VILNIUS - Just in time for the millennium celebration of Lithuania, writer and historian Laimonas Briedis has released his new book "Vilnius 's City of Strangers." The book is a brief history of Vilnius, the current capital of Lithuania, but unlike other history books it is fun to read and doesn't seek to impart a purely positive or nationalist view of the city.
The book is a collection of viewpoints of various writers who visited the city over the last half millennium since Gediminas founded it in the 14th century. Various writings and analyses come from places like the Vatican, Germany, Russia, Poland and more.
The book aims to show Vilnius today as it has been seen for the last 500 years 's as a place of meeting and dispersal. It is a place of connections where people, trains, cultures, languages, and even armies can meet.
The city is a gateway from east to west, in terms of both geography and culture. To the west is Europe as they knew it, and to the east is Russia.
"Vilnius 's City of Strangers" is remarkably easy to read for a historical snapshot of one of Europe's richest cultural cities. Writings made over 500 years ago are still poignantly relevant to the lifestyle and habits of the city, whose personality hasn't changed dramatically, despite the changing of tenants uncountable times.
The city has been ruled by numerous empires throughout history, yet it was always able to remain unchanged. Partly protected by the forests, swamps and rivers, only reachable in a bitter winter when the rivers were frozen, the city has always had its own spirit, a spirit that amazed and fascinated visitors.
Although not immediately clear from a Western point of view, it has been the city's contradictory tolerance and intolerance of itself and visitors that has allowed it to survive.
Visitors of today usually get drawn to the city by its seemingly impossible mix of cultures and languages that live in harmony. Vilnius has always been a polyglot city with languages like Polish, Armenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Yiddish and more being spoken as main languages. Surprisingly, Lithuanian has rarely been the lingua franca of the city 's in fact, under German occupation, signs were written in five languages to ensure complete understanding.
This multiculturalism has always been the situation in Vilnius with one exception 's today the Jewish community is no longer an integral part of the city.
One of the book's strong points is the exploration of the Jewish culture of Vilnius. The Jewish population of the city once made up around 50 percent of the population 's a significant portion compared to today's numbers.
The Jewish population of Vilnius earned it the title of the 'Jerusalem of the North' by visiting rulers and brought prominent writers and thinkers to Vilnius to investigate what they described as the 'Ostjuden.'
Throughout the book are various illustrations that will surprise readers and shed light on the development of Lithuania's capital from being a smattering of hovels to the proud city that it is today.
Perhaps one of the downsides of the book is that it constantly fills in the background of the writers of the memoirs, which sometimes takes the reader far from Lithuania. While this is important to develop the background of the information, it often leaves readers wanting more direct information about the town.
For a complete visit to this year's European Capital of Culture, visitors and residents alike should pick up a copy of the book and get acquainted with the city's rich, interesting and multicultural history.
