Now the policy of the government is as positive as any they have seen in sixty or more years. For example, the government is sponsoring Jewish Studies programs at the University of Vilnius. The situation is not unlike a woman who is married to a man who beats her when he is drunk but is friendly when he is sober. She does not want to provoke him when he is being pleasant. Nor does she have the courage to divorce him. Instead she will take what positive attention she can get from him and hope he stays sober. Nothing excuses the drunken beatings, but they are married. The husband tells himself, 'Sometimes I am good, sometimes bad. It evens out.' Israel is taking the role of the shelter for battered wives, and tells the Jews they are foolish to stay, but knows how difficult divorce is. I think Jews are not blaming Lithuania--they are blaming lots and lots of Lithuanians, and that is an important distinction. Perhaps they are worried about just which Lithuanians will be tarred. It will also be divisive over incidents that happened over a half a century ago. Lithuania is funding marble plaques, Holocaust memorials, and Jewish Studies programs, to make clear that the current regime is not anti-Jewish. They would like that to be enough after fifty years. Is it enough? I'm not sure I would know even if it were my place to decide. Thank God it isn't.'
Our goal for today is the island castle of Trakai. To understand what Trakai is, we will remind you of Gediminas. (Yes, all Lithuanian history fits together. The country is too small and poor to be able to afford a history so complex as to have pieces that don't fit together. In the United States we are used to being able to say that the Iroquois had nothing to do with the San Francisco earthquake. That is a luxury not afforded to the poor but poverty-stricken people of Lithuania.) At the time Gediminas dreamt of the iron wolf, the capital was Trakai. The castle there on an island is considered to be one of the most beautiful sights in Lithuanian. Now it is more of a resort area on a peninsula in Lake Galve. Very picturesque from the postcards.
Breakfast was a minor variation on breakfast every other day. In addition, there was something like a cookie loaf filled with jam. But basically it was sausage and cheese.
After breakfast and a little clearing up, we packed up our stuff and headed out to the bus station to ride the hour or so to Trakai. There are two styles of bus going to Trakai, fancy (costing 1.30 Lt) and plain (costing 1.05 Lt). The bus to Trakai in the morning is fancy, with reclining seats, though perhaps it was a bit on the warm side.
The lake is only eighteen miles west of Vilnius, so it is not a long bus ride (about forty-five minutes). The gray sky we had awakened to had cleared and we had another beautiful day. The bus station is the base of the peninsula; you walk north to see the sights, all very close by, since the peninsula is only a mile (two kilometers) long and 500 yards (a half a kilometer) wide at its widest. Lake Galve is actually only a tiny lake, but the peninsula has a Cape-Cod sort of feeling, with nice photos to be taken of people repairing small boats. (Mark called it 'the Cape Cod of Lithuania'; for those of you on the left coast, think of it as 'the Monterey of Lithuania.') Actually, the peninsula really divides the lake into four smaller lakes. To the west of the peninsula the lake is called Totorishkiu, to the east it is Lake Luka, to the north it is Lake Galve, and punctuating the base of the peninsula is a disconnected Lake Gilushis. But this is Lithuania's resort area and it is rather nice. We walked two kilometers north to the Lake Castle, which was restored from ruins.
Most of the buildings around the edge of Trakai are small wooden cottages, many of them built by Karaites. The Karaites are usually described as a 'Judaist sect'--Evelyn says she isn't sure why they're just not called Jewish. As she writes, 'It's true that they reject the Talmud and later rabbinic teachings and adhere strictly to the Law of Moses, but that hardly seems to put them outside Judaism, since they would almost seem to be between Orthodox and shive (assuming there is a true spectrum). There were 383 Karaite families brought to Trakai by Vytautas to serve as his bodyguard. Though the Karaites originated in Baghdad, these came from the Crimea and are often described as a Turkish ethnic group. I read somewhere, though, that Hitler wasn't sure that the Karaites were Jews and so didn't have them rounded up. I would have thought that their being Turks would have been enough, but 'Traveler' magazine speculates that he may have found them enough of a curiosity to leave them alone. In any case, there remain about 130 Karaites today.'
One comment Mark made here about the Lithuanian people: 'They are very stand-offish. I have tried smiling and nodding to them and with the exception of the occasional child and maybe the drunks yesterday, they just look back with no change of expression, as if nodding and smiling were like wearing rubber Spock ears and a Bozo suit. If you come to visit, don't bother with being friendly and/or don't be bothered if people are not friendly to you.' Of course, this is no doubt the effect of fifty years of Soviet control, when even being friendly to foreigners was considered suspicious and could get you in serious trouble.
But he adds, 'I did find some children who smiled at us and were just tickled pink when I waved at them, not once but several times.'
We walked to the end of the peninsula and over what looked like a fairly light bridge, except that we had just seen a micro-bus drive over it. This bridge led to the island with the castle on it. We paid 1 Lt for a photography permit, but admission, normally 1.40 Lt each, was free because it was Wednesday. (Museums here seem to be mostly closed on Tuesday and free on Wednesday. Back home they're open every day but never free. Given how expensive museums are back home, a free day to let the more financially strapped see the museums wouldn't be a bad idea.) Because it was free, there were several school groups taking advantage of the opportunity. This made the castle the most crowded site we've visited so far, but still it was almost entirely Lithuanians.
