In Vilnius, the “pearl of eastern Europe”, young men in hoodies urinate on the walls of houses or kick people to death behind municipal bins. It’s where the public transport network consists of a burly bloke in a beard hauling passengers around on a wooden cart.
So begins the latest advert from the Lithuanian capital’s tourist board, intended to rope in foreign tourists by ironically riffing on misguided stereotypes of the city as a post-Soviet dump.
Even before the campaign’s launch today, however, it has upset locals, who fret that it will only reinforce the caricatures it is trying to subvert.
Like its neighbour Latvia, and Estonia, Lithuania was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and then occupied again from 1944 to 1991,
