“Only in this city, an avenue called Liberty starts with a court building. Once it used to be a funny grocery store where goods looked like they were being on trial, but the store’s verdict was much more favorable to the city than the court’s verdict. In addition, old hippies used to sell pirated CDs there that smelled of illegal and yet authentic spirit of preserved freedom.” This is an excerpt from Kęstutis Navakas’ essay “The Avenue of the Last Trial” which can be found in Silent Call collection (Begarsis skambutis, Tyto Alba, 2015).
February 16 will mark a year after the poet, writer and translator’s death but his texts will always live on Kaunas streets, gateways, cafes, and bookstores; suspended between conversations, steaming asphalt and lovely rain. Meanwhile, the “Avenue of the Last Trial”, or other Kaunas-specific texts, are trying to become – maybe already have – a wanderer’s guide, inviting to rediscover the surfaces that have been polished with the eyes for hundreds of times, and to dissect their hidden layers.
This is the only solution at the moment. To create an occasion for focusing your gaze on your street, your block, or your district. To create rules of the game, to become a first-time guest in your own house, a picky tourist in your own city. And instead of exploring a social network, operating in a principle of a closed circle, investigate riverbanks, scroll down the sidewalk, instead of a smartphone screen. We really have the luxury of not rushing anywhere.
After slowing down a bit this month, we are interested in what a well-known city looks like when playing discovery games. The magazine’s routes find coziness in industrial Petrašiūnai, warm up in the back seat of a trolleybus, fly a drone over the roofs of Kaunas, teach how to cut off corners, build bridges between riverbanks, look for the motifs, captured by painters decades ago in today’s streets, and find Kaunas in the most unexpected corners of the world. And all that within the municipal boundaries. So, we wish you a motivating read and many steps. By the way, register for the Kaunas 2022 challenge in the walk15 app. This way, all of us, one family unit at the time but together, will walk all the way to the European Capital of Culture.
