Ausros Vartai Gatve: The Street of the Gate of Dawn

I wrote this originally in the fall of 2000 soon after my arrival in Vilnius.  I wrote and later published my impressions and I think they were honest views – honest views of what I observed, honest views of who I was at the time . But they were views seen through the filtering lenses of Western self-protection. What I had yet to grasp was that the signs of terror are few because terrorized human spirits leave few tracks. It took a few years to see the traces of the Soviets’ constructed and purposeful public use of terror. And that required living in a situation that provided no alternative to seeing them. 

Here I am catching up.  But more than catching up, weaving current realities into the older text, which may be something like bringing new tenants in an old house..  This can make for an uneven flow. But as I review the text it seems honest. And since I write for myself that is it good enough. 

Just the other day I was reading, by happenstance, a poem Milosz wrote in Warsaw in 1944. I read it now and know what he is describing for I walked through endless acres of rubble.  Fifteen years ago I would not have had any sense of it. 

I am writing this in Vilnius, within a glassed-in café.  The rainy end of cold, gray clouds flying across the sky caught me unaware and drove me to seek shelter.  This is one of three cafes cramped side-by-side on a small triangle of land stuck inside the spot where three wandering cart paths happened to run into each other a couple of hundred years ago. Not that much here then except the city walls, a medieval monastery a bit farther up, the houses of some well-off farmers and merchants, and a gate leading out of the city, Ausros Vartai.  Gate of Dawn. This café is on Ausros Vartai Gatve. Gate of Dawn Street. And on top of the gate is a very impressive and famous shrine and pilgrimage site to the Virgin Mary.  Busloads of Polish pilgrims come to Ausros Vartai every day. 

Down the hill, a mile or so was and is an elegant and historic ‘old city’ with the Cathedral, the university, and testifying to the city’s one-time Russian life two beautiful Russian churches.  Even then the growing city had begun its march up the hill. Around 1900 Nicholas II built an impressive Philharmonic across the street which anchors Vilnius’s cultural life. I chose this café because the other two had tablecloths and nicely printed menus fixed to the glass screens. Here there were metal tables, glass ashtrays, cardboard coasters advertising local beer. A place for my budget. And since I hadn’t been here long enough to know my way around the Lithuanian litai I figured that the pocket change I had would work.  

So I sit impatiently, tormenting the bottom of my teacup – tea is also big in this long-time Russian country – hoping that the distant blue will capture the day.  Yet through the cold rain streaking the window glass I see how lovely this old city still is.  The signs of the Soviets’ brutal occupation, here at least, show in neglect, not in destruction.  Or so my recent arrival’s mindset tells me. 

In this corner of the city, close to the remaining sections of the city’s ancient walls, it is evident how tied it still is to centuries of rural life. The steep pitch of the leaded roofs on the one- and two-story houses, assuring that the heavy snows that race across the surrounding plains will have no long hold, reminds me that I am far inland from the Baltic Sea. Here I am, unexpectedly living deep into Eastern Europe, a world that until my first trip here last year seemed mythic. More unknown and distant than India or China.  And it is far into Eastern Europe. The flight from Frankfurt takes at least an hour.  And we are only forty miles from the border with Belarus and Minsk. 

This may be called a city but visually it is still close to the surrounding countryside. What were wandering country paths may have long since been cobbled, but they still wander without a current rationale?  The wall of unadorned one and two story houses, set right at ground level and fronting directly on the streets, follow curves and twists that bepseak village life more than urban pride.  The houses are secured from the tumult of the streets – and this is a city whose streets knew many years of tumult – by broad, iron-bound doors. But the windows, by contrast, are covered with lace curtains that a finger can flick aside to see all commerce on the street outside. And the curtains are real lace – hand-worked, seemingly prized, and very visible, like the houses themselves a sign from the past of standing and prosperity. Every third or fourth house also has an especially solid and high, even more, ironbound double doorway, obviously built for wagons, horses, and cows. Today the doors are left open for cars.  A number of the yards still show derelict animal stalls of unplaned planks and rough timbers. The courtyards themselves are only now beginning to show some care, mostly when the houses are restored for use by the government for offices or for banks.  

