The Gadling blog featured an interesting list of weird amusement parks recently, with Lithuania rating a surprise mention for its Grutas Park.
Last week travel blog Gadling had an interesting feature on the weirdest amusement parks they could find - and although I don't think of Eastern Europe and Russia as home to many amusement parks, some of them made their list!
The main feature talked about Lithuania's Grutas Park, an hour south of Vilnius. Grutas Park is an unusual kind of theme park - it recreates life under Stalin, something that most people have tried to stop thinking about. The interesting part (as distinct from the depressing part, featuring concentration camps and guard towers) is the collection of communist-era sculptures. So far they've got 82 of them both from Lithuania and donated from other eastern bloc nations; I've seen a similar park in Moscow full of Lenin statues and it's something different, for sure!
Gadling also linked to a post on other communist statue parks - including the Moscow one I know, "The Graveyard of Fallen Monuments" near Gorky Park, and in Budapest, the Szobor Park collection. It might sound like an odd kind of collection but I promise you, you'll spend an hour or two with the camera and with some reflection time on the past.
