At first glance, everything seems detached from a postcard: tall birch trees, Baltic pins being swinging in the wind and a road that is lost in the dense green of the Western Lithuania. 50 kilometers from the Baltic Sea shore, in the middle of the National Park žmianija, nature covered, slowly and surely, which was once a military secret guarded with strange nuclear missiles, an underground installation raised by the Soviet Union in the Iron years of the Cold War.
Nuclear missile base, transformed into museum/photo: x
Currently, the ruins of this base have been transformed into a museum-Cold War Museum-which attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually. In 2024, over 35,000 people from all over the world descended into the depths of the earth, following an era in which the pressing of a single button could have rewrite the map of Europe, reports CNN.
Rockets under the woods
Four white domes, coming out of a Soviet dystopia, come from the trees. Below them, the 30-meter deep silos, built for R-12 DVina rockets with average range. In the 1960s, focus were kept here capable of wiping whole cities from the face of the earth. The area was carefully chosen: frequent forests, isolated villages, easy to dig and a lake – plateliai – perfect for cooling systems.
The construction began in 1960, in full secret. Over 10,000 workers, brought from all corners of the Soviet Union, worked on this underground complex. The locals suspected that “something important” was happening in the woods, but no one asked anything. In the USSR, the uncomfortable questions were paid expensive.
The guardian of history
Aušra Brazdeikytė, a local guide and born in a nearby village, remembers how the Soviet soldiers had become part of the landscape. “They were everywhere, but you were not allowed to talk about what they were doing. It was a realm of silence,” she says. Today, he tells visitors about life in the shadow of the base, about the hidden accidents and how, one day, a soldier fell into the empty silo, after breaking his seat belt.
In 1978, Americans discovered the satellite base, but it was already too late. The Soviets had decommissioned it, in the context of disarming agreements signed with the US.
A pressed tranquility
Access is made through a metal tunnel, with a heavy, tightly sealed door. A message in Russian warns dry: “Please wipe your feet.” The air is cold and heavy, the walls bears the traces of the decades of abandonment, and the decor is like from a museum of the absurd: busts of Lenin and Stalin, flags with sickle and hammer, silicone mannequins with posthumous faces, dressed in Soviet uniforms.
Visitors go through the lighted corridors, enter the thematic rooms dedicated to propaganda and nuclear strategies of the Cold War. But the truly disturbing moment comes when you get in front of the main silo: a huge opening in the ground, a silent pit in which, once, a rocket with nuclear capacity was held.
A ghost town
Within a few steps of silos is what was left of a city that never had a name. Here were the approximately 300 soldiers and officers serving the base. After closing, the administrative buildings were transformed-into a gesture that defies logic-into a children's summer camp, called “žuvėdra” (Pescărușul). Today, only a few hinged hangars and covered by muscles remind of that ambiguous past.
Between heaven and abyss
The confrontation between the natural beauty of the region and the creepy relics of an era of global confrontation is, perhaps, the most sincere metaphor for Lithuania today.
Apart from the base, the National Park žmaTija is a landscape jewel: clear lakes, bicycle routes, quiet forests and old villages. In Plateliai, just 15 minutes to drive, tourists can visit a 18th-century wooden church, a local carnival museum and can taste the famous žmaičių Blynai-potato pancakes with various types of meat-or the classic CEPELINAI, huge dumplings.
