Kernavė

Kernavė is the sort of place that rewards knowing what you are looking at, because at first glance it is simply a field. A beautiful field, admittedly — a terrace of grassy mounds above the wide, slow Neris river, an hour’s drive northwest of Vilnius. But those mounds are the reason Kernavė carries the title of Lithuania’s first capital, and the reason the whole site is protected as an archaeological reserve. What looks like gentle landscaping is, in fact, the eroded remains of one of the most important early medieval towns in the eastern Baltic, abandoned and slowly swallowed by grass.

Five hills and a vanished town

There are five hill forts here, lined up along the valley edge, each one a flat-topped mound that was once crowned with timber fortifications. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this was a thriving political and trading centre of pagan Lithuania — the last pagan state in Europe — until it was burned during the wars with the Teutonic Order and never truly recovered. Walking from one fort to the next along the boardwalks, I kept having to remind myself that the empty air above each mound had once been filled with walls, towers, smoke, and the noise of a living town.

The little museum in the village does the heavy lifting of imagination for you. Decades of excavation have pulled an extraordinary amount out of this soil — medieval jewellery, tools, textiles, even fragments of the wooden town preserved in the damp ground — and seeing the objects first makes the empty hills outside suddenly populated. Lia, who has more patience for display cases than I do, had to drag me back out, and then drag me back in again when I realised I had walked past half of it.

Midsummer fires

I had deliberately timed our visit for late June, because Kernavė is one of the great places in Lithuania to experience the midsummer festival — Rasos, or Joninės, the old solstice celebration that the country never quite stopped observing through centuries of Christianity and Soviet rule. The hill forts fill with people. There are wreaths of flowers and oak leaves, folk singers, bonfires lit as the long northern dusk finally gives way, and the slightly giddy atmosphere of a whole nation deciding, for one night, to be openly and unironically connected to its own deep past.

We stayed until well after dark. Someone handed Lia a flower wreath; someone handed me a cup of something fermented and herbal that I could not identify and did not refuse. Standing in a field that has been sacred to this place for a thousand years, watching the fire throw shadows up the slope of an abandoned fortress, I understood Kernavė properly for the first time. It is not a ruin. It is a place where Lithuania goes to remember where it started.

When to go: late June for the Rasos midsummer festival, by far the most atmospheric time. The rest of the warm season is quiet and lovely; avoid winter, when the hill forts are slick and the museum hours shrink.