Kaunas, the 2022 European Capital of Culture, is offering a unique opportunity to stay in authentic apartments of various historical periods. The Cultural Stay initiative has recreated the feel of interwar and Soviet everyday life in Lithuania to the smallest detail.
“We were looking for apartments where as soon as you enter you feel like you have been transported back in time,” said Marija Pulokaitė, curator of Kaunas 2022.
“We want to reflect different periods of Kaunas, from the interwar period to the Soviet era. We are also still looking for an apartment characteristic to the 1990s up to the present day,” she added.
One of the apartments is located in Kaunas’ Žaliakalnis district in a villa built in 1938 by an architect Stasys Kudokas.
The apartment is decorated in the Art Deco style that was popular in the interwar period. It features authentic furniture, paintings, tableware, and cultural magazines published at the time. Visitors are free to use everything they find in the apartment.
This apartment is already fully booked for January. It is especially popular among Lithuanian visitors, while foreigners are more interested in a Soviet-era apartment.
The latter belonged to a family of doctors in 1970–1980. The apartment is a bit more luxurious than an average Soviet place, but all of its furniture and decorations are also authentic to the period.
The children’s room in the apartment features Soviet science magazines and textbooks. A three-piece mirror, with Soviet perfume placed next to it, is the main highlight of the bedroom. Visitors can also listen to music on an authentic gramophone.
“What's fun about this experience is that everything can be used and all the machines work,” said Pulokaitė, curator of Kaunas 2022.
To help guests associate the past era with more than just objects, the apartment will also feature informational boards talking about the difficulties that people faced at that time.
In the kitchen, for example, there will be information about how people working in meat factories used to wrap sausages under their clothes to bring them home to their families.
One Soviet and three interwar apartments have been selected for the Cultural Stay initiative so far.
A one-night stay in such an apartment costs between 40 and 400 euros.
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