Follow the mammoth

In 1957, excavations took place in what is now Smėlio Street. The city was expanding, and new residential houses were being built. While laying the sewage pipes in one of them, workers found huge bones at a depth of 3.5 metres. They turned out to be the legs of a mammoth! Two tusks, a lower jaw and a vertebra, were also found… In total, there are 40 intact bones. Although this was the largest collection of bones from an Ice Age animal found in Vilnius, scientists were curious to know where the rest of the body parts had gone. They speculate that the decaying mammoth’s body was damaged and its bones carried away by the river water. Walking along Smėlio Street, you can imagine that this was the sandy and shallow bank of the Neris. And in the 300 metres it takes to get to the present-day riverbank, there was a torrent carrying icebergs. 

Wandering along the banks of the Vilnia and the Neris, one can come across some unexpected finds – marine fossils. These are the remains of prehistoric small animals pressed into pebbles. The fossils were originally thought to date back to the Tertiary Age, the period just before the Ice Age. However, they are not indigenous to the banks of the rivers in Vilnius and were deposited here by the advancing glacier, which not only dragged stones but also the remains of fossilised animals. These fossils have been found to be hundreds of millions of years old and were brought by the glacier from Latvia and Estonia. 

The myth of the great flood as the punishment of the gods for the sins of mankind recurs in many religions. In the Bible, the hero of this myth is Noah, whose family was the only one to survive the cataclysm that destroyed everything. Noah boarded his ship and saved many animals. But not all species. That is why, for many years, Christian clerics have used the remains of prehistoric animals as a scare tactic. A mammoth bone hanging in the church reminded everyone who came of the creatures that had received God’s wrath and had not survived the global flood. There is a good chance that an orthocerus fossil can be seen under the carpet on the floor of All Saints Church for the same reason. This is a cephalopod that lived around 480 million years ago.

Vilnius University has been collecting the works of scientists who have studied the Ice Age in Lithuania. Their research on the Ice Age sediments can be seen at the Museum of Geology and Mineralogy. The magnificent showcases preserve the spirit of the Old University and contain collections of fossils, meteorites, ice-aged clay, interglacial sediments, and a variety of rocks and minerals. The mammoth tusk stands out in terms of size and is kept company by the teeth of an animal from the same ice age.

The Earth’s crust is like a pie. Each layer has been ‘stained’ by various natural phenomena over millions of years. If you were to cut a slice of the pie near Lithuania, the layers would stretch for about one kilometre before the imaginary knife hit the crystalline bedrock. This foundation is the Earth’s primordial surface, dating back to a time when volcanoes dotted the landscape of our planet and life was limited to single-celled organisms. But the volcanic mountains of old gradually eroded into sandstone. This is how the first layer of the pie was formed around 1 billion years ago. Today, you can pick up pieces of this reddish and very hard layer while walking along the Vilnius defensive wall. There are even boulders in several places that are composed of prehistoric sandstone, glacially transported from Sweden, more specifically from Jotni. This is why it is called the Jotnis Sandstone.

In the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Centre, there is a six-part sculptural composition by Mindaugas Navakas with the somewhat ironic title ‘Skip the Smaller One’. This title is also appropriate for the story about one of the boulders in the composition. It is easy to recognise, as the stone is distinguished by several smoothed planes. This boulder came from the north with the glacier. It was trapped in the ice, so it was polished by the long drag. When there was an obstacle on the way – another stone or a pothole – it would roll over onto its other side and ‘skip the smaller one’. The stone would then scrape and polish a new surface.

The pavements of Vilnius Old Town provide a luxurious surface to walk on. Many of the stones that make up the pavement pattern were brought from Scandinavia by glaciers. The pavement is worth a look when the rain washes the dust away, revealing the colours and textures of the stones. The rock known as porphyry is worth your attention; these are the stones whose patterns often include large and regular polygonal crystals. Such porphyries, especially those of a royal purple hue, were particularly prized in ancient Rome. 

As you walk along Gediminas Avenue, look out for the terraced late modernist building. It is special not only for its architecture but also for its building materials. The administrative building of the Lithuanian Cooperative Union is decorated with stone slabs brought from the vicinity of St. Petersburg. They clearly show the rounded egg-shaped crystals known as ovoids; the same ovoids can be seen in the second-largest boulder in Lithuania, the Puntukas stone (the second-largest boulder in Lithuania found 5 km south of Anykščiai), which was known to be much larger at the beginning of the journey. The glacier probably picked it off the rock somewhere in Finland and brought it to Lithuania. Scientists are convinced that Puntukas, transported to Lithuania tens of thousands of years ago by the forces of nature, is of the same origin as the granite slabs of the building on Gediminas Avenue. 

The whole of the New Town area sits on rich glacial deposits of gravel and sand. There is always water that accumulates between the finer and coarser grains of sand. If you stand between Vingrių g. 5 and 11, you will see a large slope. This is the beginning of the Vingrių stream. The streams coming out of the slope were one of the main sources of water supply for the town. The Vingrių Stream ran through the whole of the Old Town and joined the Vilnia River at the Lower Castle. In 1805-1808, when Pylimo Street was being landscaped, it was decided to cover the stream with stone vaults. Residents complained that it had become a place of filth and sewage, emitting an unpleasant smell. The creek was thus hidden but still runs under Vingrių Street. 