I feel very much the foreigner here.  This is so unlike the California that is always polishing and upgrading. I have not been here long enough to know that even the fields and trees are victims of abuse. When the sun rises each morning to yet another day of terror the streets and buildings also learn the lesson.

At my own house, I live with it every day. The wars and tribes that crisscrossed much of Eastern Europe four hundred years ago taught hard lessons here as well.  But my community’s forebears learned them. Our church and priory built around 1630 to watch over a cemetery in the fishing village of Lukiskiu have brick walls four feet thick.  It was something like the tenth church to have been built there.  Turks and Tatars, Russians and Swedes, Germans, Protestants, and free-lancing knightly orders kept crossing and recrossing these flat plains for two hundred years or so,  just as the Germans and Russians did in the 1940s, burning and wrecking as they went.  But mostly they were on the move.  The Russian Soviets were different. They seized and stayed.  For fifty years.  And in many ways, they are still here. I live with that presence every day.  But it is in their world, not in mine.  Coming to connect the effects with a cause will happen only bit by bit since that cause still has no place in my secure world.

When I first arrived here most buildings looked grey, grim, and very neglected.  The Soviet-era‘s  leading hotel which for fifty years hosted all meetings of visiting firemen from Moscow had just been closed. Just six years after the tanks left it looked abandoned. But scaffolding, re-stuccoing, and painting were already looking to the future. For me, the outsider, it seemed as though the past was being set behind. But I saw those improvements as part of my outsider‘s baggage. It took as long to construct my sense of personal security and confidence as it did to impress the terrorizing here. It took me a long time to be able to read the signs of integrated terror and even begin to appreciate how terror can take control of life.

I learn through what I see.  After many years I have come finally to see what actually has always been obvious. My understanding is always a function of memories.  Not that I somehow slip into a storehouse of past images. Rather the reality of what I see finally impresses itself on what is going on in my mind.  On the eastern side of the old city, on the edge of the wooded hills that form so much of this still-rural country, and set back a hundred feet from the street, stands the boarded-up shell of a once-elegant monastic church.  Mismatched sections of rusting, iron fence seal off the baroque ruin from the street. Running along the other three sides of the block are the decaying and empty monastery buildings.  But even in their ruined state, they form a formidable wall to people on the street.  Missing roof tiles expose the supporting beams to the weather.  In a few places, the roof has already collapsed.  Where the monks’ windows once opened onto the inner court, squares of brick-rimmed blackness peer blindly through ragged openings in the stucco walls. And exactly how fragile that human reality proves to be when subjected to brutish hands is everywhere evident.  The church’s light lines and the details of its rococo tower still evoke the sounds of Mozart despite the grimness of its decay.  Its only visitors are the ravens flying in and out of the monastery windows.  Its only life the weeds growing in the littered field behind the church where Augustinian monks once tended roses.  It is real enough and small enough for me to see it.  

For some reason, some instinct I admit to but cannot name, that abandoned wreck has survived.  And it has survived in part, and as best I can figure out,  because the monuments of past Christian life have endured.  Consecrated stones remembered when the fear and distress of daily life under Hitler and Stalin made remembering just too painful.  The stones stood watch and guard when flesh and blood could not.  And they speak the language of survival.   The monks are gone.  The czars and the Soviets and the Nazis are gone.  The worshipers are gone, at least from this church.  Yet the stones still stand and the stones remember.  They stand there in desolation but they stand nonetheless. They rise in ruin.  But it is a ruin that for me in some way still speaks of life.  Not of proprietorship or claims to land. They remind me that once, many years ago, people consecrated them, set them aside for a sacred use they still painfully proclaim. Some of those people still live here, old women out of time in this university town, walking without expressions, but going somewhere.  I wonder if it still exists. 

The Gate of Dawn (Ausros Vartai) is one of the few surviving Medieval gates to the city of Vilnius, Lithuania. In the 16th century a marian shrine was built on the top of the gate.

