A visit to a popular destination out of season can show it in a very different light. However alluring a place may be, the pleasure of a visit in high season can be spoiled by hordes of fellow sightseers and a constant procession of daytrip coaches. Lithuania is no different in this respect: during the Baltic summer - a heady time of long warm days and short bright nights - Trakai, a lakeside settlement twenty kilometres or so southwest of Vilnius, becomes a veritable honey pot. The bees are day trippers; the honey, a pristine castle set in a glacial landscape of clear blue lakes and birch forest. On the other hand, a visit to this same village at the end of October, when the Baltic region slips quietly over the edge of a flameleafed autumn into the first throws of winter, is a completely different matter.
Trakai lies close enough to the Lithuanian capital to enjoy regular public transport connections. We follow a skipping schoolboy all the way from the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius' Old Town to the bus station. It turns out that the boy is catching the same bus - his daily commute from school in Vilnius to his home in an outlying village. At first, the bus heads through dull industrial suburbs that seem a far cry from the quaint Old Town with its castles, cathedral and extravagant churches. Then we steer west along an unpromising dual carriageway - the main highway to Russia's Baltic exclave at Kaliningrad. A half hour later, our bus turns off the main road to drop slowly down to the edge of Trakai village - a long, sprawling community that follows the shoreline of the largest of several interconnected lakes.
By the time we arrive, menacing black clouds have blown in from the west and the village streets are almost deserted as we walk towards the lake. A sudden wind picks up to scatter the curled red leaves that lie in the gutters and, almost immediately, the clouds start to release their payload: cold rain that turns rapidly to sleet. Trudging rather miserably towards the tourist office we see a light and head inside, as much for shelter as for information. The woman on duty seems bemused to see us, as well she might. If it is true that Trakai is visited annually by some three hundred and fifty thousand visitors then this inclement day, at the very end of the tourist season, must be anything but typical. It seems likely that we might well be the first visitors of the day. And probably the last.
At first glance, Trakai may appear like any other southern Lithuanian settlement, albeit one that is more self-consciously beautiful than most. A closer inspection reveals a few anomalies however. The spick and span wooden houses passed en route to the lake sport a curious oddity of design. Each has three windows facing directly onto the street at the gable end. This is more than a mere architectural whim. It reveals a cultural and religious tradition that stands well apart from Lithuania's Catholic mainstream.
This street is Karaimu gatvé (Karaim Street) and the houses belong to members of a minority that settled here over six hundred years ago. These are the Lithuanian Karaim, a remarkable ethno-confessional group that speaks a language more akin to some of the tongues heard around the Black Sea and the Caspian.
The Karaim practise a distinctive form of Judaism. They accept the Torah but the Karaim reject the Talmud as the impious musings of rabbinical scholars rather than the direct word of God. The name Karaim, derived from the Hebrew word qarayim, means ‘readers’. In a purely literal sense, it refers to practitioners of the Karaite sect of Judaism, small communties of which exist in Israel, the USA, Turkey and elsewhere. More generally, the term is also used to describe the distinct Turkic-speaking Karaim communities living in Lithuania, the Crimea and elsewhere in eastern Europe who consider themselves to be separate from the Judaic mainstream and who emphasise the independent nature of their religion — a strand of Judaism that defies the rabbinical tradition of interpreting the scriptures. For the Karaim, all that counts is what is written. Hence ‘the readers’.
The ethnogenesis of the Karaim remains obscure. One theory suggests that they are descendants of the Khazars, a curious people who flirted with Islam, Christianity and Judaism, eventually settling on the latter. A more plausible explanation is that the Karaim are a Jewish sect that originated in Mesopotamia - in an area nowadays part of Iraq - in the eighth century AD and broke with the mainstream of Judaism two centuries later. What is certain is that by the eleventh century the Karaim had settled in the Crimea and elsewhere around the northern Black Sea. At that time the region was ruled by Tatars who came from the Central Asian steppe and spoke a Turkic language. The Crimea became part of the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a territory that at the time stretched unbroken from the Baltic all the way down to the Black Sea. The move to Lithuania took place in 1397 when more than three hundred Karaim families were taken to Trakai by the Lithuanian ruler Vytautus the Great to serve as his elite guard. A small but steady migration followed over the next few centuries.
