Žemaitija National Park is one of Lithuania's most surprising corners: a landscape of forests, hills and lakes in the heart of Samogitia, the proud region of the 'lowlands', which hides beneath its pines one of the most chilling secrets of the Cold War. Around the beautiful Lake Plateliai, the largest in the region, it protects a serene world of villages, churches and Samogitian traditions; but deep in the forest, a former Soviet bunker that once held nuclear missiles aimed at Europe has become a striking Cold War Museum.
That combination of peaceful nature and Cold War memory is what makes the park unique. You can spend the morning descending into the depths of an R-12 ballistic missile silo (the same type at the centre of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and the afternoon swimming or paddling on Lake Plateliai, walking forest trails or discovering Samogitian culture, with its own dialect, wooden churches and famous carnival masks and traditions (Užgavėnės).
This guide covers Žemaitija National Park from a practical angle: how to get there (best by car), what to see (the Cold War Museum at the Plokštinė missile base, Lake Plateliai, the visitor centre, the trails and the villages of Samogitia), how to arrange the guided tour of the bunker and what to keep in mind. A destination that brings together, like few others, the beauty of Baltic nature and one of the tensest stories of the 20th century.
Samogitia (Žemaitija) was the last pagan region in Europe: its Baltic tribes resisted the Teutonic Order for centuries and only converted to Christianity in the early 15th century, after the Lithuanian-Polish victory at Grunwald (1410). The park's territory, around Lake Plateliai, preserves that heritage in its churches, villages and traditions, such as the masks of the Užgavėnės carnival. In Soviet times, the isolation of these forests attracted a secret use: from 1962 to 1978 the Plokštinė missile base operated here, one of the USSR's first underground silos, with R-12 (SS-4) nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. Žemaitija National Park was created in 1991, after independence, to protect the region's landscape and heritage; in 2012 the former base opened as the Cold War Museum. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Lithuanian Baltic and Lithuania Minor with its German roots: the port of Klaipėda (the former Memel), the dunes of the Curonian Spit that Thomas Mann loved, the beaches and amber of Palanga, and wooded Samogitia.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Žemaitija National Park lies in the heart of Samogitia (Žemaitija, 'the lowlands'), one of Lithuania's historical regions with the strongest and most distinctive identity. Its people, the Samogitians, are a Baltic people with their own dialect, so different that many consider it almost a separate language. History shaped their proud and stubborn character over centuries of resistance. Samogitia also holds a remarkable title: it was the last pagan region in Europe.
While the rest of the continent was turning Christian, the Samogitians kept their ancestral Baltic beliefs for centuries, with their worship of nature, their gods and their rites in sacred forests and hills. They did this while fighting off the Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order, the German crusading orders that wanted to conquer their lands and join up their territories, using the conversion of the Samogitians as a pretext. Through the 13th and 14th centuries and the early 15th, Samogitia was a constant battlefield, and its people drove back the invaders again and again.
The turning point came in 1410 with the great Lithuanian-Polish victory over the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grünwald (Žalgiris), which broke the crusaders' power. Soon afterwards, with the region secured for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Samogitians officially became Christian around 1413-1417. That made them the last people in Europe to give up paganism. The late conversion and the memory of resistance left a deep mark on Samogitian identity, which has combined fervent Catholic faith with strong regional pride ever since.
Once Christianised, Samogitia ironically became one of the most devoutly Catholic regions of Lithuania, as if it had poured the intensity of its old beliefs into the new faith. The park's land around Lake Plateliai reflects that history. For centuries the village of Plateliai, on the lakeshore, was a rural centre with its church, wooden houses and farming community. At different times it belonged to nobles and to the Crown.
Just outside the park, the town of Žemaičių Kalvarija ('the Calvary of Samogitia') became one of the great pilgrimage centres of all Lithuania in the 17th century. A monumental Way of the Cross was built there, with some twenty chapels spread across the hills. Pilgrims walk the route singing the distinctive Samogitian 'Calvaries' hymns, especially during the big festival in July, which still draws crowds. It is a symbol of how deeply Catholicism took root in the region and of its own religious culture.
Alongside the faith, Samogitia kept folk traditions very much alive, many with pre-Christian roots. One of the best known is the mask tradition of Užgavėnės, the Lithuanian carnival that sends winter off before Lent. Carved figures of devils, witches, Jews, Roma, skinny Lent (Kanapinis) and fat Carnival (Lašininis) lead parades and rituals to chase away the cold and call in the spring. Plateliai is one of the places most famous for this tradition, and its masks are part of the cultural heritage the park helps to preserve.
The most unexpected and chilling chapter in the history of these forests belongs to the 20th century and the Cold War. Because the area around Lake Plateliai was so isolated, wooded and remote, the Soviet Union chose it for one of its most secret military projects. Between 1960 and 1962, Soviet labourers built one of the first underground ballistic missile silo complexes in the whole USSR in the Plokštinė forest, digging much of it by hand.
From 1962 to 1978, the Plokštinė base held four R-12 Dvina intermediate-range nuclear missiles (NATO designation SS-4 Sandal). They sat in deep vertical silos linked by tunnels and control rooms. Each missile could carry a powerful thermonuclear warhead more than two thousand kilometres, which put much of Western Europe within range. It was the same type of R-12 missile the USSR tried to deploy in Cuba in 1962, setting off the missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. During the tensest years of the Cold War, those weapons in a Lithuanian forest were aimed west.
The base operated in total secrecy, surrounded by barbed wire and security systems and hidden from local people, who had no idea what lay among the pines. It was decommissioned in 1978, when newer missiles had made it obsolete, and the complex was left abandoned and looted for decades. Yet that forgotten silo held one of the most striking stories of 20th-century Lithuania and Europe.
Žemaitija National Park was created in 1991, just after Lithuania regained its independence. Its purpose was to protect the natural and cultural heritage of this part of Samogitia: Lake Plateliai and its surroundings, the forests, the hills, the villages and the region's traditions. It was one of the first national parks set up in free Lithuania, at a time when the country was also recovering a historical memory that had long been suppressed under Soviet occupation.
The old Plokštinė missile base, abandoned since 1978, fell within the park's boundaries. For years the bunker was a forbidden ruin, a silent reminder of a past many people preferred to forget. Over time, though, the idea took hold of turning it into a place of memory and education about the Cold War. After a restoration project, the base opened to the public in 2012 as the Cold War Museum, the only one of its kind in the Baltic region. Here you can literally go down into the depths of nuclear terror and get a sense of the madness of that era's arms race.
Today Žemaitija National Park offers a combination you won't find anywhere else. On one side there's the calm of the Samogitian countryside: Lake Plateliai, the forests, the trails and the culture of the 'lowlands'. On the other, hidden under the pines, is the chilling memory of the Cold War at the Plokštinė base. In just a few kilometres you go from carnival masks and pilgrimage chapels to nuclear missile silos, from Europe's last pagan land to the edge of atomic annihilation. Few places pack so many layers of Baltic and European history into such a beautiful, peaceful landscape.
