This morning, because the hours spend at the Palace of the Grand Dukes didn’t cure us, we went to see Trakai and Trakai Castle. If you followed my blog or spoke with me after my 2018 and 2019 research trips, you would have heard about my fascination with the old houses by the side of the road. On those trips, Marek was driving and I could open the window (I was sitting in the front passenger seat) and take photos galore as we drove through places. This time, I am in the back of a much larger van with windows that don’t open, and I impatiently wait until we get where we’re going to take photos. Driving through roads of old houses, flower-filled fields, shops, all of which I can’t photo.

Trakai has a community of Karaites called Karaim and they came to Lithuania from Crimea with a lot of customs they absorbed from the Turkish and Moslem communities. They don’t consider themselves Jewish, but a lot of the words I saw on their buildings and descriptions I heard of their practices tell me they haven’t thoroughly discarded their Jewish roots. Karaites don’t follow Rabbinic Judaism – if it isn’t Biblical, it isn’t part of their beliefs or observances. They have a food that is similar in appearance to an empanada called kybyn. Most of them are meat filled but there was a cabbage choice and a spinach-curd choice, and I had one of each. They were so good.

Yesterday we read about the history of Lithuania, and Trakai figured prominently in that information

After marveling at the bricks and stones, seeing silver bars and coins cut off the bars, looking at a cannon, chain mail, and more, we headed off to sample the kybyn I mentioned above and then settled in for a 2 hour drive to Kaunas. By the time we got there, the chilly weather we had experienced earlier in the week and the beautiful mild weather in Trakai had become a blazingly hot summer day. This field of flowers was a welcome, cooling site.

There are castles all over Lithuania, and this one is in Kaunas. It’s not far from the bridge to Viliampole, the town where Jews were permitted to live before they were allowed to live in Kaunas.

The old city of Kaunas is, as always, charming. Unfortunately on this trip we won’t be spending much time here. It will be a rushed 3 day stop, using Kaunas as a base while we visit other places. Dinner was wonderful but afterwards, I walked down to Independence Street which is packed with restaurants, in search of an ice cream shop that was still open. I’m so glad I found it. The chocolate though was milk chocolate and the pistachio was tiny crushed almost pulverized pieces. This was not my favorite ice cream stop, but it was good.