Travel to Lithuania, where nature and history meet

I decided to give one of the Baltic states, Lithuania, a try this summer. I was lured by the promise of endless birch forests, hundreds of lakes, and a unique coastline on the one hand, and a rich — and also often dark — history on the other.

The country did not disappoint in either of these two aspects: the first days are spent gathering mushrooms and berries provided by a very generous Mother Nature, foraging through dark and deep forests. I then head to Vilnius, Lithuania’s cute and picturesque capital. I am an ardent advocate of ‘runsploring,’ so I put on my runners and set out from my Airbnb at 7am: not just to see the sites before the tour groups arrive but also to witness a city coming alive early in the morning.

I first head to Cathedral Square, the city’s pulsating heart, where Lithuania’s biggest Cathedral was built on the site of a Pagan temple. I have the square all to myself.

I stand in awe before this grand Greek temple-style entrance, made up of six snow-white columns. Early worshippers start arriving and pass me by as they head inside, but it is something outside that has caught my interest: a tiny tile on the ground about 50 metres away from this grand structure. I observe a person approaching this particular spot, watch her as she steps right on it and stands still for a moment, as if praying. Her lips move — she is whispering to the tile — and then she spins completely around once, then leaves in the opposite direction from the church.

I am intrigued and leave the site without even entering it. The unassuming tile bears the words STEBUKLAS. I turn on Google Translate — a true game changer for today’s independent traveling, even though most people speak English fluently in Lithuania and I would hardly have needed it before.

Google tells me that the word means ‘miracle’ in Lithuanian — a religious miracle I ask myself? But my research takes me back to August 23, 1989, when two million people joined forces by holding hands, creating an unbroken human chain that would span the distance of 675 kilometers, over three countries, starting in Tallinn, passing Riga, and ending here, right on this tile. While it is not the longest human chain to date — that occurred in 2004 in Bangladesh, with 5 million people — it is the longest one to span several countries, namely Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, collectively the Baltic States.

Those humans had come together to demand their independence from the Soviet Union, and they had chosen that particular date as it marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a treaty that was signed on that day between the USSR and Nazi Germany that ultimately resulted in the occupation of the three countries by the Soviet Union.

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