City highlights

Coolest corner

Kaunas’s Old Town is the more raffish, studenty end of the city centre (so you’ll find not only late bars but also vegetarian Indian restaurants). The New Town, at the other end of Laisves aleja, the city’s mile-long pedestrianised spine, is generally slightly smarter, but has its own fantastic pubs. Genys Taproom (genystaproom.lt) and Vingiu Dubingiu (vindub. wixsite.com) are brilliant little craft-beer joints, the latter with its own food truck in the back garden

Must-see sight

Built around 1900, the Ninth Fort was soon something of a white elephant in the new world of airborne warfare, and by 1918 had become a prison. During the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania, it housed political prisoners on their way to the gulag; then, when the Nazis invaded, it became a death camp. Now a starkly understated museum (9fortomuziejus.lt), it tells the story of the 50,000 Jews murdered there – the gloomy claustrophobia of its thick walls and the grim banality of its collection of exhumed spectacles brings the horror home powerfully. But the mood is mercifully lifted by the surrounding parkland: in winter, kids sled over the rolling slopes; in summer, newlyweds pose for pictures – incongruous, perhaps, but strangely cheering

Signature dish

How much do Lithuanians like cepelinai? Enough to erect sculptures in their honour. The little potato dumplings – usually stuffed with ground meat or mushrooms – are being immortalised in statue form by two artists as part of the Capital of Culture programme. You will be able to see the result in Karmelava, just outside Kaunas; but those philistine few not prepared to take a taxi for a foodstuff-shaped art will be pleased to hear that Karmelava is also where the country’s best cepelinai are found. The best place to try them is Briedziu medziokle (facebook. com/ briedziumedziokle1); it doesn’t look much on the outside (or on the inside, with its moose-themed decor), but the food is rib-stickingly satisfying

Greatest export

Kankles. Centuries before some body-fascist fashionista decided even our ankles needed to diet (lest they merge, podgily, with our calves and become “cankles”), Lithuanians were playing the kankles: a zither-like musical instrument that soon spread around the Baltic. (Don’t know what a zither is? Picture a small wooden harp, but solid, and played on your lap.) At the brilliant little Folk Music Branch of the Kaunas City Museum (kaunomuziejus.lt/ tautines_muzikos_skyrius), you can try your hand at playing kankles from across the country (though beware: say you prefer the example from north-west Lithuania and that’s fighting talk round here). Even better, they’ve got an enormous flugelhorn thing you can trumpet through, and a kind of computerised karaoke (kara-folky?) machine where you can join in with pre-recorded traditional polyphonic singing

Fun fact

Beer is big here, but if you can’t keep up, order a “driver’s drink”. It’s a non-specific measure (between a third and a half pint) – though probably still best avoided if you’re actually driving

If you learn one word

You’ve done well. Lithuanian is a tough language. You should at least be able to memorise the word for “thank you”: it’s aciu – pronounced “atch-oo”, as if sneezing

Proximity to Ukraine

No shame on you for asking. The good news is there’s a whole country between Lithuania and Ukraine; the bad news is it’s Belarus. Lithuanians (especially those who remember the second Soviet occupation, from 1940 to 1991) are understandably anxious about Moscow’s ambitions, but no one is expecting the war to spread here. At the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine, Lithuania’s government did declare a State of Emergency, but its only impact for tourists is that they must now carry photo ID with them