‘Come for the culture, stay for the doughnuts’

I’ll bill the city’s marketing department for the slogan above later, but right now the urgent thing is changing all the brochures, because the Capital of Culture’s current tagline, “From Temporary to Contemporary Capital”, is, well, a bit short on jam and sugar.

In fact, it is everything that holidaymakers have come to expect (and fear) from the EU’s annual Capital of Culture programme: obscure municipalities, earnest artworks and 100ft high-fallutin ideals. Which is a shame, because once I had found Kaunas on a map and in the flight schedules, I found a city of haunting history, eccentric attractions, fascinating architecture, crazy-friendly denizens and Christmas-card looks. And amazing doughnuts.

Those little fried fists of doughy pleasure – spurgos, in Lithuanian – are a traditional treat here, dispensed, with a traditional disdain for frills, in Spurgine, a café on the city’s main drag (facebook. com/spurginekaunas.lt). The clock seems to have stopped around 1978, with plain, faintly Soviet-looking interiors and plain, faintly Soviet-looking ladies serving up the goods, which come stuffed with meat, cheese curd or jam. I paid €3 for three doughnuts, fresh from the fryer – then, about six minutes later, €3 for three more, because they were as warm, fragrant and comforting as a grandmother’s cuddle.

Spurgine certainly had more customers than any of the Capital of Culture venues I visited. To say there was a buzz about the city’s new status would be overstating things: an interested murmur would be more accurate. None of the museums and galleries and “found spaces” I saw were empty, but none

i Doughy delight: Cepelinai is so popular, the city has a sculpture of the dumpling