Jim's Tuesday Tour from Riga to Vilnius (One Way)

Don't take the bus to Vilnius. Take the road through a castle blown up in 1706, a palace turned grain store in 1945, a hill of crosses bulldozed three times, and a shtetl rebuilt from photographs.
There is a bus from Riga to Vilnius. It takes four hours, it stops once, and you will see a great deal of pine forest.

This is the other way to do it.

Six of us in a minivan, one long day, and a road on which almost everything we stop at was blown up, bulldozed or burned. Most of it is standing again. One of them is not and cannot be, and that is the stop you'll still be turning over on the flight home.

We leave Riga andbegin with coffee at Āgenskalns Market — an 1898 market hall, beautifully restored, and one of the better things to have happened to this city in a decade. Take a sklandrausis for later: rye pastry filled with carrot and caraway, from the far west of Latvia.

An hour south is Bauska, where two rivers meet and two castles share the spit of land between them: a Livonian Order fortress of the 1440s made for cannon, and the Renaissance palace the dukes of Courland built beside it in the 1590s. Retreating Russians blew up both in 1706. We eat the sklandrausis here, looking at the ruin.

Twelve kilometres on is Rundāle, designed by Rastrelli before the Winter Palace and begun in 1736 by a duke arrested and exiled to Siberia with the walls half up, who returned twenty-three years later to finish it. By 1945 it was a grain store. Restoration ran from 1972 to 2014. Eighty minutes inside; I'll be in the garden when you're done.

We cross into Lithuania, stop for lunch at a hunter's inn in Joniškis, and then at a field. On 22 September 1236 the Samogitians and Semigallians caught the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in swampy ground here and killed their Master and most of his knights. It finished the order inside a year. There is nothing to look at, which is rather the point.

Twenty minutes on is the Hill of Crosses. Nobody planned it. After the 1831 uprising, families with no bodies to bury planted crosses on an old hillfort instead, and everyone who came after added one. The Soviets bulldozed it three times and burned what they cleared; each time the crosses came back. Over a hundred thousand now, and on a windy day the rosaries hanging among them make a sound you don't forget.

The afternoon belongs to Šeduva. It was a shtetl, one of hundreds across Lithuania — a town where Jewish life was simply the life of the town. On 25 and 26 August 1941 its community was taken into the woods nearby and shot. The museum that opened here in 2025 is not principally about those two days. It is about everything before them — the shops, the arguments, the weddings, the ordinary mornings — rebuilt from photographs and from testimony gathered as far away as South Africa. It is one of the finest new museums in Europe. We give it ninety minutes, and ninety minutes is not enough.

The drive south is quiet. Nothing else is planned. Everything else we stop at today was destroyed and came back. Šeduva is the one that didn't, and it seems wrong to follow it with a gift shop.

Vilnius by evening, luggage carried door to door.

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