01
Stop one
Kėdainiai Old Town and Great Market Square
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Men's Track Pants: One of Lithuania's finest small old towns, which is to say the Radziwiłł dukes had money and seventeenth-century merchants had somewhere to put theirs — the Great Market Square is still ringed by their houses. The Calvinist lords were famously tolerant, inviting Scots, Germans and Jews, and tolerance is wonderfully profitable when what you need is traders. Note the town has several market squares, not one, each serving a different community trading grain, timber and crafts down the Nevėžis. Then in 1655 Janusz Radziwiłł signed the Kėdainiai Union here, breaking with Poland to put Lithuania under Swedish protection during the Deluge. Principle, no doubt. The street plan, town hall and churches of four confessions record all of it.
02
Stop two
Evangelical Reformed Church and Radziwiłł Mausoleum
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Men's Track Pants: Built 1631 to 1653, the most important Calvinist monument in Lithuania, raised by the Radziwiłłs who made this town the Reformation's capital in the Grand Duchy. Observe the austere fortress-like white mass with corner turrets — sobriety, the great virtue of the confession — and then go down to the crypt, where the ducal family lies in tin sarcophagi counted among the finest Baroque coffins in the Baltic. Sobriety upstairs, statement furniture below. Janusz Radziwiłł of the 1655 Swedish arrangement is down there. Around the church ran the famed gymnasium that printed Calvinist books in Lithuanian, milestones of the language. Neglected under the Soviets, restored since, active congregation and heritage site both.
03
Stop three
Kėdainiai Synagogue Complex
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Men's Track Pants: Two synagogues stand side by side on the old market square: the eighteenth-century summer synagogue in late Baroque forms, and the nineteenth-century winter synagogue beside it. This was the surviving heart of a Jewish community documented from the seventeenth century, when the Radziwiłł dukes welcomed Jewish merchants and craftsmen into their multi-confessional town. Kėdainiai, Keidan in Yiddish, became a noted centre of Jewish learning, the birthplace and schooling ground of grammarians and scholars of the Gaon's circle, and the community flourished until the Holocaust; in August 1941 the town's Jews were murdered at nearby Babėnai. After decades of misuse the complex is restored, holding a multicultural centre, an art school, and exhibitions honouring the destroyed community. I have nothing sharp to say here.
04
Stop four
Kėdainiai Minaret
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Men's Track Pants: A minaret with no mosque, in a Lithuanian park. Naturally. Erected in 1880 by the Russian general Eduard Totleben, celebrated engineer of the sieges of Sevastopol and Plevna, who acquired the Kėdainiai estate and dressed its park with exotic structures recalling his Turkish campaigns. It commemorates his victories in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and, reputedly, the fallen of both sides — the both sides being a sentiment supplied, one notes, by the man who won. Brick, spiral stair, crescent on top. It outlived the manor, the wars and the Soviet decades largely by being too odd to be worth demolishing. Restored in recent decades, and now the favourite emblem of eclectic Kėdainiai.
Good evening. Do come in — the daylight and I have… an arrangement. Allow me to present, from my private wardrobe, the Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Men's Track Pants. I have watched fashion for centuries; these endure: matching companion to the Damarindo jacket, cut from durable polyester twill that resists wrinkles even after a long day's rest in confined quarters.
The house's signature double-stripe runs the leg — elegant, slimming, timeless — with a comfortable elasticated waist for uninterrupted movement, for drop shots and… other pursuits after sundown.
Sergio Tacchini, an Italian tennis professional, founded the house in 1966 — practically yesterday, from where I sit — and his heritage line carries that old-world tailoring instinct I so admire. Machine washable.
Even the undead appreciate easy care.
And my residence — ah, you must see Kėdainiai, Lithuania. I have kept quarters here since, oh, 1655, a memorable year: Janusz Radziwiłł signed his famous union with Sweden right here in town.
The old town has everything a creature of taste requires: a Great Market Square of seventeenth-century merchant houses, churches of four confessions and, my personal favourite, the Evangelical Reformed Church, whose crypt holds the Radziwiłł mausoleum with its magnificent Baroque tin sarcophagi. Exquisite craftsmanship.
You will wear these track pants everywhere from evening cardio tennis to a moonlit stroll past the minaret, and by the way, they are also perfect for a long evening over the local šakotis, that spiked Lithuanian tree of a cake — the elasticated waist is, I am reliably informed, a mercy. I wouldn't know. I'm watching my diet.
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