(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)
(Update for non-paying subscribers: I accidentally sent out the email to only paid subscribers, so this email is coming to you belatedly — and without the paywall this time.)
I have to say I’m pretty, pretty excited to finally win! Looking forward to receiving the book; it will have a place of honor on our coffee table.
When I first subscribed to the Dish and started seeing the VFYW contests, they seemed impossible, and yet the super-sleuths nailed the windows every week, along with anecdotes, history lessons, movies, and recipes. Seemed like they must have spent every day of their lives traveling the world. But like all great puzzles and games, it gradually became more solvable as I practiced, and now it’s a highlight of my weekends.
Here’s a dissent from the super-sleuth in Sydney:
That was an excellent roundup last week. I’m sure this contest takes a lot of time, and it’s appreciated. But I’ve spent a while looking back at my entry, and I’m pretty convinced I circled the right window — the same one Chini did. I’ve re-attached the photo I sent:
Of course we are playing for serious stakes here, and I will defer to the umpire’s final call, but I wouldn’t want to miss out on my (possible only ever) chance to share the gold with Chini, the World Champ in the Olympics of tracking down views from windows.
Yep that was my bad; I somehow overlooked that window guess. Here’s a followup on an earlier contest:
I’m kind of amazed that your cinema section for contest #425 didn’t mention the recent Netflix show with gay ghost leads, Dead Boy Detectives, which takes place in Post Townsend. (Oh, and for Andrew: *British* gay ghost leads!) Then again, I’m a month behind, so maybe someone else sent it to you. Here’s the trailer:
The wine geek in San Francisco sends a thoughtful note:
I hope you and your family have recovered from the shock of losing your stepfather. My dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack when he was 55. He was a very healthy long-distance runner at the time, so it was hard to make sense of his death. One day he was there and the next day he was gone. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. Over time, my memories of him have coalesced into a figure who probably is quite different from who my dad actually was, but that is all I have to go on. It would have been better to see how he would have evolved had he lived longer.
By the way, I finished your Funk book during this hiatus. I think I related most to the description of ED’s trip to Europe in his early twenties because I did something similar. I could identify with the feeling of being a curious outsider. I liked Isaac’s battle with the bear too. One of my poker buddies, who grew up in Illinois but had not heard of the Funk family, is going to read the book next. Thanks for writing it!
Thanks for reading it! The chapter on ED’s trip to Europe has many personal photos, and the following one is my favorite … a double exposure, or the reflection of a window? Or maybe ghosts …
From the UWS super-sleuth:
I’m sure you’ve got a million things to do other than read more emails, but I just wanted to send you a quick note of sympathy on the loss of your stepdad. I hope you’re comforted by your family and good memories. And I’m confident that I’m speaking on behalf of many of my fellow sleuths when I say that Fridays and Saturdays aren’t the same without the Dish and the contest results. And that we can’t wait until you and Andrew are back.
So grateful for those condolences and the many others you all sent in. A quick one from Berkeley:
I’ve only seen a photo of Steve, but he looks like a mensch, a friend, someone who will be missed by many. I just wanted to express how much your loss means to the community you’ve created.
Regarding the photo of Steve that Andrew posted in the email alongside his mother, the super-sleuth in Clinton writes, “I love the Dish shirt that he’s wearing in the photo, and I still have mine in very good shape. I’ll go change into it now.” Steve was a genuine reader of the Dish, which made us even closer.
Here’s another photo, of Steve and my mom — the best:
The super-sleuth in Augusta provides me some much-needed Mental Health Breaks:
Greetings! Not an actual entry this time — I just wanted to say hi, really. I was very sorry to hear about your stepfather, and I hope that you and your family are doing okay. I also hope you still managed to get some rest over the break. I spend way too much of the time I DON’T have looking at silly videos online, so I thought I’d pass along a couple that I found amusing (though they’ve been around for a while, so you may have seen them before). They are “political,” but not really :)
Or if Congress is more your flavor:
On to this week’s view, a sleuth is concise:
Weird lighthouse thingy. Northern Europe. Denmark.
Another is more so: “I say Krakow, Poland.” Another knows the right country:
I’ve been a paid-up (just-auto-renewed!) Dish subscriber since Andrew got dumped by NY Magazine in July 2020 (whereupon I immediately dumped them). I’m also a long-time VFYW lurker and first-time entrant. The fact that I — always just stunned by how folks find these damn windows — found this window in five minutes means that you will be deluged with correct answers. If it had taken much longer, I’d have given up. I have no patience for real super-sleuth-like detective work! Thank you for all the work, skillful editing, and amusing asides you put into this weekly contest.
From another sleuth who got to the right place this week: “I’ve been waiting quite a while since I missed my chance to enter on the last one I knew instantly (Valletta, Malta).” This next sleuth also got the right place (though I’m still withholding the name):
Well, this seemed an easy one: It was obviously in a European country, judging by the blurred-out license plates and the street signs, not to mention architecture, which also hinted at eastern Europe. An examination of the map, followed by some googling of cathedrals in eastern Europe by possible countries, soon revealed a matching image.
I’d try to come up with a more entertaining story, but I’m on the road, dealing with my hospitalised father who may or may not be nearing the end of a surprisingly long (given his lifestyle) life, and I’m exhausted.
Can relate, and my sympathies.
Chini displays this week’s city — and the circled window, if you squint:
He adds:
A location this straightforward should be easy for this crowd, but if you do need some help, you could do worse than to ask the local schoolmaster … you know, our old friend Marko …
The super-sleuth in Clinton explains:
It’s so freaking odd what the mind grabs, stores, and lets out with the slightest prompt. Almost as soon as I discovered that this week’s city is Vilnius, Lithuania, I recalled a fairly minuscule detail from the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October. Sean Connery’s character, Capt. Marko Ramius, was known as “The Vilnius Schoolmaster.” (And the fact that Ramius was a Lithuanian — rather than a native Russian — may have been one of the reasons why Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, finally deduced that Ramius was trying to defect.) For some reason I’ll never understand, the nickname stuck with me.
Next up, “a ‘lurker’ who enjoys your contest but is too lazy (and otherwise occupied) to drill down specifics on Google Earth”:
We were in Vilnius just a couple of months ago, but given the prominence of this landmark (the National Cathedral), I expect you will have plenty of correct results.
The super-champ in Berkeley zeroes in on the bus in view:
It occurred to me that a comparison of different European cities’ “hop-on-hop-off buses” might be productive, because what little we can see of the red, black, and yellow bus on the left looked like one of those. It crossed my mind that the yellow image on the bus that seemed to be a tower might represent a local observation tower (something like San Antonio’s Tower of the Americas in contest #393). So I did a search for “observation towers in European cities,” and immediately the white tower to the right of center in our photo popped up in the results at number three! I wasn’t even thinking of that tower, or anything similar, when I did the search!
How the super-sleuth in Chattanooga got to Vilnius:
First I struck out trying to match famous European cities to the tour bus landmarks. After figuring it must be an embassy across the way (turned out to be Ireland … why is there a Costa Rica flag there??), it took me a few remaining European capitals to find a hit with Vilnius plaza tower.
I’m amazed at the array of car types available in Vilnius. I know little about Lithuania, but given Olympic season, I’m sure there will be many submissions devoted to their over achieving 1992 basketball team and its tie-dye outfits.
