The Dumplings of Count Tiškevičius

 

The Dumplings of Count Tiškevičius

 

1 June 2026, Monday

It’s uncanny how the fireflies always make their first appearance of the year on 1 June. It’s a delight to see them but why don’t they wait for better weather. Their bodies are each smaller than a Bulgarian summer raindrop so what they survive must be akin to me being repeatedly being drenched by the contents of baths. Fortunately the dampness doesn’t extinguish their fires.

I hacked all afternoon at wild hops that grow thirty centimetres per week, have tiny but vicious barbs on their stems, and strangle our fig tree. I can’t understand why hoppy beer is so nice.

 

2 June 2026, Tuesday

Yesterday (not today) was the anniversary of the tragic death of Hristo Botev, the Bulgarian revolutionary, poet and journalist. So today at noon, across the whole country, air-raid sirens reminded us to be silent and still for two minutes as a mark of respect.

It would appear that we’ve been doing this a day late every year for 150 years. Bulgarian tradesmen never have diaries so you never know when they might turn up to do a job, but you’d expect the Minister for Internal Affairs to at least have something scribbled on a Post-it note on his fridge door.

 

3 June 2026, Wednesday

We both worked nonstop all day in the garden so that it was in perfect condition and beautiful for Fiona the house-sitter lady who would be coming to stay in a couple of days. Our garden is always at its best just before we go away.

However, our horticultural endeavours meant that by the evening neither of us were in perfect condition and beautiful. We always look exhausted and bedraggled just before we go away. Crazy Ludo looked even worse than we did but that’s generally the case. It’s always very embarrassing having to explain his grotty condition to visitors.

 

4 June 2026, Thursday

With yesterday’s sunshine replaced by thunder clouds and yesterday’s feeling of invigoration replaced by aching muscles and lethargy, we slimmed down the task of getting the house in perfect condition and beautiful for house-sitter lady Fiona and concentrated on going into town for a pizza.

Arriving home there were a few drops of rain but nothing worth panicking about. Horrific video scenes on the internet later showed us huge flash floods as bad as those of two weeks before. Many people no longer needed to water their gardens because their gardens had been completely washed away. Again we’d been lucky.

 

5 June 2026, Friday

The price of a beer in a Sarafova seafront bar was €2.20 but a coffee was €2.90. The beer-to-soft-drink ratio in Bistro ‘Gusto Del Mare’ was similar so we decided that if Priyatelkata didn’t become a lager lout we wouldn’t be able to afford future holidays. The benefit of staying in this sunbed-hell-type resort was being only a five-minute drive from Burgas airport.

It was strange to see Ukraine and Russian registered cars parked side by side outside pizza and fridge magnet outlets, and for the first time in my life I saw a loquat tree complete with ripening loquats. 

 

Temporary Rule Change

In the following few days there would be much more to see and do than usual as a consequence of being away on a trip. For this reason the one hundred words per day restriction was temporarily lifted.

 

6 June 2026, Saturday

When we arranged our trip we had no idea that the Lithuanian city of Kaunas would be hosting a folklore festival, an international swimming event, and a Justin Timberlake stadium concert. However, we hadn’t packed our cozzies and the boy Timberlake’s awful, so our first day’s entertainment was limited to watching the lovely old folklore folks dancing and singing in the centre of the tree-lined pedestrianised boulevard for an hour before stuffing our faces with Šaltibarščiai (cold beetroot soup) and mashed potatoes with nettles.

This was my first trip with my new passport. My first trip with my previous passport had been my emigration to Bulgaria which was a hard act for the new passport to follow, but I soon saw that Kaunas was doing its best.

Neither Priyatelkata nor I had visited the country before so we had to do some research. We discovered that the most famous Lithuanian ever was film star Charles Bronson, and Billy McNeil, one of football’s Lisbon Lions, was of Lithuanian parentage. The Volfas Engelman beer was smokey and strong, just like Charlie and Billy. The city itself was famous for wars, sieges, health clinics and savoury dumplings. It had also been a member of the Hanseatic League in mediaeval times but the Wikipedia page didn’t say if they had ever won it.

 

7 June 2026, Sunday

Having tramped the beautifully kept old broad streets and gardens of the New Town yesterday, we opted for the Old Town quarter today. There we found a typical North European square complete with the usual huge church with chiming bells, a town hall that had also served as a prison, statues of long-dead dignitaries, fountains and pavement cafés. The historic town hall was known to locals as ‘the Swan’ because of its colour and shape (i.e. white and swan-shaped).

Refreshed by coffee as strong and black as death (to remind us of home) we wandered in a westerly direction through the town park to where the great rivers Neris and Nemunas met to make the city a place of strategic importance with a need for an old castle and ramparts, much of which remained though not looking as defensive as might be required if hostilities were to kick off again in the Baltic states.

The hot weather made us think of ice cream which we found a torturous ordeal as we observed athletes in training and dozens of local young families taking advantage of the sports facilities all around us. They were supposed to make us feel welcome, not fat!

We learnt that the words ‘Ar kalbate angliškai?’ mean ‘Do you speak English?’ and used them with great regularity, but it was completely unnecessary as everybody did speak English, and did so very well. ‘Ačiū’ (pronounced a-choo) means ‘thank you’ which was easy to remember but likely to cause confusion in the event of someone catching a cold or a choo choo.

 

8 June 2026, Monday

The mainly nineteenth century New Town quarter was quieter than it had been on our first day due to a combination of threatening grey skies, it being a work day for Lithuanians, and Lithuanians having become aware that we were there.

