LONG TIME DEAD

The Fell Bar Four (me plus three mates from Chorlton, Manchester) and two further mates from Birmingham and London embark on what we hope will be the first of many adventures. May 2023.

We had all heard good things about Kaunas, primarily through its status as European Capital of Culture for 2022 (click here for a copy of the 2022 CoC programme). It is the second largest city in Lithuania about 60 miles from Vilnius and is also included as one of 49 global cities in the UNESCO Cities of Design network.  

We arrive Friday mid-afternoon. The bus from the airport into Kaunas costs us 1€ each. We revel in both the cheap and efficient public transport and the blast of mid-May sun on our faces.

First night I booked dinner at Avilys which is both a brewery and restaurant. The house ale is an unfiltered, unpasteurised beer made with Lithuanian honey. We had plenty of it. Food is excellent – catering handsomely for both meat eaters and veggies. We end up staying here until 11ish and then sample a few shots of the appropriately named local liqueur Devynerios 999 at a bar near our hotel.     

The next morning we mooch around Kaunas, taking a walk up the route of the 1930s Aleksotas Funicular for great views back across the city. Back in town we stumble across the fab Humana Vintage store. My mate Bobby purchased a lovely white Fila track-top which I suspect will see relatively little wear back in the UK, despite its beauty.

The main event for Saturday is a guided tour Dom has organised. He liaised with True Lithuania Tours and arranged a bespoke jaunt centred on sporting culture and local history.

I cannot begin to describe just how popular basketball is in Lithuania. The national team are regularly seeded 7^th/8^th in global tournaments, not bad for a country ranked 140^th in the world by population. The local team Zalgiris are the top outfit in the country and one of the best 10 teams in Europe. We visit the House of Basketball which is a new-build shrine to the sport, with the building itself winning numerous architectural awards. We also have a guided tour of the far more old-school Lithuanian Sports Musuem where we see the full range of national sporting accolades from the last 100 years or so.   

Next we cross over to the Vilijampolė area which once housed a thriving Jewish community. In the interwar years the Kaunas Jewish community numbered circa 40,000 – 25% of the city’s population. After the horrors of the Nazi occupation, this fell to 5,000 and was then further eroded to just 500 after the subsequent 40-year Soviet occupation.     

We see numerous insights into the struggles of the Jewish community (and others) against both Nazi and Soviet occupation. Most moving was the memorial to the 19 year-old Romas Kalanta who killed himself in 1972 in an act of protest against the Soviet administration.

Massive shout out to our tour guide Jonas. He was exactly the same age as us and had an exquisite knowledge of both Kaunas and more surprisingly British youth culture from the 80s and 90s.     

Jonas serves up a fab final stop. We find ourselves in a really quirky bar on an industrial estate at the city fringe – 14 Stotele. This place is three old trolley buses welded together to create a cosy drinking den. It is the perfect spot to round out our mini-tour and chat to Jonas – who seems very happy to hang around so long as we keep buying him Radlers.

We have no fixed plans for the Saturday evening. We stumble across a cluster of bars-in-cargo-units slightly decoupled from the main centre. There is a group of about 50 locals drinking and listening to clubby tunes so we stay here for a few hours until 8ish. By this point we are all starting to get far too cold in our shorts and Birkenstocks, so head back for long trousers and more 999-medicinal shots.        

Kaunas is located at the confluence of the two largest Lithuanian rivers, the Nemunas and the Neris – so next morning we take an early riverside walk, strolling through the beautifully maintained Santakos Park (also known as Confluence Park). We decide that cities at the confluences of two major rivers could be a great theme for future trips.

We then embark on a self-guided modernist tour – using the excellent fold-out Modernists Guide to Kaunas. I can’t believe the number of high-quality buildings from the interwar years. My favourites are the 1932 Fire Station (on I Kanto), the 1931 Central Post Office (on Laisvės al) and a whole bunch of 1930s apartment buildings.

Kaunas served as the temporary capital and stood in for Vilnius from 1919 till 1940. Over this period the city grew massively – 12,000 new buildings were constructed and a whole new cadre of professionals (including a big bunch of architects) flocked to the place.

We have a late Sunday lunch followed by a couple of pints. Our mate Bob announces he has a few loose coins in his pocket and will happily cover the 6€ cost of getting us all back to the airport on a nice clean bus in the setting sun. A blissful end to a fantastic two-night trip.

Post Trip Reflections:

• Kaunas is the perfect size for a two or three-night break. The largely car free central area gives the place a very relaxed feel and pretty much everything is accessible via a short walk.
• The concentration of art deco buildings in the centre of Kaunas must be as dense as any other European city. Go here if you want to max out on art deco per square mile.
• I wish we had been in town for a Zalgiris basketball game. It truly is a local passion. We went to see the Zalgiris Arena from the outside, it seats 15,000 for games and I reckon the atmosphere would be electric. I also spotted an excellent modern swimming complex adjacent to the Arena but time was too short to visit.   
• There is a very well designed and informative website if you visit Kaunas – check out Visit Kaunas for ideas and inspiration. Some destination websites are a bit bland but this one is a winner.
• Travelling as a group of six can sometimes be a bit unwieldy, but certainly not on this occasion. We all approached the trip with great camaraderie and a relaxed attitude, and we even got to learn a bit more about each other.