Lithuania's interwar modernist gem — art deco boulevards, Ninth Fort, and spurgos
Kaunas is Lithuania's second city, sitting at the confluence of the Nemunas and Neris rivers — a compact city centre that is among Central Europe's finest examples of interwar modernist architecture, built rapidly in the 1920s and '30s when Kaunas served as the temporary capital of independent Lithuania. Laisvės alėja (Freedom Avenue) is a tree-lined pedestrian boulevard flanked by art deco and functionalist buildings housing cafés, galleries, and book stores. The food scene is robustly Lithuanian: cepelinai (potato dumplings shaped like zeppelins, stuffed with meat and served with sour cream…
Kaunas grew around a castle at the rivers' confluence from the 14th century, when it was a fortified outpost of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania against Teutonic Knight raids. It was the provisional capital of independent Lithuania from 1920 to 1939 (after Vilnius was occupied by Poland) — the period that built the modernist city centre that UNESCO recognized as a UNESCO Modernism hub in 2015. The Ninth Fort, built by the Russian Empire in 1902 as part of Kaunas Fortress, became a Nazi mass-murder site in 1941–44 where over 50,000 people — mostly Jews from Lithuania, Germany, France, and Austria…