“Vilnius is a city of dreams.” This compelling assertion appears in an article about the capital city of Lithuania (“Vilnius: Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open,” Baltic Outlook, October/November 2007). Indeed, both Lithuania and its capital have had a number of major dreams come true, with significant goals realized and long-held ideals made manifest. Amazingly, this tiny country on the Baltic Sea was able to emerge from the waking nightmare that was 50 years of being annexed to the former Soviet Union, the long-nurtured dream of independence made real at the beginning of the 1990s. More recently, Vilnius has been designated as the European Capital of Culture in 2009, an aspiration that could not have been dreamed of under the Soviets.
However, this article informs us, Vilnius is not just a city of dreams - it “was born because of a dream.” Legend has it that the city owes its very existence to a sleep dream. “Many centuries ago Gediminas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, was hunting in the environs of present-day Vilnius and had a dream in which he saw an iron wolf howling on a hill. Lizdeika, a pagan prophet, interpreted that dream as follows: the iron wolf stood for the capital be built here in the future and the sound of howling stood for Vilnius’s glory spreading around the world. Soon after, the town was built.”
All too often, history plays out as the most unimaginable waking nightmares. Certainly this has been the case for Lithuania and its neighbors, Latvia and Estonia. These countries and their cultures seemed destined for oblivion, drowning in a tsunami of Russian domination, yet they survived. In scenarios of oppression, suppression and repression, dreams of a better future are what keep people going. Sometimes history also shows us that dreams held onto, even of the most outrageous sort, can come true.