Vilnius (Day 6)

Looking back on the day, it was the slow, quiet one I needed ahead of the travel home tomorrow.

A trip to the post office. Lunch. Some work. Dinner at Ramunė’s house with her husband, younger daughter, son in law and half a dozen friends. Well, quiet-ish.

My camera got the day off too.

The Blip is the floor at the front entrance of the tenement building my flat is in. It's in A. Vivulskio gtv, in the "New Town".

Like so many around here, the flat is perfect inside but the exterior and common parts are badly neglected. The reasons are another story.

The point is, Vilnius was part of Tsarist Russia when the building went up. Ahead lay WWI in 1914. Germany occupied the country in 1915. Lithuania gained independence in 1918.

Germany “gave” Lithuania to the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, and the Red Army arrived to occupy in 1940. It became part of the USSR.

Germany “liberated” Lithuania in 1941 when it invaded the Soviet Union, and then the Soviet Union liberated it from Germany in 1944. It then became part of the USSR (again) until 1991, when independence resumed.

That’s a lot of history. In fact, it’s more complicated than it seems.