Kaunas is one of the three European cultural capitals in 2022. The kick-off of a year of festivities was given on Saturday evening January 22 with a sound and light show evoking the transformation of the city, but also encouraging the inhabitants of the second Lithuanian city to explore it.
With our special correspondent in Kaunas, Marielle Vitureau
They are hundreds after the inauguration to walk around, a map in hand like Domas. The young man scrutinizes the entrance to the theater in Kaunas.
He must discover a sign to solve a riddle that will allow him to better discover his city. That it has become a cultural capital is a good thing. ” I know a lot of things in the city, he says, but there are always more secret places, and it is thanks to such initiatives that we can discover them. »
In a European tradition
Becoming a cultural capital allowed Kaunas to begin a necessary metamorphosis. ” The city, in Soviet times, was very commercial. All production went bankrupt in the 1990s, people were really poor and many left. It was therefore really necessary to find the identity of the city explains Ina Pukelyte, one of the organizers.
On the program, therefore, rediscovery of the modernist architecture of the city which fully inscribes it in a European tradition, but also exploration of the multicultural history of the city, in particular of its Jewish past with an exhibition of the South African William Kentridge of Lithuanian descent.