From The Economist: Vilnius — Contested city

THE choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania—”Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius—”shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.

Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. —Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea,— said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city’s population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90% of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis’s subtle and evocative book about their city’s history.

Poles mourn the loss of Wilno, one of their country’s great cultural and literary centres. Poland’s two great poets studied there: Adam Mickiewicz nearly two centuries ago, and in the pre-war years Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prizewinner. Yet both men saw their Lithuanian and Polish identities as complementary, not clashing.

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In any of the dozen possible renderings of the city’s name, its roots evoke mystery. Wilda, its old German label, comes from the word wild. In Lithuanian come hints of the words for devil (velnias), the departed (velionis) and ghost (vele). That ambiguity is fitting. In its 700-odd years of recorded history, the city has been both capital city and provincial backwater. Outsiders have been struck by its filthy streets and shameless women, and also by its glorious architecture and heights of scholarship. Pilgrims flock to the Gates of Dawn, its most holy Catholic shrine. It has been the epitome of tolerance and a crucible of the Holocaust.

In a modern Europe Vilnius can seem peripheral. Mr Briedis, however, begins by noting that when French geographers recently plotted the mid-point between Europe’s cartographical extremes, they found the continent’s true centre was a derelict farmhouse just outside the city.

Foreign visitors have left few written accounts, but Mr Briedis uses them all as sources. A hapless papal delegation provides the first. In 1324 it tried and failed to persuade Lithuania’s great pagan ruler, Gediminas, to adopt Christianity. He showed no desire to forsake Perkunas the thunder god, berating his visitors for their intolerance. —Why do you always talk about Christian love?— he asked the pope’s men. —Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?—

Lithuania eventually adopted Christianity, along with a dynastic deal with Poland, in 1387. A cathedral was built on the pagan temple, the holy fires doused and the sacred groves felled. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania flourished. At its height in the 16th century it was a vast multiconfessional empire, stretching to the Black Sea, with no fewer than six legal languages, including Hebrew and Armenian. Even as that declined, the Vilnius style of Baroque architecture ripened in glory, a —splendid autumn— in one of Mr Briedis’s many well-turned phrases, that paid —a gracious farewell to its phantom golden age—…

Mr. Briedis’ book Vilnius: City of Strangers is available at Amazon.