Near the halfway point of Gedimino Prospekt between the cathedral and the parliament is the city square, a park which occupies what would otherwise be four city blocks.  Our baroque Church of the Holy Apostles Saint Philip and Saint James – brevity is not a Baltic virtue – stands on the northern side of the park.  The tallest church in the city, it towers above the rows of linden trees that line the park. The center is a large and empty rectangle.  This is surprising because the empty center is bordered by an obvious square of white benches and large iron lamps atop red granite pedestals.  For fifty years this was known as Lenin Park.  And for fifty years a heroic bronze statue of the Russian revolutionary stood in the very center, atop a polished red-granite pedestal.  But in 1991 a commandeered construction crane wrapped him in steel cables and snapped him off below the knees. Before the world’s television cameras, with the church so prominent just behind him, he was swung through the air like a demented trapeze artist while from below a crowd of many thousands jumped and cheered.  Today the lamps illuminate the park’s empty center, and the white benches face each other across open gravel.  After the statue’s abrupt removal the granite pedestal was dynamited and all the pieces trucked away.  

Facing the opposite side of the square, right on Gedimino, is an unimaginative turn-of-the-century government building of blended Russian and beaux arts design, nowhere as elegant as the Philharmonic. It occupies the entire city block, although the back half appears to be a Soviet era apartment block.   The three-story building, with the usual palladian windows, Corinthian columns, and monumental entryway, rises above a solid foundation of rose-colored, granite stones.  These stones rise above the sidewalk to a height slightly above eye level. And as  I have written elsewhere it was a chance tug on the surprisingly unlocked door during a very early morning search for coffee that led me to wander into the basement prison with its cells and dirt-floored execution room.  

During the Soviet occupation, our church was used as a basketball court and then as a storehouse for opera sets.  After Lenin’s flying departure the Republic of Lithuania restored the churches to their communities.  Now the Dominicans have returned to the church and priory from which they had been expelled.  The baroque altars, the richly carved and ornamented pulpit, and much of the statuary which was smashed during the occupation have been restored or are still covered with restorers’ scaffolding.  The multi-lamped brass chandeliers so typical of Eastern European churches have already been restored and hung again from the towering roof.  They are bright evidence that a half-century of darkness is at an end. The wings of the stone angels who gaze down from atop the baroque altars, the crowns on the patron saints guarding the sanctuary, and the leaves on the capitals atop the different altars’ many decorative columns are again being gilded.  

Within this church, I listen to the soft echo of winter boots as old women in knotted kerchiefs and long coats shuffle slowly to the altar for Communion.  Before reaching me some lower themselves slowly to the stone floor, touching it as if in reverence, one knee after the other, head bent far forward, fingers outspread for support.  Then they move forward quickly on their knees toward me, the unlikely priest, palms clasped together under their upturned faces.  They seem to look up at me and I am unable to read their faces.  Then they slide quickly to the side and out of the way.  Slowly, falteringly, they struggle to stand again.  They turn and shuffle across the stone to their places in the church. I am the latest intruding foreigner in their land, their church, their beliefs.

The stones of this church are being honored and renewed.  Once again they echo to the confident vitality of young men and women and to the murmured piety of the old.   Again they resound to the sounds of singing and prayer.  The echo of this church which has heard so much and seen so much more rolls long around the great stone walls. When singers and preachers would have it end it continues.  It will not be silent.  More than self-sustaining it is insistent, even intrusive.  For as I have learned the knowledge of what has happened in this land is harsh and unforgiving. Like the blowing brick dust, Milosz describes it comes only in wisps.  Except here, in the dark hours of empty silence, it proclaims again what no one should forget.  To anyone with ears to hear it cries out with a memory of stone.  It cries out in some ways with a sound that endures longer than the sounds of the concerts I attend in the Philharmonic across the street. 

And I come to understand that the look in the eyes of the old women is terror.  I think it is this realization that made me see that I am no longer the non-understanding outsider, my welcome card was some understanding of terror.  I may be an outsider to their world but the remains of terror live with me. It is sobering to realize that they were young when they learned terror‘s lessons. Young like the kids in Syria and the East who are learning this generation‘s lessons in terror.  Young like I was when I learned some of those lessons.  We chase them away as we mature.  Or really by the fact maturing, which is  our own self-imposed entrance into into the confidence of  life.  But they are there.  And they come back, and begin their claiming on me again when I no longer have the energy to dismiss them.