Laisves Alėja (freedom avenue) is a broad pedestrian street in central Kaunas. The median strip is lined with shady trees, and there are plenty of benches for people to sit on. The street is elegance itself, with fashionable shops on either side – colourful and stylish summer clothes, souvenirs, pharmacies, (vaistinė) restaurants and cafes (miesto sodas, the city garden). Walking up this street you encounter many modern statues and sculptures. It is clearly the Champs Elysées of Kaunas. At the top of this boulevard, instead of the Arc de Triomphe, there is the vast white cathedral of St Michael Archangel, which is not just the sweeping culmination of the avenue, but is also the goal of a pilgrim route. Little brass coquilles de St Jacques line the middle of the pedestrian alleyway, marking the pilgrim way.
And there are many churches in Kaunas. My favourite is the little red-brick one of Saint Gertrudos. It has a crypt full of glowing candles, an interior of penetrating silence and small basins with holy water. 
From one area near the confluence of rivers Neris and Nemunas, looking across a green meadow you can see 7 church spires, says Ja. She has counted them before, the last time she was in Kaunas, and she counts them again. I say that one of the spires is actually of the town hall, not a church. But still, it is a spire.
So we set off to explore, Ju, who is local, Ja, who has been here before and is trying to remember where her memories are located, and myself, for whom everything in this fascinating city has the allure of being brand new. First we walked along the grand, artistic, tree-shaded Champs Elysées (aka Laisves Alėja/Freedom Street) then on to the Old town, along Vilnius Street.
We walked around the outside of churches, and went into some of their hushed spaces, moving softly on the shiny flagstones. We viewed memorial sculptures and plaques. One stated that Adam Mickiewitz was connected with this building, part of the old Town Square, 1819 – 23. The plaque is only in Lithuanian but as I discover later, he taught in a school in Kaunas during those years, so this must have been the school where he taught. The engraved granite stone is so polished that the spire from a building opposite is reflected on the surface. There’s a sculpted image of young Mickiewicz, hair flowing back from his face, streaming in the wind. Gusted by inspiration, his face, in profile, gazes towards the source of the breeze, possibly towards the east, source of dawns and beginnings and all things new and fresh. 
The streets in the pedestrian area are paved with colourful and uneven stones. Slightly raised pavements produce irregular artistic hazards. Red-brick buildings on street corners are warm, glowing in sunlight, human-sized. The bricks are narrow with white borders and paths between the bricks, icing between the red cake layers. But because the pavements have been removed in places, as part of the renovation of the Town Square, we walk along over gravel and white dust. Sealed off, on the inside of the square, earth-digging machines sit around among piles of sand and slabs of concrete paving stones. What will this square look like when it’s finished? 
The following day Ja and I visit the Art Gallery dedicated to Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875 - 1911). His landscape paintings are ethereal; in the Raigardas triptych, there’s a valley, trees, river, some cultivated fields with a forest beyond. No cars. Not even people. In the winter triptych, the trees are starkly lovely, one of them is lit, turned into a candelabra. He has painted all the zodiac signs, all with skies full of stars and with pinkish or sea-green luminescence.
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| Painting by Čiurlionis of Pisces zodiac sign |
Following on the theme of stars we head for the gardens of the Military Museum, and there we find the star sower, marked on the tourist map as a modern sculpture. The sower is actually a socialist realist sculpture, a man with a bag of seeds, slung over his shoulder, and one hand holds the bulging bag and the other sweeps away from him, and behind him as he casts the seed to the ground. Or so it looks. Almost as if he is dismissing the future, tossing it away, as something that, as soon as it has left his hand, will have to fend for itself. You might think that. His face looks a little serious, a little weary. Maybe he loves this gesture and its regularity, maybe he is tired, or dreaming of something else entirely. But on the wall behind him, the wall enclosing the garden and its sculptures, its trees and flowers and stone memorials, on this high wall, there's a cluster of silver stars. They are set into the wall. As if the seeds have turned into silver, shining on the wall behind the sower. All these stars. 
The Military Museum is a huge stone block with squared frontage like a palace to a god of corners and angles. Someone who does not like curves or intrusions, who does not like the way foliage spreads and twists and moves in freedom. This block-architecture relishes control.
But in the rambling gardens, there are bushes, plants, flowers, and sculpted figures. As well as the sower who has been turned into a scatterer of stars, there’s a man leaning forward, one hand shading his eyes which are searching the horizon, and a woman who is spinning and beside her, a child has an open book on her lap and while the woman holds the spinning wheel with one hand, with the other, she points to a passage in the open book, that the child reads from. And another memorial in the gardens of the Military Museum, is in remembrance of those who died fighting for Lithuania’s freedom.
When we meet up with Ju, she has brought us some goats’ cheese studded with caraway seeds, from her own goats. Her family has a small farm just outside Kaunas. That afternoon we cross the bridge over the Nemunas river and take the funicular to reach the top of the hill. In my time in Lithuania I have not come across many hills and perhaps that is why they stand out in my memory, (and have historical significance like the one in Birute park).
I remember this one for the view out over the city that I have got to know, alongside my friends. Which has made it doubly special.
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| View over Kaunas from the funicular terminus |
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