St. Casimir is the patron saint of Lithuania and the festival that honors him dates to the   19th century as the gateway to spring.  Craftspeople have spent their dreary winters stockpiling traditional handcrafted items for sale once people come out of hibernation; folks pour into Vilnius from all over the country and surrounding regions to mingle, eat traditional food, and enjoy lots of accordion from the main stage.  Vilnius loves its street fairs, but this is the BIG one, blocking more than two miles of the main arteries of the city from Friday to Sunday with booths selling smoked meats, local curd cheese, gaudy candy, and hot beer along with the handcrafted pottery, felted wool, amber jewelry, and linens.  Estimates put total attendance in the hundreds of thousands (although we chose to visit during the quieter morning hours), and our apartment sits literally around the corner from the hub of the pedestrian traffic jams.  If you’d been walking with us at the fair this weekend, this is a sample of what you would have seen.
 
From the top: The traditional Lithuanian dried flower ‘palms’ for Palm Sunday, smoked meats, handknit woolen gloves and carved wooden utensils, traditional round breads, matchboxes displaying the typical range of ‘Lithuanian’ names, spice tea for sampling, piles of smoked fish right out of the Baltic Sea, and pickled beets and sauerkraut. (click on any of them for a closer view)