One of the VFYW Reimagineds this week borders on tie-dye — “in the style of Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter who was a pioneer of Western abstract art”:
Next we hear from a “long-time reader, founding member, occasional emailer, and one-time published Dishhead”:
I was too busy to enter last year when it was my hometown of Dublin, but this time I have the luxury of a bank holiday to respond. I recognised this view instantly, as I’m sure many readers will. It brings back happy memories. I visited Vilnius in 2019 and ran my first-ever half marathon, in a somewhat respectable 2 hours 2 mins. It’s been all managed decline since then!
I found Vilnius to be a wonderful, vibrant and hospitable city. I remember being struck at the time at the huge positivity the locals had for the European Union. I wonder if this is the case? The geopolitics in the region have certainly changed since then.
I know I won’t win because this is my first entry, but if I did I would choose the book because:
I don’t have one
I want to keep paying for the Dish.
Enjoy your holiday, and see you back for the election homestretch!
From another sleuth who knew the view instantly:
To solve this contest, it does help that I photographed this scene in 2017 (but not from the fancy hotel):
Is the beagle hiding a Lithuanian flag, perhaps flying from nearby Gediminas’ Tower?
That tower, on a hilltop, is captured by the super-sleuth in Bend:
It turns out that Dusty was hiding a major clue:
Heh. The super-sleuth in Providence names that statue — and lusts after others in the building:
Dusty is blocking the pediment statue of St. Casimir, presumably a symbol of Lithuania; the northern lower statue is St. Stanislaus for Poland; and the central figure is St. Helena, presumably for then-dominant Russia. These three sculptures were removed in the Soviet years, ca. 1950, and only restored and returned to the building in 1997.
It’s a very handsome, very distinctive Neoclassical building — the Vilnius cathedral ... damn fine structure! I see that architect Laurynas Gucevičius studied in his youth under the French “Revolutionary Classicists” — Claude Ledoux, Soufflot, et al. — and the influence definitely shows in a very good building. It’s impressive as hell, particularly given a fairly far-flung location from a center of progressive design like Paris, though Poland/Lithuania was rich and sophisticated at the time.
But I was most struck, looking over online bits and pieces, by the spectacular — and notably homoerotic — sculptural work on the facade by Italian sculptor Tommaso Righi. Those are the hottest four Evangelists (let alone impressive muscle-dad Moses — Michelangeline horns and all) I’ve ever seen — damn!
Pretty sure the window view’s room was easy to nail as the only balcony that close to the street fronting the square without a pillar in its corner. I’ll leave it to the hardcore geeks to get the room number and all that. But now you have added Vilnius to my list of central/eastern/Baltic European countries to which I need make an architectural pilgrimage. (Ljubljana, Slovenia has long been very high, ditto Split in Croatia ... and a jaunt back to Helsinki wouldn’t be amiss, and I’d love to get back to Petersburg, but that don’t seem likely in my lifetime ... )
Moses also made an impression on this sleuth: “I immediately recognized the view from when I was there on a work trip 12 years ago, and I remember right, there is a pretty cool statue of Moses near those columns (horns included).” Another notes:
The Grand Duchy — as it was normally called in English historiography — of Lithuania is customarily considered to be the last European nation to have been “Christianized” from heathenism. (Paganism was thing of the Mediterranean world, and heathenism was the traditional reference to northern/eastern European cognate.)
From a previous winner:
Apparently, this contest will serve as a proxy for the measurement of percentage of the sleuths who are artists and art history majors, because my wife laughed and said, “Any art history major will know this is a pic of Vilnius Cathedral.”
On that note:
European streetscape and a Catholic church with a possible belfry or baptistry out front — at first this seemed like a trick, since it seemed too easy. (I had flashbacks of that “Bavarian” maypole in contest #291 that was actually in Colorado yet had me exploring every town square south of Munich.) So I typed “neoclassical church with Doric portico and tower in front” into Google and voila! We are looking at the Vilnius Cathedral. I don’t have any crazy stories about Vilnius, but I’m thankful for the art history elective in undergrad that sparked my love of neoclassicism!
From the super-sleuth in College Park, who specializes in Classics:
There’s a fun stereopticon image of the cathedral’s façade from 1900 over at Wikimedia Commons, but why the photographer went to the trouble but failed to get his ground line straight is beyond me:
Like so many Christian places of worship, it effaces a pagan site beneath it. In early Christian basilicas you may find an artistic program that attempts to reflect salvation history. So, in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore, for example, Old Testament images run up the interior longitudinal walls above the columns interspersed with the clerestory lights; but at the head of the church by the altar, you’ll find the endpoint of salvation history as the focus, which means Jesus and Mary with ancillary characters. The four evangelists are often symbolically depicted, as guarantors of the truth of the story, up there, too.
The Vilnius cathedral’s 18th century exterior decoration establishes this sort of program on the façade. On the right, outside the colonnade, is Moses in a niche, depicted with his mistranslated horns; and opposite, on the far left, is Abraham. So we have God’s promise to make Abraham’s descendants prosperous, and Moses as a foundational figure for Israel through God’s deliverance of his chosen people from bondage. Closer in, and peeking through the columns, are the evangelists in niches. Above the evangelists, likewise peeping through, are five reliefs drawn from the Acts of the Apostles highlighting scriptural guarantees that God works through the Christian church. At center, echoing the act of the bishop within, is Peter preaching:
Echoing the triangle of the pediment is a triangle linking Abraham, Moses, and the Sacrifice of Noah after the landing of the ark above the door in the tympanum, which gives a third great memorial of God’s deliverance of his people. Up on top as acroteria are St. Helena at center, discoverer of the true cross and influencer of her son Constantine to turn the Roman Empire into the vehicle for spreading Christianity, and at her flanks are Stanislaus and Ladislaus. Triangles and groups of threes, hmmmm ...
But to get to the center of the story we must enter the church, go straight up the long axis, and there is the body of Christ in the tabernacle:
The interior, which was converted to an art museum by the communist government, may or may not retain its original decoration, but I’ll spare you (and me) a long discussion of that.
Details on the bell tower come from the super-sleuth in Sydney:
Cathedral Square is right in the heart of the Old Town, and that bell tower we can see has an interesting history:
One of the most distinctive features of the square is the cathedral’s bell tower, situated several yards from the cathedral itself, a thing uncommon outside of Italy. According to many scholars, the tower was in fact one of the towers of the ancient city walls of the mediaeval Lower Castle that once stood near the modern square. According to another version, not supported by modern historians, the base of the tower was in fact a small pagan temple, demolished and then turned into the bell tower.
“Layout of the square as depicted on 50 litas banknotes. Marked in numbers: 1. Vilnius Cathedral 2. Cathedral's Belfry 3. Gediminas Tower 4. Hill of Three Crosses 5. Monument to Grand Duke Gediminas 6. Location where Royal Palace is being reconstructed. So the view is somewhat outdated.”
Regardless of its origins, the lower parts of the tower are mediaeval, with several small loop-holes preserved. Its oldest underground square section was built in the 13th century on the bottom of the old riverbed. Upper parts of the tower were added in the 18th century while the neo-classical finish was added in the 19th century, during the reconstruction of the cathedral.
