A black cat protests the City Guild in Riga's Old Town.

Flamboyant architecture from the turn of 20th century.

The oldest housing complex in Riga is a mini timeline of architectural trends.

3,000 market stands in five former Zeppelin hangars.

A former Latvian headquarters of the brutal KGB secret police is now open as a grim reminder of their atrocities.

Rub it for a bit of good luck.

A 15-foot-tall statue of the head of the Sopranos family greets passengers at a train station in southeastern Lithuania.

Underwater roads undetectable from the surface used for escape routes from foreign invaders.

A century-old prison in the heart of Vilnius is now a lively bar, dance club, and artist residency.

This former KGB building is now a museum memorializing the people who suffered during the Soviet regime.

This striking structure is the Socialist-modernist centerpiece of a former Soviet spa resort.

You would never guess that before World War II this lonely field was a bustling German city.

Over time, this castle grew to encompass the entire island.

Open-air museum with a large collection of Soviet-era statues.

An abandoned masterpiece of Soviet Brutalist architecture.

The secret meeting held in this building would forever change the world.

The old fire station features a mural that has more to it than first meets the eye.

A symbolic graveyard for the villages that perished during the Nazi invasion of Belarus.

A decommissioned Soviet airplane has been used as a movie theater and a cultural center.

A beautiful and moving memorial set on a little island in the middle of the river in Minsk.

The apartment building where JFK's assassin lived after defecting to the Soviet Union.

A monument in the Belarusian city of Polotsk claims to mark the exact midpoint of the European continent.

Remains of the old fortification along the Western border of the USSR, now an elaborate defense museum.

Glowing orb in Minsk houses 8,600,000 items.