really is one of the most beautiful castles I've seen. It could have been left as a ruin (it was mostly destroyed a couple centuries ago), but it's been carefully restored - for example, I think you can see the horizontal line between old and new on the tower in the photo below.

And here you can the patchwork of old and new.

Eventually the history of the region turned in Lithuania's favor. A combined duchy ruled by Jogaila and Vytautas, with their allies, decisively defeated the Knights and their allies at Grunwald, in modern Poland, in 1410. Vytautas (the Great) was able to extend Lithuania's rule almost to the Black Sea, creating one of Eurasia's greatest empires, and resulting in the wealth which enabled Vilnius, with a population of about 25,000, to become one of Europe's largest and finest late medieval cities.

 
The Lithuanians brought back from the Black Sea area a group of people to serve as bodyguards in Trakai - the Karaites. They were a Turkic people whose religion was based on the ten commandments but who were not exactly Jewish. (I think it's a complicated story.)

After our visit to the castle we walked back to the little village, walked past some of the traditional Karaite houses and their house of worship, and stopped at Kybynlar for a Karaite lunch of beer and kibinai, pastries filled with meat and vegatables, similar to Cornish pasties. (You can find the pasties in Mineral Pt., Wisconsin, too.)

Too heavy on the history - sorry about that! There's so much to tell!