Another sleuth adds:
An unnamed pigeon tells the story of the bell tower:
From the super-sleuth in Ridgewood:
I’d really be kicking myself if I didn’t get this week’s view, considering that less than a year ago, you published my guess for contest #392 guess that contained an image that matches this week’s view! Check it out:
From a first-time entrant:
It’s the city where I was born and lived until 1990. I visit every two years.
From another first-timer:
I recognized the Vilnius Cathedral immediately, though I was only in Vilnius twice and that was over 30 years ago, and I certainly haven’t thought about it since then. In the early 1990s, the Baltic Republics were shedding the remnants of communism and were still quite poor. But I do remember how clean and northern European the city felt even then — definitely not part of the “east” at all.
I’ve been reading this contest every week for the past decade or so, but never had enough time to invest in finding the location. However, this one took me about four minutes, so I thought I’d send it in.
A more recent visitor to Vilnius:
I had the pleasure of staying at this hotel at Cathedral Square 12 years ago. Being a humble servant of the US Government, my trip to Vilnius was not expected to result in such excellent accommodations. But I guess the time of year resulted in the hotel offering rates within the government lodging allowance. The hotel was a welcome respite for me and my travel companions.
We had been on a European road-show meeting with foreign partners for over a week before arriving in Lithuania. Our flight there required a flyover of Ukrainian airspace and layover in Kiev. This was less than two weeks removed from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster in July 2014, which you may recall was caused by a Russian-made surface to air missile shooting down a commercial airline over a Russian separatist controlled area of Ukraine. So with the nerves of the flight behind me, settling into this hotel was great.
And Vilnius was great. Aside from our meetings with our Lithuanian Government hosts, the highlight of my visit was touring the museum located at the former KGB Vilnius Headquarters:
It’s a remarkable museum that brings to light the human rights atrocities and crimes of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. The basement cells were chilling. I highly recommend a visit to the museum for anyone interested in Cold War history. The building also served as a Nazi SS headquarters during WWII.
From a sleuth who was just in Vilnius:
During the Soviet occupation (1940-41, 1944-1990), the cathedral was converted into an art museum. When the Lithuanian people began their drive to restore national independence in the late 1980s, the square was the site of demonstrations and rallies. When I visited Vilnius in May 2024 and walked by the square, I witnessed a rally underway in support of Ukraine’s independence. For Lithuanians and Lithuanian Americans (like me), the site is an iconic symbol of religious and national freedom.
Another freedom-lover:
I went to Vilnius in summer 2022 and participated in a pro-Ukraine rally and wondered why we in the UK don’t do that. Since then, Ukraine is all but forgotten in the UK, although another war seems to have generated the attention I wished.
From the super-champ in Warrensburg:
I focused first on the flags on the building at left — it’s the Ukrainian flag, of course, but the other seems to be the Republic of Belarus’ flag, a pre-Soviet flag now used as a protest against Lukashenko’s regime:
That pointed me to a country in the Baltic region, and after I eliminated Poland, I just googled “historic tower” and “Lithuania” and up popped our view.
A previous winner sends a photo of that flag in action:
Another sleuth played a role in the protection of Lithuania:
This contest was easy for me, as I lived in Vilnius with my family for three years when I served as the U.S. Defense Attaché in the American Embassy from 1999-2002. I took innumerable visitors, both official and non-official tours of the city, and this square was a must-see. The cathedral, next to the iconic tower, is used for civic as well as religious ceremonies, so I have been inside multiple times.
Lithuania was then, and continues to be, a very pro-American place. During my time there I worked hard to help the Lithuanians prepare themselves for NATO membership — something that took place shortly after I left. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
But another sleuth is anxious:
On my mind is the importance of Vilnius and Lithuania to NATO’s efforts in the Ukraine-Russia war. As NATO’s closest capital city to Minsk, Kyiv, and Moscow, Vilnius also has US forces now stationed at a new base near Pabradė, 30 miles northeast. Russian occupation of the Suwalki Gap — between Kaliningrad and Belarus that links Lithuania to Poland — would be a real threat for Lithuanians.
Back to the window hunt, another sleuth aims for the hotel:
This is from the Amberton Hotel on Cathedral Square in Vilnius, Lithuania.
But first, a word about “California Uber Alles,” covered in the latest contest. I was in high school and just getting interested in politics when that song came out, and it was indeed a highly amusing take on what was (for an East Coast boy) the highly amusing loopy-left tendency in California politics. But back then, California was a two-party state, and beneath the surface the state’s other loopy tendency was about to come to the fore. Jello Biafra responded in 1981 with a remake called “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now”:
It opens with a jazzy piano riff of the type we associated then with cocktail lounges and Nixon-type Republicans, as Biafra crooned, “I am Emperor Ronald Reagan, born again with fascist cravings, still, you make me President.” All the anti-Brown lyrics were updated with their polar-opposite observations about Reagan. However, where the original “California Uber Alles” was funny, “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” was more of a primal scream.
Back to the window search. This is one of those views that’s easily solvable with decent googling skills; just try a few variations on “white tower classical building” until you find the right one. The actual window was a bit harder, only because the Grand Hotel Vilnius appeared to triangulate better to the tower-church combination but didn’t have a balcony with the proper acute angle, so I went with the Amberton. I couldn’t find a floor plan online but this appears to be from either a lounge or a super-suite room on the second floor.
Another bid for the Amberton:
This one seems too easy. It’s the corner window with the protruding terrace, circled in my photos, at the Amberton Cathedral Square Hotel:
Our sleuth in Shiprock picks the right hotel — and harrumphs:
Let’s admit it. The contest is no longer to simply submit a guess as to where the photo was taken; it also now requires you to submit a personal narrative. Didn’t spend enough time searching for the view? Great! Now you get to spend time writing a lengthy story as well.
So in the spirit of the original contest, I submit that this photo was taken from the Grand Hotel Vilnius, from the window circled in the following photo (and I’m going to sincerely believe that the individual circled on the balcony is in fact the submitter of the image):
I have no further details.
Another sleuth points to a blogger’s review of the hotel featuring many photos, including this self-portrait:
Pierre Blake
The super-sleuth in Louisville has a bit of history:
It looks like a beautiful hotel, originally constructed in 1900. After serving as a number of other things during the 20th century (including a telegraph company), it was restored in 2012. It also includes a remnant of the Vilnius Defense Wall, constructed in the 16th century to protect the city against Tatar raiders.
I haven’t been there (yet), but I would love to visit the Baltic states someday. I’m a quarter Russian (my maternal grandfather was born on a boat to America, or maybe shortly after), so I’ve always wanted to explore that region of the world.
Have a great vacay!
I tried! I explored a new country over Dishcation, which I’ll reveal next week. From a “wannabe super-sleuth”:
Only a few of the windows on that side of the hotel have this balcony corner:
Here are a handful of the windows with this feature:
The “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor picks the arrowed one on the right (as did the vast majority of sleuths):
The window can be found by multiple sight-lines. One is like this:
I think the room is 321, based on a floor map of the 5th floor:
Another settles on “room 319”:
And another:
Wow, I glance at the VFYW every week but have never come close to guessing a window. This week, I think it is on the 3rd Floor (deuxième étage?) of the Grand Hotel Vilnius, as tagged on this Street View image:
I’ve never been in Lithuania, and about all I know about it is that there are more Lithuanian speakers than there are Esperanto speakers. Fun fact to know and share, which has considerable bearing on understanding the successes and failures of various attempts to standardize this or that, such as the decimal clock in the Musée des Arts et Métiers — one metric standard that didn’t “take”:
But despite my lack of travel, I remain dangerous and facile with Google Maps and Streetview, having been one of the developers in 1967 of the street database structure underlying Google Maps.
