From Russia with Lunch Read Online Free Page B

guardtower in the fort that occupied the site. It is a favourite meeting point for both locals and tour groups, whose guides take bets to see how long it is before someone asks, ‘But why would they need a lighthouse so far from the ocean?’ It was here that I rendezvoused with guide Ruta Arwiniouskiene, a lifelong Vilnian with a PhD in education and English plus a face like a young Chris Evert. Ruta is the kind of person you’d want on your pub trivia team. Her knowledge spans history, architecture, geography, botany and ethnographics – all of which can be delivered in one of four languages with a crinkle-eyed smile.
    Across the square lay Vilnius’ most famous tourist drag – and one of the oldest avenues in the city – Pilies Street, gateway to the Old Town. Among the most extensive in Europe at 255 hectares and steadfastly maintaining an organic medieval layout, this section of the city is so steeped, marinated and then glazed in history that UNESCO declared it a world heritage site. Take that, Latvia! For a country that was the last in Europe to adopt Christianity – this took place in 1387 (with some regions holding out till 1413) and then only because it was a condition for a union with Poland – Lithuanians made up for lost time by erecting church after magnificent church on what seems like every corner of the Old Town. By Ruta’s reckoning, Vilnius’ 542,809 population is served by forty-eight churches and twenty-eight monasteries.
    Peeling off to the right from Pilies Street we entered a small but immaculate park of clipped grass beds, stands of impatiens and sunny benches. Standing guard over the scene was a cross between a place of worship and a liquorice allsort. The Church of St Catherine originally belonged to a Benedictine convent founded in 1618, but after a change of management and design philosophy it was rebuilt between 1741 and 1753. Were architect Jan Krzysztof Glaubitz working today, he would be crafting slinky hotel bars in Shanghai where the vibe is one of retro cool and the martinis cost $30. Restricted by the compact nature of the site, he settled on an audacious design for the era in which the nave was as high as it was long. The result is a façade featuring salmon and cream twin towers which narrow to garlic clove black metal spires upon which sit ornate crosses. White recessed windows occupied by black louvres and encased in sculpted plaster ovals complete the fetching picture.
    It’s nigh on impossible to walk Vilnius’ Old Town without being shadowed by a constellation of baroque spires. They peer into laneways, loom beside commons and peek over the walls of courtyards like parents chaperoning a first date. At the top of Pilies Street alone, three churches sit so close to one another that you could throw a rosary over the trio. The first is located in the Gates of Dawn, one of the five entrances to the city which existed after it was walled off at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Ausros Gate Chapel is undoubtedly Vilnius’ most beloved sanctuary. It was here in 1993 that Pope John Paul II joined hordes of pilgrims to pray before a golden portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Painted between 1620 and 1630 on oak planks in tempera, it sits in a raiment of gilded silver and dazzles beneath the reflections of thousands of SLR flashes a day.
    This spectacular enclave abuts the more restrained early baroque Church of St Theresa, which in turn rubs reverent shoulders with the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit, yet another baroque masterwork although this time taking the shape of a Latin cross and teeming with gilt-flecked rococo iconostases. What’s even more impressive is that these treasures are not sealed off behind glass or velvet ropes, but are rather a functioning element of a community that comprises four per cent of Lithuanians. Like Ruta, the majority of Lithuanians are Catholic – some 76 per cent –