Enjoying a glass of Gira, traditional Lithuanian drink
overlooking the putting green and course.
Before teeing off on this sunny August morning, we are
offered hot croissants and a glass of gira, a traditional
Lithuanian non-alcoholic beverage. Gira is made by the
natural fermentation of wheat, rye, or barley bread,
sometimes flavoured with fruit, berries, raisins or birch sap.
With hints of licorice, Dandelion & Burdock and Guinness, it
tastes like it should be alcoholic and is certainly an acquired
taste.
Karl Grundin, PGA Club Professional and Director of Golf at
the Vilnius Grand Resort, joins us to tackle this tricky Bjorn
Erikson design, who gets proceedings underway by expertly
splitting the fairway of the par-5 first. “It’s a very tight front
nine lined with lots of trees, so you may want to tee off
with hybrids or long irons on some of the holes,” says Karl.
“The course then opens up on the back nine where there’s
more opportunities to use driver.“
Before playing our second shots on the very narrow par-
4 7th, we take a short detour through a gate to learn the
reason behind the golf course name. In 1989, a group of
French scientists from the French National Geographic
Institute (with map references of 54 degrees, 54 minutes
Accordion player at Trakai’s famous Island Castle
latitude and 25 degrees, 19 minutes longitude), announced
that the geographical centre of Europe was 26 km to the
north of Vilnius, or to be exact, a short chip shot from the
Europa Golf Center’s 7th tee. On May 1st 2004, the date
Lithuania entered the European Union, a famous Lithuanian
sculptor, Gediminas Jokūbonis unveiled at the site his
composition of a column of white granite, the top of which
is rimmed by a crown of stars.
Once we finish our round its time for some culture, and it
would be difficult to imagine a more attractive capital city
to explore, than Vilnius. “Narrow cobblestone streets and
an orgy of Baroque: almost like a Jesuit city somewhere
in the middle of Latin America,” wrote the Polish author
Czeslaw Milosz of pre-war Vilnius, and with a proliferation
of churches and a distinctive skyline of steeples, domes and
belfries, the description still holds true today.
Vilnius’s Old Town includes over 1,000 protected
monuments, among them outstanding masterpieces not
only of Baroque but also Gothic, Renaissance and Neo-
Classical architecture. We enjoy an open-topped bus tour
taking in some of the major attractions such as Cathedral
Square, St Anne’s Church, Vilnius University, the Presidential
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