Nice! The VFYW brings all kinds of interesting people out of the woodwork. A quick note about the hotel’s evolving name:
The hotel’s former name was the Kempinski — the Grand Hotel Kempinski Vilnius. Berthold Kempinski was a fascinating fellow. While he and US President Grover Cleveland look like they could’ve been brothers, Kempinski was a travelling wine trader from Prussia who opened a popular restaurant in Berlin. Notably, he invented the concept of a set menu for a fixed price and a half portion for a lower price, making fine dining more affordable for the middle-class. One of the most popular men of Berlin, he is the founder of the Kempinski hotel line.
But what about the right window this week? From the submitter of this week’s view:
OK, I’m hoping this photo works for the VFYW. It’s my second submission, and I admit taking and submitting photos is great fun! It’s very easy to be excited to submit when taking the photo but then procrastinate and take several months to actually submit.
This photo is from:
Kempinski Grand Hotel Vilnius Universiteto g. 14, 01122 Vilnius, Lithuania Room 323
Here’s the window marked:
There are a few flags you probably need to blur out, and maybe some of the license plates. Also the bus saying “Vilnius City Tour” needs some blurring.
Vilnius is a great city with a lot to see. We were not there long enough to do much but enjoy delicious Lithuanian food (Cepelinai) and dark beer (tamsus alus) at outdoor cafes. We will definitely go back, especially since my wife is from Kaunas and still has a lot of family there.
I would love to see if this is easy or difficult for sleuths (excepting the super-sleuths, who are amazing and will locate it easily). And I’d love learn of the history, food, drinks and wildlife (not sure if there are many movies) of this beautiful city and country.
The submitter must have accidentally circled the wrong spot, since the vast majority of sleuths circled the window just above it, on the third floor (which “Room 323” implies anyway). For extra confirmation, here are the circled windows from Chini and Giuseppe, respectively:
The winner this week also circled that window, and he breaks the tie by being a Correct Guesser with the highest number of overall entries:
Oh no. First the Boston Marriott, now this. And just like that, I’m becoming one of the VFYW dorks.
We are in the Grand Hotel Vilnius, 3rd floor (second if you’re counting like a European). The room looks out over Vilnius Cathedral and its bell tower — or, for those of us in the Church business, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Stanislaus and St. Ladislaus of Vilnius. Based on the angle of the railing and the placement of the parking lot, I’d say it’s the uncovered balcony in the attached photo. St. Casimir is under doggy protection, presumably because he is the patron saint of Lithuania.
A few years ago, I was staying with a group of university students in a hostel during a stay in Vilnius. The accommodations were not nearly as nice as at the Grand Hotel. I may or may not have ditched the group to get a drink here after a visit to the cathedral. Thanks for bringing back a good memory!
He beat out 102 other sleuths who guessed Vilnius this week. Here’s the collage from Berkeley:
The super-sleuth in DC has a slew of fun facts:
Before being rebranded as a Hilton in May 2024, the hotel was known for several years as the Grand Hotel Kempinski Vilnius. It has had many notable guests over the years, including President Joe Biden, who stayed there during the 2023 NATO Summit:
The hotel is located in the city’s Senamiestis district, also known as Vilnius Old Town — one of the largest and best-preserved medieval old towns in Eastern Europe. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, Old Town is one of the city’s top tourist attractions. Lying within Old Town and within easy walking distance of the Grand Hotel Vilnius are several notable landmarks, including:
Vilnius Cathedral, pictured in the contest photo.
Gediminas Tower, a remnant of a castle that once stood atop a hill overlooking the city:
The Presidential Palace:
The Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania:
Vilnius University, founded in 1579, one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe.
The “Republic of Užupis,” a quirky neighborhood that declared its “independence” on April Fool’s Day 1997. Užupis has its own president, flag, and currency. It also has adopted a rather unusual constitution, which is displayed in more than 30 languages on plaques posted along Paupio Street in the Old Town. Among the stranger provisions are:
“A dog has a right to be a dog.”
“A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in times of need.”
“Everyone has the right to be undistinguished and unknown.”
“Everyone has the right to understand nothing.”
Here are a few additional miscellaneous facts about Vilnius and Lithuania that I learned this week:
Vilnius celebrated its 700-year anniversary last year.
During the 15th century, Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It encompassed large swaths of present-day Ukraine and Belarus, as well as parts of what are now Russia and Poland:
Lithuania asserts that the geographic center of Europe is located near Purnuškės, a village just north of Vilnius, and has erected a monument to mark the spot. It turns out, however, that at least six other countries also claim to contain the continent’s geographic center. Experts apparently disagree on the proper methodology for calculating the center point.
I knew next to nothing about Lithuania before this week’s contest. Thanks, as always, for the opportunity to learn about new places.
Another potted history comes from this sleuth:
I’ve never been to Vilnius, but I’ve read a lot about it over the years. It’s one of those microcosm cities that sums up an entire region’s history. In the 1600s, it was co-capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the largest country in Europe at the time — which stretched all the way to the Black Sea and incorporated much of modern Ukraine (and even, for a couple of years, Moscow).
Later, as Russian Vilna, it was a noted center of Jewish life (a sage of that era is known today as “the Vilna Gaon”). After World War I, it was incorporated into Poland as Wilno; the revived Lithuanian state of the time had to make do with Kaunas as its capital. It was restored to Lithuania by Stalin during World War II. That its architecture is obviously a mishmash of styles should surprise no one.
The Warrensburg champ has more on the quirky Republic of Užupis:
Where in God’s name did this “republic,” occupying barely a square kilometer, come from? During the Soviet period, this area had been a workers’ district, and by the time of independence in 1991, it was dilapidated and depopulated with crime rates surging. Eventually, though, students from the nearby Vilnius Academy of Arts began to move into the abandoned buildings, seeing the neighborhood as a place to revive creativity and free expression after the fall of Communism. To cement this rebranding, in 1997 they jokingly declared “independence” for Užupis (meaning “beyond the river”).
What began as a laugh, though, quickly became something more than that, as artists and others began to move into the district again, collaborating in its revival as a kind of Lithuanian Montmartre. Per the tourism minister:
If you cross the bridge, you can become yourself. You don’t play any social role, you don’t belong to anyone, you belong to yourself. You can think about who you are and you can live without being part of that mad race that all of humanity is involved in.
Residents still regularly gather on Mondays at the “parliament,” aka the Užupis Café, to discuss community happenings, presenting their ideas and volunteering to help others achieve theirs. According to one resident:
There are titles and positions, but they don’t mean anything as we all contribute. If anyone needs help with anything, people will help. If we are doing something together for the Republic, there is no question about helping and contributing.
Even the Dalai Lama is an honorary citizen, having visited the “republic” on two occasions:
Seems like a cool place to visit!
