For twenty years between the wars, Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania in everything but name. Vilnius had been seized by Poland in 1920, so the government settled on this river city as a temporary seat, and the temporary arrangement lasted until 1939. In those two decades the town doubled in size and filled with new ministries, schools, banks, cinemas and apartment blocks in the clean, white, rounded style of the time. UNESCO listed the best of it in 2023 as the Architecture of Optimism, and the name fits: these are buildings designed by people who believed that a small country could start again.
The best way to see it is to walk or ride slowly along Laisvės alėja, the long pedestrian boulevard through the centre, then drift north and east through the neighbourhoods around it. The Central Post Office, with its rational lines and tall clock, is one stop; the Vytautas the Great War Museum, with a garden and a bell tower, is another. On the hill of Žaliakalnis, a funicular climbs through quiet villa streets to the huge Christ's Resurrection Church, a pale, boxy giant begun in the 1930s as a national thanksgiving and used for decades as a radio factory under the Soviets. From the roof terrace you see the whole sprawl of the town spread across the confluence of the Nemunas and Neris.
For a rider, Kaunas is a normal city with some old-fashioned habits. The centre has tram-less streets, patchy cobbles in the older quarter, and plenty of one-way systems. Drivers can be impatient, and the long Soviet-era avenues invite speed, so watch for cameras. The road from Vilnius and Trakai on the A1 motorway is fast and easy, and the old Kaunas lagoon, a reservoir made in 1959, gives a pleasant detour toward the baroque monastery at Pažaislis, whose white and ochre domes reflect in the water.
With nearly four hundred thousand people, fuel, food and repairs are everywhere. Local cafés in the old modernist buildings are an attraction in themselves, and a cup of coffee in one makes a good rest.
Check the weather: Lithuanian spring and autumn can turn wet quickly, and wet cobbles are not friendly to a loaded bike.