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In the Old Country

© Colleen Kaleda

Lest you think, Suite101 readers, that my time in Lithuania was only spent trapped inside wood saunas and Soviet-Era buses, this story should reveal how wonderful a time I had in Lithuania. (Since then, I have done quite a bit of travel Stateside. Stories to follow in the coming weeks.)

So here I am, a young woman walking alone in the city, face bundled in a scarf to keep my breath warm as I breathe into it. The place -- Vilnius, Lithuania -- is foreign, but despite its location just 20 miles from the Belarussian border, there is a certain comfort here. It's not because the streetlights cast a glow on shiny rose-colored cobblestones, or the Catholic and Russian Orthodox church spires, poking up into moonlit clouds, seem somehow friendly in their lit close quarters. I'm here for a reason, here because I've chosen to see where my great-grandparents, immigrants to the United States in the early part of the 20th Century, came from. I am here to meet the relatives of those that stayed behind.

The Soviets once drove military vehicles through these cobblestone streets, replacing Lithuanian-language street signs with Russian ones, pulling Lithuanian books out of the schools and replacing them with Russian classics. There is an old KGB prison a few blocks from where I am walking now. Lithuanians, the first to declare independence in 1989, still call the six decades after World War II the Soviet occupation, and it was. But the Soviets are gone now, and tonight I hurry through the narrow streets of the Old City, past Vilnius' twinkly Christmas tree in the central square, to meet Jurgita for the first time. Jurgita is my cousin, and I can't wait to see her.

I took five planes and two trains to get here. On the trains, no one spoke English, but everybody seemed to have my full, straight nose and pale skin. The border guards squinted at my American passport, an oddity in the middle of winter when few tourists come to the far reaches of Eastern Europe. But they smiled, perhaps because my last name, Kaleda, looked familiar to them.

December in Lithuania is a dark, foggy time. It is not a time most tourists come here. As I walk, I think about all of my relations who may have trod along this central street. I am thinking that they would probably laugh if they could know that their American cousin would someday find it funny, as I did, seeing our surname on fliers advertising everything from decorative lights to movies to church services. Kaleda is the root word for Christmas in Lithuanian. It is also one of the oldest Lithuanian surnames.

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