The Dalai Lama would love the story relayed by the super-sleuth in Brookline:
One way to tie together last week’s view in Japan to this week’s view in Lithuania would be the story of Sugihara Chiune (1900-1986), the Japanese vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, during World War II who is famous for issuing transit visas to thousands of Jews so that they could flee Europe via Japanese territory.
His story is recounted in the film Sugihara Chiune (Persona Non Grata, 2015; dir. Cellin Gluck), which perhaps not surprisingly employs considerable dramatic license in lionizing its subject:
The number of individuals that he saved is disputed, ranging from 2,000 to 6,000, but his efforts were recognized in 1985 by Yad Vashem when he was named Righteous Among the Nations. Memorials to Sugihara exist in Lithuania, Israel, Japan, Brazil, and the United States — but the one most relevant to the VFYW is the Chiune Sugihara Sakura Park, a 25-minute walk from the Grand Hotel Vilnius:
With cherry blossoms at their peak framing a simple memorial, this is a moving tribute to a man who used his bureaucratic power to help thousands escape the horrors of war.
The super-sleuth in Albany reflects on her roots:
I don’t know much about Lithuanian culture, despite being 1/8 Lithuanian. My great-grandfather and his brother left Lithuania around the turn of the last century and never looked back. During that time, because of increasingly harsh Russian control, a famine, and pogroms, approximately 635,000 people, almost 20 percent of the population, left Lithuania.
The brothers’ first stop was England, where their last name was changed by British immigration officials, in the way that many hard-to-spell and -pronounce names were. They each found and married a spouse, and started families. For some reason, after having four kids, my great-grandparents decided England wasn’t quite up to snuff either, so they moved their side of the family to America, where they had four more kids, including my grandfather.
Traditional Lithuanian cuisine is purportedly presented at the nearby restaurant Etno Dvaras. It may possibly be a tourist trap, but it does have over 12,000 mostly positive reviews on Google. The starters are various mashed potato dumplings with different fillings (mostly meat or cheese, with intriguing style names like Landlord, Grandson, and Mother-in-Law), accompanied by either sour cream, pork cracklings, or both. There’s also an entire section of different potato dishes, mainly pancakes, but also potato sausage … what!?
The Nashua super-sleuth also touches on ancestry:
Coincidentally, one of my engineers just returned from Vilnius and posted pictures in our Teams Group. Her family emigrated from Lithuania and she went to explore her roots. Her great-great-grandfather was a signer of the Act of Independence of Lithuania, which is an interesting piece of history to have in your family background.
A recent winner sends an image of the residence of the Bishop of Vilnius in the early 15th century:
More ancestry:
I’ve never been to Lithuania, but my most recent immigrant ancestors — my mother’s father’s parents — were from there. The story was that my great-grandfather left Lithuania to avoid being drafted into the czar’s army. This would have been around 1900. He met my great-grandmother here (I’m not sure how she came to the US), and they raised six children in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, where great-grandfather was a coal miner.
The five eldest of those six children, my grandfather included, all moved to California during the Depression, leaving only their baby sister to care for their aging parents. Grandpa anglicized his name, graduated from UC Berkeley, was called up to serve as a coastal artillery officer in WW2 — spending the entire war in the Aleutian Islands — and returned to raise my mother and her three sisters with my grandmother in Oakland. That’s my quintessential immigrant story.
From the SF wine geek again:
I have not been to Vilnius, but I’ve been curious about it because my ex-wife’s father’s family emigrated to the US from Lithuania. She strongly identifies with her mother’s side of the family (Italian) and passed that along to our kids. The Lithuanian side got short shrift. My youngest, however, has also been curious about it, and so we talked about the window and how it may spur her to take a visit at some point.
Vilnius and Lithuania generally are well north of areas in Europe in which vitis vinifera can flourish, so there is no wine industry per se to write about. But never fear! There is a Nordic-style of wine production centered on using apples and wild berries as the source of the fruit. And apparently these Nordic-style “wines” are pretty good. I have never had any, of course, but certainly would try them if I ever got the chance.
The Lithuanian “wine” industry began in the early 20th century when a young entrepreneur, Balys Karazija, decided to make wine from apples in a town called Anyksciai (I can’t reproduce all the diacritical marks). It won gold in an international wine exhibition in Paris in 1938. Apparently, Balys himself — who is called the king of wine in Lithuania — was not a fan of the wine. He headed west at the start of WWII, but others stepped up to continue making the fruit wines under the same label.
The winery now makes a fruit wine called Voruta, which is available throughout Lithuania. So the next time you are in Vilnius, skip the Gevrey-Chambertin and give Voruta a shot!
The Austin mixologist joined the Dishcation:
For this week’s view, I found it pretty early after you posted, but I procrastinated so much that I wasn’t even able to come up with a cocktail. I have an idea for what I want to do, but I waited too long and haven’t had a chance to gather the ingredients. I’ll try to double up next week to make up for it.
Here’s your favorite food columnist:
What the fuck happened to August? I’ve been spending the whole month thinking I have plenty of time to write this column, and now I am frantically typing it up at the last minute. It was nice of you to make this one easy, so we could all take the whole month off. Searching successively on “octagonal tower [X],” where X is a European country, did the trick.
As chance would have it, we are also at a Hilton Curio Collection hotel tonight: the Colcord in Oklahoma City. We are on a road trip from Tucson to Asheville, to bless my car as our Asheville vehicle. Last night we stayed in Roswell, NM. Nice little town, but I don’t know what the aliens saw in it.
Anyway, on to the meal. For our Lithuanian meal we started out with Šaltibarščiai — a cold beet soup, cousin of borscht. As you can see from the fact that I am linking to a Google translation of the recipe, this is very authentic. And it was, I am sad to say, quite boring. Photogenic, but boring:
What do you think a cold soup of beetroot, cucumbers, kefir, and dill tastes like? It tastes like exactly all those things. Maybe it’s a thing you had to grow up with, like Vegemite. And I will freely admit it is much better than Vegemite, if you are not one of the people like me who happened to grow up with Vegemite.
However, the second course was delicious: zrazai — beef rolls stuffed with porcini and other mushrooms. This was a lovely surprise. We also had a stir fry of miso butter corn with hot peppers and shiitake mushrooms from Kenji Lopez-Alt’s book The Wok, and a dessert of Pavlova:
Thanks as always for a great contest, looking forward to the fall season.
Here’s a less appetizing report from our favorite biologist:
I mean no offense to Lithuania when I choose the leopard slug for this week’s animal. Slugs are cool, and Lithuania has a whole raft of them (including one known as the cellar slug, known for living in people’s homes and coming out at night to eat the pet food). Leopard slugs are the biggest and showiest of the lot. They’re widespread, found in most of Europe, and have been introduced to Hawaii and North America. This one was found in Ontario:
Size apart, the leopard slug is pretty generic. It has a small shell embedded in the roof of its mantle to remind us that it’s really just a snail. The mantle roof is full of blood vessels to absorb oxygen, serving as its lung. Inside, most of the body space is taken up by the reproductive system, which opens just behind the left tentacle.
The slug is hermaphroditic, producing both eggs and sperm. It leads a generally inoffensive lifestyle, grazing on plants, fungi, and detritus.
Gotta admit, when I see any snail of this size, I immediately think of calamari, since some people have eaten these slugs and describe their taste as calamari-ish. But the possible side effects deter me from experimenting myself because, at least in warmer climates, these guys often carry the larval form of the rat lungworm. When eaten by humans, it can attack the brain and cause severe meningitis. The parasite is not only found in slugs but in their slime, so wash those raw veggies thoroughly.