Sitting on a bench in the square dedicated to the composer Eduardas Balsys, one can imagine that this place was once much higher. As the glacier melted, the wide and flowing river valleys became rich gravel deposits. Žvėrynas is located in just such a valley – a natural gravel pit formed by the glacier. Workers building the Žvėrynas Bridge took advantage of this. As a result, the once steep and pine-covered embankment of the river Neris has been severely eroded by the excavation of some of the gravel.

The glacier that once shrouded Vilnius retreated but did not melt evenly. Groundwater was not immediately released from the ice. Gradually melting and flowing in rebellious surface streams, it eroded the banks of the main rivers. These little ones also eroded the banks of the Neris, creating many deep gullies. Later, these became flattened and drained, and geologists now refer to these areas as ‘hornfels’. They are not suited for building houses but are ideal for recreational areas and playgrounds.

Layers of sand and gravel, crushed by glaciers and folded horizontally, are real underground water reservoirs. They collect rainwater from huge areas and can sometimes erupt as an unexpected spring. One such spring is the one at Studentų g. 39, just beyond Geležinio Vilko (Iron Wolf) Bridge. Even on the hottest day, the tiles on this stretch of the embankment are cooled by the puddles of the spring. It is here that the river’s course cuts like a knife into the layers of the shoreline, and the water begins to gush out of them.

Imagine the whole of Šeškinė covered by ice a kilometre thick. Underneath, streams of melting water form. At the same time, as they are gnawing away at the glacier from below, they are filling the cavity with sand and gravel. This creates elongated dikes, known as an ‘esker’ or an ‘os’, in the wide crevasses of the glacier. In Lithuania, such gullies are usually turned into sand and gravel quarries, but Šeškinės Os (or rather its 3-18 metre peak) has survived until today. You can admire the relief formed by the glacier in the ‘Gražus’ park.

Even if the glacier had melted completely, it would have been not only cold but also dangerous to have a picnic by the White Bridge. This is betrayed by the height of the banks of the Neris, which stand out here. The left one is by far the steepest, while the right one is clearly lower. This wide and flat place is called a floodplain. It is a part of the river valley that used to be submerged during floods. The floodplain was formed by the river’s sediments, with coarser sand deposited closer to the Neris and fine sand, clay, and silt deposited farther along the bank. Don’t be surprised if your persistent four-legged friend scratches the surface of this meadow and digs up some river snail shells.

As the glaciers melted, the Vilnius area was in the midst of a torrent of water. The Vilnia did not turn at the Bernardine Gardens tennis court but flowed widely across what is now the Cathedral Square all the way to the Neris. Vilnius residents experienced what it might have looked like on 28 April 1931 during the Great Vilnius Flood. The water rose more than 8 metres, submerging Cathedral Square, and the houses along the bank of the river, forcing the inhabitants of the city to get into boats. A marker on the corner of the Vrublevskis Library building commemorates the river’s post-glacial level.

Mammoths certainly did not walk along the current Trispalvės Avenue, as Gedimino Hill and Kalnų Park were part of a single hill range. These high hills were pushed up by a shifting glacier, and the river flowing around them formed the so-called ‘headland’. The spur is like a sharpening horn of the hills, on the tip of which Gedimino Castle now stands. It was for the safety of the castle that it was decided to partition the hill. The excavated canal allowed the Vilnia to flow into the Neris in two ways – the normal course through the present Cathedral Square and the new canal. The promontory with the castle thus became an island surrounded by water.

After the glaciers melted, the trees on Bekešo and other neighbouring hills did not stay green for long. As a result, the 45-metre-high cliffs glowed from afar with the bright colours of yellowish sand and pink clay. Later on, the hill was overgrown with vegetation, but even after thousands of years, it still retains the vivid history of its name. It dates back to the 16th century when it was decided to build a hillfort here. In 1579, Kasparas Bekešas, a nobleman of Grand Duke Stephen Báthory, was buried on this mound. He was an atheist, and his body was not allowed to be buried in a cemetery. The tombstone of Bekešas was inscribed according to his will, denying God and the afterlife. However, both the monument and the octagonal tower sank into the river Vilna as the water washed away the sandy slopes of the hill. 54°41’1.23“N 25°18’0.25”E

When a slope is made of fine sand, it is easy for groundwater to wash it away. Around such a spring on the slope, a depression or circular pit forms, known in Latin as a ‘cirque’. These places are often home to moisture-loving plants and small animals that appreciate shelter and shade. The slope between 5 and 11 Vingrių Street has changed little since the post-glacial era. It is amazing that the site has retained its original form and has not been built on or overgrown as the city has grown. The best way to see this is to climb up the slope towards the New Town and see the cirque from above.

Standing on Tauro Hill and looking towards the slopes of Šeškinė, you can see a 2-3 km wide valley. Nowadays, you can see the roofs of houses whereas, in the times of woolly mammoths, most of the valley was occupied by the course of a mighty post-glacial river. This river was called the South-East River, or Pra-Neris. Carrying meltwater and huge ice floes, it flowed in the opposite direction to the present-day Neris – away from the still ice-bound Baltic Sea.