Summer in the new EU: In Lithuania, with its faint echoes of a pagan past, storks of summer get a joyous welcome, writes Daniel McLaughlin
Lithuania's pagan roots are as tenacious as its winters, and summer traditionally arrives here to grateful celebration. People scale trees and disused chimneys and even secure old wagon wheels to the pole tops to prepare for their summer guests.
At last, gliding across fields sodden by snowmelt, the storks return from their African winter to land on their nests, carrying what their Lithuanian landlords believe to be an invisible cargo of good fortune.
As the heat builds, the birds fly to and fro around their nests, descending to step daintily through the fields and marshes and pluck hapless frogs from their hiding places. Leaning against telegraph poles, beneath the storks' broad nests, many Lithuanians spend summer selling sweet fruit and vegetables to passing motorists and while away the interval between customers with a beer and a game of cards.
The main road from the capital, Vilnius, to the coast carries a steady stream of holidaymakers towards the white beaches and chill waters of Baltic resorts such as Klaipeda and Palanga. Now, only better-off Russians can afford to holiday here, as Germans and Poles probably outnumber them on the strands and in the gaudy nightclubs.
Palanga was, until not so long ago, a quiet fishing village with a long beach backed by rolling sand dunes and fragrant pine woods. Now, its population swells from about 20,000 to 100,000 people on summer weekends.
Klaipeda, 30km south, is the heart of the Lithuanian seaboard and a growing destination for cruise ships. The Soviets rebuilt Klaipeda after the second World War as a major shipping centre, and much of its historical German flavour was lost.
Today, Klaipeda's busy port quickly gives way to the northern tip of a sliver of pristine sand that stretches some 100km south to Kaliningrad. This is the Curonian Spit, a national park and Unesco World Heritage site that Lithuanians call their own Sahara, which attracts 1.5 million visitors each year.
It is a wild place of shifting sands, where balmy days can be wracked by Baltic storms that leave pieces of amber scattered along the shore. Beachcombers gather these lumps of fossilised pine resin, more plentiful here than anywhere else in the world.
Among towering dunes and whispering forests, visitors hone their appetites before returning to one of the villages that dot the sands like islands in a pale, parched sea. Nida is the largest of them, a pristine fishing village of 2,000 that welcomes 50,000 tourists every year.
A group of Prussian artists, inspired by the austere beauty, established a colony here in the late 19th century. By the time Thomas Mann came to Nida in the 1930s, it was already a popular resort with German tourists. His summer house is the village's main man-made attraction, drawing curious fans of the writer from around the world.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave special permission to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to spend time here. Now many Lithuanians, keen to escape the city but chary of the day-glo fun of Palanga, make for Nida.
The heart of Vilnius, the Lithuanian metropolis, is the largest baroque old town in Europe, a tangle of restored alleyways and breezy squares flanked by Catholic and Orthodox churches, beneath which burrow innumerable bars and restaurants.
As a short summer Saturday night slowly brightens into Sunday morning, the subterranean bars disgorge their patrons just as the temples open their doors. Three-quarters of Lithuanians call themselves Catholics but, as the last European nation to be converted to Christianity, in 1385, the roots of paganism lie close to the surface.
Summer festivals can echo the ancient traditions of this place, combining pagan and Christian imagery. Lithuanians take to the forest in late August and September, to pick the mushrooms and berries that help sustain them through the winter, when they wait for the return of cold-fearing storks to herald sunnier days ahead.