The leopard slug is most famous not for its taste, but for its mating ritual:
During warm months, pairs of sexually receptive individuals climb to some elevated position in a bush or tree and follow one another in a circle while licking each other for as much as 2 ½ hours. Eventually they entwine and drop from the perch and hang suspended, like amorous bungee jumpers, by a tough mucus strand that may be as much as 25 cm long.
If anything involving mucus can be called romantic, this mating ritual would be it:
After this dramatic interlude, during which they swap sperm, each of them will go off and lay eggs. This external fertilization is safer than internal, which sometimes doesn’t work out well for slugs — but that’s a whole other story.
From a notable animal to a notable human:
I don’t have anything of personal interest to share this week, as I have never been in this part of the world. So I will keep it short and go straight to the notable person of the week:
Romain Gary was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He was born 21 May, 1914, as Roman Kacew in Vilnius. In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his parents' origins, ancestry, occupation and his own childhood. His mother, Mina Owczyńska was a Jewish actress from Švenčionys and his father was a businessman named Arieh-Leib Kacew from Trakai, also a Lithuanian Jew. The couple divorced in 1925 and Arieh-Leib remarried.
From a young age, Gary began inventing stories about his heritage. He later claimed that his actual father was the celebrated actor and film star Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Deported to central Russia in 1915, they stayed in Moscow until 1920. They later returned to Vilnius, then moved on to Warsaw. When Gary was 14, he and his mother emigrated illegally to Nice, France. Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges.
During World War II, Gary joined Gen. Charles de Gaulle in London. As an aviator, Gary served with the Free French Forces in Europe and North Africa, earning the Croix de Guerre and Compagnon de la Libération. During this time, he changed his name to Romain Gary. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs: “Gari, gari … burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name.
For 20 years following the war, he served in French diplomatic service. From 1956 to 1960, he was French consul general in Los Angeles and became acquainted with Hollywood. It was in Los Angeles that he met the actress Jean Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. Gary had just turned 45 and was getting bored with his marriage to the British writer, journalist, and Vogue editor Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. Gary and Branch divorced in 1961, and he married Seberg the following year:
As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panthers and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed, and she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. Gary challenged him to a duel, but Eastwood declined. Gary and Seberg divorced in 1970. According to their son Alexandre Diego, Gary was a distant presence as a father: “Even when he was around, my father wasn’t there. Obsessed with his work, he used to greet me, but he was elsewhere.”
Gary became one of France’s most popular and prolific writers, writing more than 30 novels, essays and memoirs. His first work, published in 1945, L’Éducation Européenne, won him immediate acclaim. Humanistic and optimistic despite its graphic depictions of the horrors of World War II, the novel was later revised and reissued in English as Nothing Important Ever Dies (1960).
Gary’s novels mix humor with tragedy and faith with cynicism. Les Couleurs du Jour (1952), set in Nice at Carnival, and La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), in which the ghost of a Jewish stand-up comedian takes possession of his Nazi executioner, are comic novels nonetheless informed by serious moral considerations. Les Racines du Ciel (1956), winner of the Prix Goncourt, balances a visionary conception of freedom and justice against a pessimistic comprehension of man’s cruelty and greed.
He is the only person to win the Prix Goncourt twice. This prize for French language literature is awarded only once to an author, but Gary published La Vie Devant Soi in 1975 under the pseudonym Émile Ajar. The Académie Goncourt awarded the prize to Ajar without knowing his real identity. Gary recruited his distant cousin, Paul Pavlowitch to portray Ajar in public appearances, allowing Gary to remain unknown as the true producer of the Ajar works. Gary later revealed the truth in his posthumous book Vie et Mort d'Émile Ajar.
In addition to his success as a novelist, he wrote the screenplay for the motion picture The Longest Day, and co-wrote and directed Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!, which starred Seberg:
But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. Gary died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Paris on 2 December 1980. (Seberg had committed suicide only the previous year.) Gary was cremated in Père Lachaise Cemetery and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea near Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
In 2007, a statue honoring Gary was unveiled in Vilnius depicting the 9-year-old hero of Gary’s autobiographical novel The Promise at Dawn:
Another sleuth points to a “larger-than-life statue of Tony Soprano looming over a train station”:
From our public art maven:
It’s Musikfest time here in Bethlum, the 40th year of the supposedly largest free music festival in the US, and I’m listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd from afar as they finish their set tonight. I’m going to retire before they finish, but I wanted to get this off by this week’s deadline: Vilnius, Lithuania. I’ll add to it later. “Free Bird” is playing right now as the encore, so time to go.
She follows up:
I am so sorry about your stepfather. Hug your mom, and help her as much as you can. The shock of such a sudden death is often paralyzing.
It feels weird to work on the VFYW under these circumstances, so I’m not going to have a lot of content. But I must say this is an amazing city, and it’s now on my list to visit. I’ve mentioned before that there is a website with street art in cities all over the world, and Vilnius has a number of entries. There is abundant public art, including sculptures memorializing Frank Zappa, Leonard Cohen (who supposedly had Lithuanian roots), and John Lennon. Here’s Zappa:
Cohen:
Lennon:
Two different tile installations caught my eye. First, close to the cathedral, is one that honors different authors, and it’s an ongoing project. Initially, this place was dedicated to Lithuanian poets, but later it expanded in scale and the wall became a reflection of all kinds of writers across the world. It’s Literatu Street and continues up around the corner with pictures in the windows of the houses on the right:
Second is “Wall of Ceramics” (not too far from the view), which is very quilt-like in its style:
And with that, I will sign off. I’m travelling to a few National Parks in the Southwest this week, so maybe I will have some views to share.
Here’s one:
This afternoon we stopped at the visitor center at the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. This is the view from inside the building — a great office view for the folks who work there, with the changing seasons:
Another “just for the fun of it” view comes from this previous winner:
I’m sending in this view because it was just so nice; I wasn't thinking contest — too easy! It’s the view from my office in Lansing, Michigan:
Here’s the cinema report from Berkeley that you’ve been missing this month:
If Finnish director Mikko Kuparinen had managed to fit a car chase into his romantic dramedy 2 Nights Till Morning (2015), it would have been the perfect VFYW movie (according to my criteria anyway). As it is, though, it’s as close to perfect as I’ve seen. Too often I’ve had to settle for movies filmed hundreds of miles away from the window view; or a movie will have been shot in multiple places all over the world but have only a single scene in the VFYW neighborhood. My favorite example of that was in contest #331, when the horde of zombies in World War Z ran directly below our hotel window in Malta (though the hotel itself never appeared).
