Wander & Wonder Travel Newsletter

Hey StoryHunter

Vilnius is often the city most people visit in Lithuania - but if you want a more fascinating trip, you should head for Kaunas.

Which is odd, because it’s just one an hour down the road – and for 20 years, Kaunas was actually the capital of Lithuania.

Entirely by accident.

(more on that later)

It also has the only devil museum in the world, a small house where one man saved thousands of lives with a pen, and a wooden lift from 1931 that still creaks up the hillside all day long.

So this week – as autumn really sets in – Kaunas is our recommendation.

 The trees turn brown, everything is cheap, and you will have almost everything for yourself.

Read on to learn about:

🏛️ The city that became a capital overnight

✍️ The visas written by hand until the train pulled away

😈 The museum with 3,000 devils in it

New update: Many more languages 🌍

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So wherever you’re from - or wherever you’re going - you can explore in a language that feels like home.

Destination of the Week

In 1920, Poland seized Vilnius.

Lithuania lost its capital overnight, and the job fell to Kaunas - a quiet provincial town that suddenly needed ministries, banks, a university and a parliament.

It had about 20 years to build them all.

What went up is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 2023 under a wonderful name: Modernist Kaunas: Architecture of Optimism.

And that is exactly what it looks like.

Curved corners, round windows, clean white walls - a whole city thrown up in a hurry by people who were certain the future was on its way.

Walk Laisvės alėja, the long pedestrian avenue, and you walk through all of it.

Don't Miss

On a quiet residential street stands a small house that was once the Japanese consulate.

In the summer of 1940, Kaunas filled with Jewish refugees fleeing Poland.

To get out, they needed a visa, and the Japanese vice-consul asked Tokyo for permission to issue them.

He was told no.

He asked again.

No.

A third time.

No.

So he did it anyway.

For a month he wrote visas by hand - up to 300 a day, a normal month’s work - while his wife stamped them and rubbed his cramping hands.

Today, that man is often dubbed the "Japanese Schindler".

Did You Know?

In 1906, a Lithuanian painter was given a small carved devil as a present.

Then somebody gave him another one.

A priest sawed a devil off a church altar and sent it to him with a note telling him to collect devils for life.

He decided to aim for 169 of them.

He got to 260.

When he died in 1966, his house became a museum - and then visitors started bringing their own devils and leaving them behind.

They never stopped.

The collection now holds more than 3,000 devils from over 70 countries, spread across three floors.

It is the only museum of its kind on earth.

The Trendy Traveler Tip

Kaunas is built on hills, and in 1931 the city solved that in the most charming way possible.

The Žaliakalnis funicular is a little wooden carriage on a cable, hauling people 142 metres up the slope.

The ride takes one minute and thirty-eight seconds.

The benches are wood, and the machinery downstairs is the original German gear.

It is one of the oldest funiculars still running anywhere in the world - and it still carries several hundred people a day.

At the top stands a huge white modernist church with a roof terrace and the best view in the city.