Ignalina In Your Pocket

Although excavations suggest Ignalina was one of the places to be seen during the Stone Age, modern history places it as one of Lithuania's newer townships. Traditionally a backwater settlement, it was the construction of the Warsaw-St. Petersburg railway line in the 1860s that put the town firmly on the map. In less than 70 years the population ballooned from just 85 people in 1866 to 1,535 in 1931.

The Nazi occupation of Lithuania (1941-1944) destroyed the ethnic makeup of the town (fewer than 20 of Ignalina's 700 pre-war Jews survived the holocaust), and the Stalin years that followed brought a new wave of terror for the local Lithuanian population. The post-war Soviet occupation though did herald an aggressive programme of development, and Ignalina surprisingly found itself earmarked as a regional centre. Today its population has mushroomed to 7,000, and its direct rail link to Vilnius means that for travellers, the town is often their first taste of the Aukštaitija region. As a town, Ignalina offers an odd combination of trials, tests, sights and sounds. Squat Soviet housing estates rub shoulders with rustic cottages, blind bends lead to stunning lakes, beautiful woodcarvings appear at random and a man in a loincloth lives in a tree. The crazy world of Ignalina starts here.