Not only was 2 Nights Till Morning filmed entirely on location in Vilnius, but long chunks of it were filmed right inside the Grand Hotel Vilnius! Pause the trailer below at the 24-second mark and you’ll be able to pick out our window in a two-second long nighttime shot of Cathedral Square in Vilnius Old Town, with the hotel to the left and the cathedral and its bell tower on the right:
The movie is set during the weekend of April 16, 2010, when the eruption of an Icelandic volcano named Eyjafjallajökull spread a gigantic ash cloud across European airspace, shutting down all air traffic. We meet a French architect named Caroline, in Vilnius on business and riding a taxi into Old Town. As it pulls to the curb and she gets out, I said “Holy shit! She’s going to our hotel!” — and the movie suddenly got interesting. That holy-shit moment happens at minute 1:27 in this lengthy clip when the bottom third of the bell tower in our view photo appears above the roof of her taxi:
She checks in. We see her second-floor room. Later that evening in the actual bar of our actual hotel (and at 4:30 in the clip), a fetching Finn named Jaakko comes over to apologize about the noise his entourage had been making. (Yes, this Finnish guy who turns out to be some kind of quasi-celeb DJ on tour playing House music for raves, has an entourage.) He speaks to her in English, of which she signals ignorance, so they spend a flirtatious but nearly mute evening in the hotel bar over glasses of wine.
Late at night and finally heading for the elevator (at 7:40), she instead accepts his invitation to go out for a nightcap — somewhere “close by” — and they wind up getting really wound up downing multiple vodka shots with convivial strangers at an underground bar. (This scene takes place on Šv. Kazimiero Street in Artistai Pub, which looks pretty cool but it’s about a 15-minute walk south of the hotel, so by my reckoning it doesn’t qualify as “close by” for a nightcap.)
On their return to the hotel, there’s some coy elevator play in which she doesn’t get off on her floor when the elevator door opens, but instead wordlessly accompanies him (at 11:45) to his third floor corner suite, which overlooks Cathedral Square. The scene that follows is the first of many to be filmed in the Presidential Suite of our hotel. The remainder of that clip concerns our heroes’ activities until morning (from which I’ll avert my eyes, mentioning only that two minutes of the scene have been cut from the clip, starting at about 15:40, including a very brief non-salacious bit of partial nudity).
In the next clip below, some ice has formed in their “relationship” and we meet her in the morning having just checked out of the hotel. She’s just learned that no airplanes can fly because of the ash cloud, and now no rooms are available at the inn. But I’m not including the clip to continue recounting plot. Starting at the 9:15 mark, Caroline and Jaakko leave the hotel for a field trip so he can check out the venue where he’ll be putting on a rave later that evening, and the movie rewards us with a promenade around the city:
The venue is an arena named Forum Palace, north of the river on Konstitucijos Avenue. We explore inside it, but when she steps outside to answer a phone call from her clingy significant other at the 13:10 mark, we’re shown the busy cityscape around it. At 14:24, Jaakko suggests the two of them walk back to the hotel and a brief montage of shots follows in which we’re shown Old Town, looking west along Gedimino Avenue and shot from what could only be an upper window of the cathedral’s bell tower; then a ground level shot, looking eastward along Konstitucijos Avenue toward the glass skyscrapers of bustling Šnipiškės district; then a very picturesque shot of the Orthodox Cathedral of the Theotokos with a flight of hot air balloons rising behind it, again apparently filmed from a different upper window in the cathedral’s bell tower. (Hot air ballooning above the urban center of Vilnius isn’t just permitted but promoted and apparently has become a significant tourist attraction, and flights of up to 14 balloons at once can go over the city on a summer evening.)
A walk from Forum Palace to the Grand Hotel Vilnius takes about 35 minutes if you choose the most direct route and don’t dilly dally. At 14:35 in the clip, we pick up Caroline and Jaakko mid-stroll, a kilometer from their starting point and somewhat off course, walking past the Church of St. Archangel Raphael in precisely the wrong direction for getting back to the hotel. She kids him about the “great benefits of [his] job” (including the young girls in his entourage). At 15:26, they’re a half-mile farther north at Kalvarijų Market — the largest and oldest marketplace in the city, where locals come for fruit and veg and used clothing, and where tourists come for trinkets. He kids her about being so much older than he is (“a more mature woman” is how he puts it, although the difference in the two actors’ ages is only about five years).
At the 17:00 mark, after a ride on a city bus, during which they talk about children and childlessness, we catch up to them a mile and a half south of the market, on picturesque Paplauja Bridge spanning the Vilnia River. The bridge’s guard rail is bedecked with love-locks, those padlocks that have come to infest and sometimes destroy tourist-worthy guardrails in every tourist spot in the world ever since first being popularized by Italian author Federico Moccia’s romantic 2006 novel Ho voglia di te (“I want you”), and the 2007 movie it spawned. Our couple discusses how she met her current squeeze, and unfortunately they assess the damned love-locks as “sweet.” Then at 17:45, they sit on the banks of the river beneath the bridge and debate the meaning of “a look” that one has directed toward the other.
At 18:20, they’re finally about a six-minute walk from the hotel and are heading back via St. Mykolo Street with the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in the background when she remarks about how much she’s missed this: “just wandering around and getting lost in places.” This woman clearly hasn’t been happy in her current relationship, but at the end the movie leaves you ignorant of what happens next. Does she or doesn’t she? Do they or don’t they? Personally, I think they do, but that’s just me.
The film is available to stream, with commercials, on Amazon’s Freevee channel.
Okay now, it’s not as if I can happily finish with Vilnius without taking a stab at a movie that has some action in it — Defiance (2008). Here’s a trailer:
Liberally based on true events (and controversially so), Defiance stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell as a trio of Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Poland (in an area that today is Belarus). The brothers Bielski (Tuvia, Zus, and Asael) are depicted as having more or less been petty-criminal ne’er-do-wells (or at least smugglers) before the invasion, never before having displayed an aptitude nor an inclination for heroism. But they’d formed a partisan unit, and eventually they were to bring more than 1,200 of their neighbors, threatened with extermination by the Nazis, with them deep into the forest where most of them survived the war.
This isn’t my favorite kind of VFYW movie, because very little of it was filmed within the city limits of Vilnius, resulting in very little of its location shooting being even conceivably identifiable. Although 36 seconds into the trailer, I was surprised to notice that Defiance and 2 Nights Till Morning share something beyond both appearing in this cinema report:
Most of Defiance was shot on location an hour’s drive outside Vilnius, in forests similar to — and no more than 130 miles away from — the actual locations where the events depicted in the film took place. As I understand it, nothing quite like the incident depicted in the following clip ever really happened, but I’m not going to object to some artistic license if I get a damn good action scene out of it:
From the musical sleuth in Indy:
In honor of the Olympics, I’m going to talk about what might arguably be the most popular song in Lithuania and the man who sang/wrote it. It’s considered their “sports anthem.”
“Trys Milijonai,” which means “Three Million,” is a song by Marijonas Mikutavičius, who is actually from Vilnius. He was born in 1971 and graduated from Vilnius University in 1993 with a degree in journalism. But he is, supposedly, a “singer, musician and songwriter, a television journalist, a comedian and a talk show host.” Not sure when he started his singing career, but he played in a rock band called Bovy. I found one of their songs on YouTube from 14 years ago, but I did not make it through the whole song. I’m not sure it’s actually a completed piece of music, but judge for yourself:
Now, on to “Trys Milijonai.” The song was created for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The title comes from the approximate population of ethnic Lithuanians in the world — not necessarily the population of Lithuania, since there are more than three million people living there. The song was played on Lithuanian TV and radio broadcasts of the 2000 Olympics. The single became a bestseller and won song of the year at the 2000 Bravo music awards — Lithuania’s equivalent of the Grammys.
