The sun is out and mosquitoes form small clouds over the path ahead of me. As I focus my camera on Stalin’s moustache, stout Russian voices break into song. I can’t help myself and begin to laugh. I am in a Lithuanian theme park called Grutas Park and it has to be the strangest place I have ever been.

Grutas Park is southern Lithuania’s biggest tourist attraction and has been open since 2001. Grutas was the brainchild of mushroom entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, who bought all the dismantled Soviet sculptures in the decade following the country’s independence of 1991.

A stoic statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin resides in the park.

He realized that after the downfall of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, all the statues from this era of Lithuanian history would need a home, resulting in Grutas Park’s existence.

As I continue down the path, past the gray statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on my left, the Soviet marching music plays from loudspeakers on my right, which are attached to imitation Gulag watchtowers in a forest by a small stream.

Each statue has an English translation of where it stood in the Communist era. The Stalin statue stood outside the train station in Vilnius, which must have cheered commuters as they shuffled to their work.

However, not all the statues are of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB’s forerunner, the Cheka, is present looking, very sleek and sinister in a long cape. There are also statues of Lithuanian heroes such as 20-year-old freedom fighter Maryte Melnikaite, who was shot by the Nazis in 1943, and of the Four Communards, the underground communist leaders who were shot in 1926 in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city.

After an hour-long tour of the statues, I go to the canteen and am given a choice between a lengthy ‘normal’ menu and a much shorter ‘nostalgia’ menu, specializing in Soviet-style cuisine. I decide to indulge in the spirit of the park and select my lunch from one of the three nostalgia dishes offered.

The picture of the “Goodbye Youth” chop indicates to me that there is no actual meat on the chop – just bone with some marrow attached. “Hello Hunger” might be a
better name.