Sorry for the little gap in posting...we left for Vilnius Friday evening and returned Sunday evening. I'll post pictures largely in the order we shot them. Each city's street utility covers have the city name and a stamp of the city coat of arms. Pretty fun to see.
This is the St. Teresa Church, to which our guest house was attached. Our guest house was the former monastery, I believe.
These young ladies were also staying at our guest house. They were in town for the Lithuanian SongFest, and performed various folk songs and dances. They're from Cleveland. Apparently, a lot of Lithuanians have moved to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Cleveland.
Step a bit to the right, and you'll look upon a little chapel in the upper part of the gate in the city wall.Turn immediately to your left, and you can go into this Russian Orthodox church.
Turn another 90 degrees left, and you can head down into the old town.
Old Town Vilnius is very pleasant, and charming...and nothing more than about 100 years old. Indeed, some things have been rebuilt in the last 50 years. There are a lot of churches in Old Town, and most were established 500-700 years ago. But each went through several rounds of destruction. There were fires, then there was a war with the Russians, then there were Tsarist authorities (that razed them), then WWI, then WWII, then Soviets.
More details on that in a future post.
Several churches had Mass every day, and we popped in on a couple of Masses on Sunday (one in Vilnius, one in Trakai--on which, more later), and they were crowded, but mostly with pretty elderly folk. The demographic did not look like one that could sustain very long.
I was struck that while we may not have been participating in the kind of worship with which we are familiar, and the church decoration is hard to get my mind around, we did see a lot of devotion. It's hard to discount that completely. More later...I'm off to talk about being an American vs. being American, then to hear the parallel difference about their countries.
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