The efforts to restore the castle have not been to recapture the original look, but only to recapture the original shape in materials that would not be mistaken for the original building materials. That way you know when you are or are not seeing the original stonework.
The castle of turrets and a drawbridge is in general pretty impressive. The collection in the castle museum seems almost interchangeable with the collection in Lithuania's Museum of History and Ethnology, though considerably larger. It starts with prehistoric stone tools and continues up through this century. There are impressive versions of what Vytautas looked like. The man looks like he was carved out of granite with a chin you could build a skyscraper on. This guy is a real man's man. And then some.
Mark asks how they determined what items went into which museums, as the Castle Museum had an exhibit about an independent Lithuania between the wars. There were some entertainment posters, including one for Molly Picon playing in MAZOJI MAMYTE (MY YIDDISCHE MOMMA. Why was that here? Who knows?
Outside the moat, but within the castle proper is a collection of artifacts from the furnishings of the castle. Of special note are some canes with handles in the style of Japanese netsuke, as well as some very interesting carved pipes with human features and other interesting motifs. There is also a historical note about Jean Nicot sending tobacco to Catherine de Medici. That must be the origin of the word 'nicotine.'
In the room of fine glassware, Evelyn heard someone else speaking English. It turned out to be an American living in Vilnius. He was from Georgia, USA. He always has to make clear it is Georgia, USA, since if he says just 'Georgia,' people think he is a Soviet. When he heard we worked for AT&T, he said he was thinking of throwing out his Sprint card since it always gives him a busy signal when he calls the United States. He says that with AT&T he never gets a busy signal. We suggested that throwing out his Sprint card would be a very good idea.
Mark relates, 'I asked what he was doing living in Vilnius. He is a missionary and he said he would love to have us come worship with him and his group. I didn't tell him, but he probably would not like it at all. I am Jewish, agnostic, a mathematician, and an empiricist with a penchant for arguing religion. This is not a combination he wants. In the month before this trip, I spent two very enjoyable sessions with Jehovah's Witnesses on my porch. As they left the second time, their parting comment was that at least I had convinced them that they need to know what they are talking about before they come again. (I told them I had hoped I'd convinced them of more than that, but I'd settle for that. They won't de back, however. Every five years or so they send someone around and I show them holes in their reasoning. A week or so later they will show up, bringing their 'big guns'--their expert arguer. After arguing for ninety minutes or so he leaves, promising to come back and explain the holes I had found in *his* arguments. He never comes back. And I am safe for another five years or more until they forget that it isn't worth their time to come to this house. By that time, their cast of characters has changed. I wish that they argued a little better, but too many of them assume their arguments must be good because God is on their side. I doubt God is on their side, and even if he is, bad logic is bad logic.) But at least I am working a bit on their side albeit unintentionally. One, and perhaps two, friends who considered themselves atheists before discussing religion with me later said that they too decided they were agnostics. I don't try to change anyone's thinking, but some people who consider themselves atheists are really agnostics, and I do try to get people to think about what they themselves believe.'
'In any case our missionary friend would not find me making what he would consider a positive contribution. I would end up liking him, but I am not sure he'd feel the same about me,' Mark concludes.
Oh, one more room Mark wants to mention was what he called the 'Gaston Room' after the character in the animated BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. You can imagine what this is all about if you've seen the film. The room has furniture made from bones of slain animals. You see chairs whose feet are elk hooves. The backs are antlers. Feh!
After the castle we felt it was time for lunch. We had heard that there was a restaurant called 'Kibinine' near the Karaite Museum, which served traditional Karaite food, including kibinai. We could not find it. We did find a kavine that seemed to have no name on the corner of Vytauto and Birutes, and for US$2 we got two beet salads, three kibinai, two glasses of orange-apricot nectar, and a cup of coffee. We had been curious to try kibinai. It is essentially meat loaf in a glossy pastry shell. We think it is what is called elsewhere a pasty. It's fairly tasty but the grease was a little heavy. And where it comes off it seems to congeal like candle wax. (The Kibinine turned out to be on the mainland, across the bridge at the northern end of the peninsula at Karaimu gatve 65. We suppose it might recently have moved, as it is now close to a large lot where tour buses can park.)
From there we went to the Karaite Museum, another one of those 'two-dozen-item' museums. Perhaps not surprisingly from their background, we see a lots of things that look more Arabic than Jewish. For example, there was no Hebrew and no Stars of David. You see in two small rooms swords, bows, arrows, and shields. You see pipes and hookahs. There are beaten metal trays that one still sees a lot of in Arabic countries. There were small tables and some nicely decorated boxes. Some of their weaving was represented. Evelyn spent some time translating the Russian descriptions with the help of her dictionary, but there wasn't very much here. |