Aimlessly trekking through the avenues and alleyways we noticed there were pockets of very old wooden buildings, predominantly houses plus a couple of cafés and churches, but no wooden sheds or woodsheds. For centuries, apparently, most of the city had been constructed from wood until 1847 when a Czarist Russian town plan brought an end to it and the concept of the brick was introduced to the local architecture.

We ate a gorgeous gut-busting meal in one of the wooden buildings. The sign above the door said it was called Bernelių užeiga Smuklė and one of the waiting staff, all of whom wore very drab nineteenth century dress, translated for us. She said the first word was a family name, the second was the Lithuanian for inn and the third meant tavern. So I deduced that it was a Berni Inn, which took me back in time to the Leeds of 1976. Having broken into double figures with our new words from the local tongue we decided it would be easier to just call it the dumpling restaurant. It was quite a mouthful in any language, as was the food we had. Our dumplings were described on the menu as Count Tiškevičius’ dumplings stuffed with game meat and dried mushrooms. He’d been dead since 1868 so hopefully he hadn’t made them himself but they, and the sauerkraut soup we started with, were utterly delicious and it made us wonder if the old count had died of complications from obesity.

With bellies probably looking like we’d each just swallowed a whole watermelon (though healthy food had disappeared from our lives the minute we boarded the plane to fly away from Bulgaria) we wobbled to the lower terminus of the funicular railway that would hoist us up the hill to somewhere near to the Ikea-styled apartment that we were temporarily calling home. We didn’t need to read the Lithuanian words scribbled on a weather-worn piece of paper attached to the window of the ticket office. Our East European instincts immediately told us that it said ‘out of order’.

Climbing the long flight of steps that seemed to go on longer than the eternal flame that we had been looking at earlier in the day made us wonder whose decision it had been to take the fun out of funicular and why there wasn’t a place for us to dump our dumplings before starting our ascent. 

 

9 June 2026, Tuesday

Near to our apartment was Christ's Resurrection Basilica, a huge and strange construction that looked almost Stalinist in design. Work on building it had begun in 1926 and only finished in 2012 because of interruptions by Joe Stalin himself and people of his ilk. Perched on top of the hill it could be seen from most places in the city. This was our first stop of the day where a €5 ticket took us in a lift to the viewing terrace. From there we could see most of Kaunas but not the Old Town because the western end of the terrace was blocked off by a small chapel that was locked, preventing us from getting through to the last bit of viewing terrace beyond. We considered trying to negotiate a €0.25 refund but the ticket office lady was on her coffee break when we descended.

Half an hour later we had coffee of our own at a pavement café at the bottom of the hill. From our table we could see there were people on the forbidden terrace and by arriving there too early we had missed out on the best bit of the grand view. But we didn’t fret as we had already seen the Old Town quarter and the river confluence from as close up as you can possibly get.

The Devils’ Museum (Žmuidzinavičiaus muziejus) contained more than 3,000 diabolical artefacts from all corners of the world, but mostly from Lithuanian folklore. They were the expansion of the private collection of Antanas Žmuidzinavičius, one of Lithuania’s most famous artists. The museum had formerly been his home, many of the rooms had remained exactly as they had been during his lifetime while others contained his paintings. When he died in 1966 he left a collection of around 250 figurines and masks of devils to which visitors had further contributed.

I was interested to learn that before it arrived in Europe, tobacco grew around the grave of Satan’s mother somewhere in the Americas, and he gave mourners ground tobacco to ingest nasally which made them cry, seemingly for the death of his mother. In Baltic countries he made vodka from goats’ urine which was still known colloquially as ‘The Devil’s drops.’ Primitive art has shown that a genderless devil is thought to have been around long before any of the gods worshipped today might have existed. It was an entertaining place, especially our discovery of this artist who we had never heard of and whose paintings put some flesh on the bones of the local history that we’d read about.

Kaunas was a city with barely any litter on its streets and we found art everywhere. Sculptures and tasteful graffiti made every short walk an interesting one. Not far from our apartment there was a place called the Art Yard where old tenements had been gentrified and their outer walls decorated with brightly coloured paintings, many of which contained cultural and political messages.

Near to this was the Choral Synagogue, so named because it was one of the few synagogues where religious ceremonies included singing. During the early and mid-nineteenth century most of the city’s Jewish population perished or emigrated, so the building is barely used these days. All the others in the city had been converted to other uses or destroyed. Apparently it was beautifully decorated inside but its outer shell was drab and uninspiring, and its garden overgrown, unlike anywhere else in Kaunas.

Priyatelkata and I can never resist trying food from other countries, so the Marakandas Uzbekistan restaurant was an unexpected treat. As expected it was a bit Middle Eastern but with some special additional ingredients. It’s always nice to have bits of pomegranate sprinkled over your dinner. I’m surprised Gregg’s don’t offer it as a condiment in their shops in Britain.

Our evening promenade took us to the city garden where we watched local people dancing old style dances to Lithuanian jazz music. It was quite uplifting to see so many folks enjoying themselves in such a simple way. A few metres from where we sat was a memorial to Romas Kalanta who in 1972, as a protest against the Soviet Government, doused himself with three litres of petrol before setting himself alight. It was hard to imagine that lovely Kaunas and Lithuania had known such unhappiness during the Communist era, but being aware of what had gone on at home in Bulgaria at that time, we were not surprised. I’ve visited many former Communist states but Lithuania was the first that had actually been part of the U.S.S.R.      

 

---

Image:

Just a few of the lovely old folklore folks dancing and singing in the centre of a tree-lined pedestrianised boulevard in Kaunas.  My own photograph.

And also…

Kaunas in pictures... my pictures!

 

Part Two:

Marta My Deer