I feel like I am back in school.
There is “paying attention” needed on an hourly basis, from geography to history to religion to ethnicity to culinary, if one does not keep up, then, that one gets lost.
Having posted that thought, I will retreat from it and confess that this activity is not a chore! The presentations are an all-encompassing series of events designed to lure that old reluctant student out of retirement and smack them in the face with all things stimulating,,,,, and important.
We are still in Vilnius for one more day and that day contained several wildly different aspects that somehow all seem to make sense when combined. I believe that it is that way because learning about people(s) and places needs to have that well-rounded aspect that can only come with all of the boxes being ‘ticked’ that I listed in my first paragraph.
So, get ready, I did the “paying attention” for you and I’ll provide you with the Cliff Notes version, and you can feel free to just ‘audit’ this class, no exams needed, but…. I do encourage you to enroll sometime because the Class Trips are something quite extraordinary!
Our day started at the old KGB building right down the road from our hotel. Yes, that dreary, Cold War, Boris and Natasha, Spy vs Spy, James Bond, Man from U.N.C.L.E. experience has a real-world genesis, and its name is Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or the KGB. And it is as sinister as its hard-consonant name sounds.
I know that it’s a grisly way to start, but I’m afraid that these are the representations of the facts.
We had a private tour of this facility which is now dedicated to the Freedom Fighters that helped make the downfall of the old Soviet Union possible. Our Tour was led by a gentleman who had the opportunity to delve through, and bring to the surface, old KGB evidence that spoke to the incredible evils that occurred within the walls of that facility. We saw detention rooms, solitary confinement cells, padded cells, and even the execution room where everything was so planned out that there was a drain in the floor for the blood and a special window chute to hoist the body through.
On one level, the scariest part was a giant map of the U.S.S.R. that showed hundreds of like facilities strewn about that vast area, that accomplished the exact same thing that this one did…. strike relentless fear into the populace with the express intention of keeping everyone contained and controlled. The Guide was very convincing…. as I had mentioned, he had a personal role in this building after the fall. Anyway, he came across as a cross between Boris Karloff and Rod Serling, an effective communication combination I am sure you’ll agree.
The numbers associated with all of the fear and trepidation of the KGB are staggering in their own right. In the initial occupation by the Soviet Union back in ’40 and ’41, over 23, 000 citizens were either imprisoned, deported or killed. The next era, which ended with the death of Stalin, saw close to 400,000 ‘suspects’ being treated to the same fate. You did not need to go to trial to get convicted, all you needed to do was look suspicious and have someone rat you out for listening to Western music (for example!) and wham! Into this hideous torture chamber you would go! After Stalin died, things got a little more lenient with only about a thousand people being ‘processed’ through this system here in Vilnius. That old building, along with the monsters that worked in there, were quite efficient as you now see. The fear of being ‘eliminated’ had been the most effective implement in their toolbox.
Please note that there are three windows facing the street. Each window is for one of three entities, God, The Grand Duke (who brought them here centuries ago) and their family.
We then boarded our bus again for a trip outside of Vilnius to a beautiful lake region town named Trakai. This is where it starts to get interesting….. there we found a very small enclave of a very small population of a very small religion. We met members of the Karaite community, a ‘sect’ of Judaism that has its own beliefs in how they interpret the Torah. They are not interested in anyone else’s ‘explanation’ or interpretation of the Torah, so they reject the traditional Hebrew study guide (?) of the Talmud. This is the main difference between them and Rabbinical Judaism. Definitely ethnic in origin, they trace their roots back to remote regions of (Crimean) Turkey where in the late 1300’s the Grand Duke of Lithuania persuaded some of them to leave the area and come and be guards for him in Lithuania. Away they went and now six-hundred years later a handful are left, some still 100% Karaite, living in Trakai. We not only met them, but we learned how to make one of their traditional dishes, Kibinai (think empanadas) which was in fact delicious!
And not just their cardboard cut-outs! This is the family that owns one of the most successful restaurants on the lake and during the season, this area is jam-packed with visitors from the surrounding areas.
They are holding tray of Kibinai, their claim to fame and deservedly so!
Again, I could bore you to tears with the historical intertwining of these folks and their journeys out of ancient Egypt and their diaspora up and through Asia Minor and finally into Europe so…. I’m not going to do that! Rest assured it is a fascinating story, one that is worth investigating on your own, and it bears witness to being one of the fundamental traits of traveling with a group who revels in learning about the peoples of the world…. and eating their snacks!