At first, the Trakai Karaim were given the task of guarding the royal castle, accessible only by boat or by way of a bridge across Lake Galve. Then, in 1441, the Karaim were granted a measure of autonomy - under the Right of Magdeburg — and in the years that followed they began to engage in agriculture and horse breeding, and, with a high level of literacy, they advanced socially to constitute a middle class that positioned itself between the aristocracy and the rest of the farming community.
The Karaim of eastern Europe were never particularly numerous. A hundred years ago there were, perhaps, just eight hundred of them living in and around Trakai in Lithuania, with some five thousand more in the Ukrainian Crimea. The last century saw a further reduction in numbers: in a survey of 1989, 289 Lithuanian citizens identified themselves as Karaim, with around one hundred in Trakai, thirty in Panevežys and 130 in Vilnius. Despite this decline, signs of the Karaim are still clearly evident in Trakai. As well as the parade of threewindowed houses that line Karaimu gatvé, there is also a small, square-planned kenessa (prayer house) and an ethnographic museum. The distinctive three window gables follow a tradition in which one window was said to be for God, another for the family and the third for Grand Duke Vytautus, whose likeness still hangs on the wall of many Karaim households.
After a stroll along the shore of Lake Galve, and further battering by another fly-by rainstorm, we decide to repair to a restaurant that offers traditional Karaim cuisine. Were it not for another couple, sat at a table drinking beer, we would be the only customers. The restaurant — one of the larger wooden buildings on the street — is light and airy inside. Sepia photographs of old-time Trakai line the walls: darkfeatured moustached men in fez-like caps; a snow-covered street scene with the same threewindowed houses; matronly women bejewelled in their finery — all memorabilia celebrating the village’s Karaim heritage. The music playing in the background is Karaim too. It sounds vaguely oriental, Anatolian perhaps, and the language sung sounds like Turkish - all soft consonants and purse-lipped vowels. The food on offer reflects a culinary tradition that hints of Turkey too - with an emphasis on lamb. We settle for a plate of kibinas, a traditional Karaim snack: meat-filled patties in the shape of half moons that are said to resemble Cornish pasties but remind us even more of Chilean empanadas — crisp parcels of flavour that are a comfort on a cold day like this.
After kibinas and a glass of excellent local beer, the view out of the window looks altogether more promising now that most of the storm clouds have been banished to the horizon. We wander across the street to the kenessa, the Karaim place of worship, but it is locked. The building, made of wood with a greening copper roof, has a trio of high windows on the wall that give light to the interior but reveal nothing to those outside. This kenessa was the only one that remained in operation during the Soviet era and even then, given the disapproval towards organised religion by the authorities, it served mainly for funeral ceremonies. The kenessa that stands now was last restored in 1997. So not the original one, although it occupies the same site as its predecessors. Given the propensity for attracting combustion that wooden buildings and minority religions seem to have, it is unsurprising that many early prayer houses were lost to fire.
Across the water on the other side of the lake stands the Karaim cemetery where the pitted stone markers of the deceased peek through the grass in birch woodland. Many of the stones bear eroded Hebrew inscriptions. Hebrew was the language of Karaim liturgy until the end of the nineteenth century when the Karaim language itself was introduced to replace Hebrew in religious ceremonies. The language is now considered to be ‘seriously endangered’ according to UNESCO’s Red Book of Endangered Languages and there are only around fifty native speakers in Lithuania today. Karaim, as spoken in Trakai, remains a rare Turkic language that will require some sort of a renaissance in order to survive. To adopt a simile appropriate for the Baltic region, the Karaim tongue is like a tiny fly trapped within the amber of Lithuanian and Slavic languages. It remains to be seen whether the recent resurgence of interest from within the Karaim community itself will be sufficient to prevent it from joining the long litany of other European languages that are extinct.
