Quick Tips on Five Baltic-Region Capitals, Part One: How to Get to the Vilnius Paneriai Memorial by Bus

Note: This is the first in a series on five Baltic-region capitals, which continues here with Riga.

Vilnius struck me as the least highlight-reel-dense of the three Baltic capitals, but therein lies much of its attraction. When my overnight bus from Warsaw deposited me on the northern edge of downtown, I thought I’d stepped back behind the mid-’80s Iron Curtain, a first impression owing only in part to the morning’s leaden sky. Even in the most lively section of the Senamiestis historic center — which runs from the Aušros Vartai (Gates of Dawn), past the Rotušė (city hall) and university to the Katedros (cathedral) — or the delightfully bohemian Užupis district, it feels like a town that is going about its life with a certain vitality, sure, yet a subdued vitality sans fanfare, a town more interested in keeping one foot thrivingly in front of the other on a forward path, than in putting on too much of a show.

But don’t get me wrong: Any town with its own Frank Zappa memorial is, categorically, a pretty hip town. And while most of us aren’t quite old enough to remember the days — centuries, rather — when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of Europe’s most formidable empires, controlling a vast swath that stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic, vestiges of this proud heritage remain readily evident throughout the capital and in the poise of its residents.

Here the general fog of Soviet oppression seems to linger a bit more, although perhaps a tad more subtly, in my opinion, than in Riga or Tallinn — more subtly, that is, except for at the Museum of Genocide Victims (aka KGB Museum) and the Paneriai Memorial, a forested area southwest of town where where, from 1941 until 1944, massive Soviet jet-fuel pits became the mass grave and crematorium of an estimated 100,000 Nazi executees, including Jews, Catholic priests, conscientious objectors, and prisoners of war.

(The following is reprinted from my original post on a popular travel website, i.e., one perhaps slightly more popular than Wanderloosed. I hope they don’t sue me for reclaiming my content.)

Paneriai Memorial: a lesser-known but important place for sober reflection (includes bus directions)

If the raw basement of the Vilnius KGB / genocide museum is a place that will hit you in the forehead with a 2×4, leaving you slack-jawed and repeatedly questioning the unquestionable reality of what you just saw, Paneriai is a place that lends itself more to quiet contemplation of man’s seemingly boundless capacity for evil. Much has been written of the memorial/park itself (I was the only person there when I visited, so my experience was particularly meditative, as others have mentioned), but I don’t see that directions have been provided to arrive there by bus — which was EASY, cheap, quick and convenient — and so here they are:

1. Buy four one-trip bus tickets (in 2012 they cost 2 litas each) at one of the red newspaper kiosks around town.
2. Catch either trolley-bus (i.e., runs on overhead cables) 6 or 12 in direction “Zemieji Paneriai” heading south on the west side (far side of the street from old town) of Pylimo gatve at Reformatu, near where it crosses Basanaviviciaus/Traku, not far from the Frank Zappa memorial plaza. Yes, Vilnius has a Frank Zappa memorial plaza. The schedules are printed on the little spinning plastic cylinders on the post — if the numbers 6 & 12 don’t appear in red among the various schedules there, you’re standing at the wrong stop — and during business hours one of them seemed to come about every 15 minutes or so.
3. Aboard, validate one of your tickets in one of the little red clamp devices; repeat this on each segment. (NOTE: If the bus doesn’t turn right and start heading away from the old town immediately after you board, you boarded on the wrong side of the street. Get off at the next stop and try again.)
4. After about 20 minutes, get off at the Vaduvos stop. You’ll be able to know when the stop is approaching by: a) listening to the announcer and coordinating with the route schema in the bus (easy even if you don’t speak a scrap of Lithuanian); and/or, b) watching the two stops shown on the little yellow card readers — the next stop is always the one shown at the bottom. If you get off the bus and feel as if you’ve stepped back 30 years into the USSR, you’re at Vaduvos.
5. From the same side of the street, take either bus (regular bus, NOT a trolley bus on electric lines; the bus number on the schedule is blue, not red) 8 or 51 to “Aukstieji (or Upper) Paneriai,” a ride that will take 5-10 minutes. How long you have to wait will vary; I waited less than 10 minutes.
6. Shortly after you’ve left concrete communal housing projects behind and have entered the forest, the bus turns left and stops at a quasi cul-de-sac among some old farm houses near a large rail yard. This is the small village of Aukstieji Paneriai, your stop. (NOTE: Before you start walking, cross the street and make a note of times for buses 8 and 51 heading back the other way, as they run fairly infrequently — seemed like it was about once an hour.)
7. Cross the tracks via the long footbridge. Once across, turn right on Agrastu, the paved road (most of the others out here are dirt) that runs parallel to the tracks. This road ends after about a km or so in the Paneriai memorial parking lot.

(Original post here)

QUESTIONS FOR READERS

• If you’ve visited Paneriai, could you please share your impressions of the memorial?
• Which Holocaust sites have made the deepest impressions on you, and why?
• In what areas of the former Soviet Bloc have you found its influence to be most enduring, as I’ve described to be the case in Vilnius, and especially its suburbs?