Kaunas Has the Audacity

A few years ago I was about an hour away from boarding a flight to New York when a stranger in front of me just plainly asked “What’s happening in Kaunas in 2022?”. Honestly, it threw me off a little until I realized I was wearing a T-Shirt with “Kaunas 2022” written all over it. After quickly gathering my thoughts, I launched into a pitch.

I talked about what the European Capital of Culture is, how every year a few new cities take the title, what it means, and how Kaunas is going to be different. I have closely followed the preparations, checked who’s behind all of it, attended a couple of early gatherings(that’s how I got the T-Shirt), and had a feeling that they were cooking something really special.

In retrospect, I think, I downplayed the potential importance it could have for the city, because 2022 proved that the team behind “Kaunas European Capital of Culture 2022” had a simple, yet grandiose vision and more importantly the means to flawlessly execute it.

What follows is my 100% biased appreciation post of the work that has been done, how it felt, and what it meant for a regular inhabitant of Kaunas.

From temporary to contemporary

Kaunas is a small city right smack in the middle of Lithuania, slowly approaching 400,000 inhabitants. During the inter-war period it became a Temporary Capital of Lithuania, because…well..Poland decided to occupy Vilnius. The “temporary” slogan kinda stuck for decades and branded Kaunas as an afterthought.

What’s the best city in Lithuania? Not Kaunas. Where should something important happen? Not Kaunas. It basically became a city that folks had to transit while going from one corner of Lithuania to another, only coming to visit when they absolutely had to. Nobody wants to invest into temporary things and I’m not surprised that “From temporary to contemporary” was chosen as the main slogan for 2022. The city was in desperate need of something inspiring and a way to separate itself from stereotypes that are decades old.

The audacity

There’s an infinite number of things that can(and i’m sure did)go wrong when you take on a challenge to transform how people perceive the city. Kaunas was selected as a 2022 European Capital of Culture in 2017 and, even though, they had some time to prepare, five years is an awfully long time for something to go wrong. Key people behind the initiative can just leave, the public can ignore everything, or the things that you do might just fizzle out. Just try to imagine what it would take you to execute a grandiose vision, set a new quality bar for public events, while being fresh out of global coronavirus pandemic. Money? Sure. Some freaking luck? Helps. How about sheer audacity?

One needs audacity to believe that you can do something great when the deck is stacked against you, maneuver around the things that ultimately go wrong and find opportunities in desperate circumstances. Ultimately, that’s what progress in any field is all about. Taking a crazy leap of faith, not taking no for an answer and plowing forward.

Audacity is inspiring as well and, i believe, it’s firmly implanted in Kaunas right now, especially when the city witnessed it firsthand. One of the major goals that “Kaunas 2022” organization had was to build enough momentum behind their activities to ensure that the city would carry on the benefits well past the year 2022. As i’m approaching my 5th consecutive year living in this wonderful city, i can strongly say that the city right now feels really audacious and there’s no way to reverse that transformation. I can see in how people talk about the city, what it could become, what they think they can do here, what they can achieve together with others.

Appreciating things is never easy, especially for me, but in the case of Kaunas 2022 i’m willing to completely ignore pesky, minor mistakes and instead publicly thank all the people who were behind this massive transformation that made the city so different from what it was before. They are all heroes who literally did the impossible.

P.S. Watch this short aftermovie to get a glimpse into Kaunas 2022. It inspired me to write this post.