Here is a live version of “Trys Milijonai”:
By the 2004 Athens Olympics, “Trys Milijonai” had become the unofficial Lithuanian Olympic team anthem. The song was also played almost every time the Lithuania national basketball team played, until 2011, when Marijonas wrote the following song for the 2011 Euro Basketball championships held in Lithuania:
“Your average super-sleuth in NYC” gives props:
I don’t know much about Lithuania except this: at the Paris Olympics, the US Mens 3 x 3 Basketball team lost to Lithuania — probably the most embarrassing loss by an American basketball team ever. That is until we lost to Latvia a couple of days later. (Although bravo to Lithuania; they went on to win the bronze medal.)
From a sleuth in nearby Estonia:
The last time I visited Vilnius was in 1998, when I bought pirated CDs at a market near the bus station. I’m an American expat living in Estonia. Yes, also the Baltics. But it’s striking how ordinary folks here don’t seem to know, or care, all that much about the two other Baltic states!
Not our previous winner in Tbilisi:
I love the Baltics! They are an antidote to cynicism. Sure, there are all sorts of problems when you look closely. But watching the Baltic states thrive should really fill everyone with hope. What they achieved, going from Soviet rule to European success story, shows what you can get done with hard work — and with the EU, which is so fashionable to be dismissive about. I am writing this from Tbilisi, where the country’s European future is imperiled by a kind of top-down coup. You only realize how valuable this all is when you are about to lose it.
Another bonus of visiting the Baltics: they have great and quite recently done-up museums, usually top-notch. And they cover the breadth of the last two hundred years of art, but you can all see it in the same place — and in a day, without the guilt-trip of going into a museum behemoth in London, Paris, or Berlin.
The ski nerd scopes out the slopes:
The nearest skiing is the Snow Arena, 70 miles southwest in Druskininkai, Lithuania. It’s one of the biggest year-round indoor skiing slopes in the world, with a 1510' long indoor run, a 2100' outdoor run, a 492' vertical drop, a terrain park, a quad chair and two surface lifts, snow making, and night skiing:
Here’s the Alaskan globetrotter with cycling tips:
I’m still enjoying the alternating challenging and straightforward Views. It’s good to have weeks that just don’t require the same level of effort. Do you have any idea of the self-induced pressure to keep up with the super-sleuths?
I recognize that we have three weeks for this one, but another one of my river trips matches your vacation slot, so I’ve got to turn this in today or I’ll miss. But there is no rest for the weary, because I’ll be back just in time to have to obsess over the next one.
Way too many clues to bother cataloguing this week. Even for those of us who have not had the pleasure of visiting this Baltic state could sense we were in the north of Europe with some Russian influences. Google helped with the rest; the buildings are beautiful and distinct.
The View has been in the region before, as has Valya, but not me. Like Alaska, one should probably time a visit to appreciate the white nights and warmer summer days. Without much spectacular topography but lots of congenial scenery, this is a quaint-and-shoot kind of place for photographers.
I would focus on village life by taking to the backroads with a biking tour, if I was going to visit. At least a week seems necessary to do it justice, with maybe a few days more for the capital’s delights (which I expect to learn about from the week’s reveal).
Starting from and returning to the View in Town Hall Square keeps things logistically simple, and there are some biking routes to get you out of the city center into some nice forested parks and into rural environs. Here’s a 2020 map from velovilnius to get you started. The website warns that Lithuania doesn’t have the bike infrastructure of other northern Euro countries to the west, but it’s catching up, and traffic densities outside the city are low by comparison.
I would generally head east thru Karolinskiu park, then work north toward Anyksciai for a sample of river and forest country. There is a forest canopy walk that seems worthy of a destination, and there are camping and air bnb options in the villages nearby. This is a couple of days of riding. To keep me going, I’d carb out on keugela with sour cream and apple cakes.
But the can’t-miss country I would target is the Curonian Spit, a sort of Outer Banks of the Baltics, with low density roads, sand dunes, and the sea:
Sounds like there are a few delightful campgrounds along its roughly 60 miles, and in less war-torn times, you could even continue down into Russia’s Kalingrad district. But I don’t think that border is open, at least for American tourists.
This next sleuth knows the countryside well:
I was visiting Lithuania and Latvia this summer and drove through the countryside for Riga from the Baltic Sea ferry port (you need your car registration to get on the ferry, to make sure it wasn’t stolen, and you are breathalyzed when you exit the next morning). Looking at the photo, this is somewhere in the Baltics (cobblestoned, nice, but less tall building than, say, Scandinavia or Eastern Europe). Having just been to Riga, it isn’t there, so Vilnius?
Yup. A Google search for “white tower Vilnius” and there you have it.
Driving in the Lithuanian and Latvian countryside takes you back decades. Tons of storks, roofing not a big thing. Both countries are looking into seriously dwindling populations — from Russians exiting, from their own young people going abroad, and from fertility tanking. Riga and Vilnius have a feeling of being too big for their populations, like young boys in their fathers’ suits. On the main road from Riga to Vilnius, just south of the border, you find the Hill of Crosses, with more than 100,000 crosses and more coming. You can put up your own.
As always, thanks for this contest; it’s a ton of fun.
And finally, here’s the last of many first-timers this week:
Long-time aspirant, first-time entrant here. This is a photo of the Vilnius Cathedral, taken from the Grand Hotel Vilnius across Sventaragio. No great story of travels or sleuthing to tell, unfortunately.
Oh, but I geared up for it. The architecture, the busses, and the street signs gave off immediate Eastern European vibes. (I studied in Prague and travelled around Eastern Europe a good bit.) For the first time, I copied the photo into my law school friends’ text chain and told them I thought we could figure this one out together. We’ve kept up the chain for a number of years now, and every now and then, we share the sublime moments: pictures of kids, travels, celebrating our teams’ championships. But we mostly discuss the same nonsense we discussed during law school: which Olympic sport looks most doable, which household appliance is most important — that sort of thing. It’s where we re-create our law school dynamic. In other words, the perfect place for a collective effort to solve a VFYW.
When I shared the photo, my instinct was this was Eastern Europe, so I began to text out my monomaniacal plan. First guy was assigned to looking at images of buses from the 500 largest cities between the Rhine and the Urals. (I was fairly sure this was somewhere between Prague and Moscow; but one must be cautious.) Second guy was assigned to researching column capitals.
But before they even had a chance to tell me to shove it, the most low-key guy in the group simply texted a link to the hotel three minutes later.
What?!?!?!?!? I demanded an explanation and got: “A friend of mine visited the Baltics several years ago and I recognized the building from pics.” To which I say again: “What?!?!?!?!?!?” He managed to (1) recall this building from pictures his friend showed him several years ago, (2) place that building in Vilnius, and (3) figure out exactly what that building is so he could locate it precisely within Vilnius … all within three minutes, and without looking at any other resources. This is bonkers.
Having had a friend nail this one, I look forward to sharing future VFYWs with friends so we can divvy up the sleuthing and solve them as a group … unless it turns out that one guy has simply downloaded into his brain the street-level images of everywhere in the world that he or his friends have ever visited. In which case, this will get both very impressive and very boring.
Thanks for giving me and my friends a fun challenge and some good laughs.
Thanks for all the great entries as always, and see you next Friday.
This week: Vilnius, Lithuania. Next week:
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions. The contest archive is here.
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