Trakai

Trakai is a castle on an island in a lake among lakes: the red-brick stronghold that Vytautas the Great finished around 1409, when Lithuania ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea, reached now by two wooden footbridges from a town on a peninsula, half an hour from Vilnius. The town belongs, in part, to the Karaites — a Turkic-speaking people of the Jewish faith whom Vytautas brought from Crimea as his guard six hundred years ago — whose wooden houses face the street with three windows, one each for God, the Grand Duke and the family, and whose kibinai, half-moon pastries of lamb, are the food of the place. Around it lie the lakes of Galvė and twenty more, full of sails.

The traveller crosses the bridges to the castle and climbs its keep for the lakes; walks the peninsula's one long street past the Karaite houses to the kenesa, their prayer house; eats kibinai hot from the oven at a table by the water; rents a rowboat or a pedal-boat and circles the castle from the lake, which is how it was meant to be seen; takes the boat or the road around to Užutrakis, the manor and park on the far shore, for the view back; and, in winter, when the lakes freeze hard, walks to the island over the ice, as the town does.

The Guide's honesty: Trakai is Lithuania's most visited day trip and the castle courtyard fills by midday in summer — the morning train and the late afternoon are the traveller's —; the castle is a reconstruction of the twentieth century on the medieval walls, and honest about it; the Karaite community is small and living, and its houses are homes, so look with courtesy; the kibinai are worth the trip alone and are best where the queue is local; and the lakes are for swimming in summer and skating in winter, and the town knows both.