Free From Russia with Lunch by David Smiedt

Fences and dividing walls are rarely in evidence, necessitating the tethering of all livestock. Weathered wooden barns the colour of corpses sit perhaps 200 metres from the road. Out the front are stacked feed parcels the size of minivans wrapped in white plastic. It’s a countryside steeped in torpor. In couverture fields lugubrious families in gumboots harvest potatoes by hand into plastic buckets.
    Rural Lithuania is also home to a rather special optical illusion. Because jade is a favourite colour for farmhouses, when viewed from a distance they dissolve into the gauzy greenness at their back door, leaving only their white windows and doors hovering. Few kilometres went by when I didn’t thank a force greater than myself that golf course developers had not yet discovered Lithuania. For now at least, I could travel through a landscape not dissimilar to that which Moses did on his way to Africa. No great flight of the imagination is required to envisage this agrarian fecundity – largely unchanged for centuries – being transformed into a ‘resort community’ with 36 holes designed by a pro who can’t beat Tiger Woods so he has to make his money elsewhere. In some insultingly token gesture, the clubhouse would be decorated by a Milanese designer who Googled ‘Lithuanian architecture’ the day before handing in his presentation and the whole shebang would be christened ‘Mafia Links’.
    Druskininkai is Lithuania’s southernmost town and spreads modestly along the banks of the Nemunas River, which runs slow and tea green. The name derives from the word druska, Lithuanian for salt, in recognition of the high saline content of its seven mineral springs. Its first celebrity endorsement came in 1794 from Stanislaw August Poni-atowski, the last man to hold the combined office of King of Poland and Duke of Lithuania. In fact, he was so convinced of the curative properties of the local wet stuff he promulgated a decree to this effect. ‘After a long day of running an empire,’ he might have said, ‘I need time for me. And that time is spent is Druskininkai. So bring the wife and kids and don’t forget your swimmers because the water’s fine.’
    Stanislaw’s hunches were proven accurate between 1821 and 1835 by Professor Ignacy Fonberg of Vilnius University, a pioneer in the art later perfected by travel journalists of soaking in hot tubs and calling it research. A sanatorium was duly opened in 1838 and within five years 2000 patients a year were making the 130-kilometre trek – a journey of significant proportions at the time – from Vilnius for treatments that targeted cardiac, blood vessel, gastrointestinal, gynaecological and nervous system disorders. By 1914, 18,000 visitors a year were signing up for saturation. This figure blew out to 40,000 in the Soviet era, with dozens of new facilities being constructed to accommodate them.
    Things quietened down after independence but Drus-kininkai is on the up again with US magazine Newsweek ranking it among the ten leading spa towns in Europe. It’s an easy call to make. Here, there seems those extra few moments to take the long way through a well-tended but not prissy park covered by a tarpaulin of spruce and birch. Roundabouts are not considered mere exercises in vehicular management but ideal locations for floral-trimmed sculptures. There is also a church in Druskininkai so gorgeous that it made this lapsed Jew begin to reconsider the whole Messiah thing.
    At the centre of a grassy landscaped square rimmed by anorexic birch sits the Russian Orthodox Church. Painted a shade of blue somewhere between cyan and summer with white accents, this diminutive wooden house of worship is topped by six black cupolas. It dates from 1865 and at a push could accommodate one hundred faithful. The eaves shelter a series of small yet beautifully detailed pentagonal paintings on religious themes. Such art continues on