Things To Do in Vilnius Lithuania

Baroque Old Town

Vilnius has the largest Baroque old town in eastern Europe, and the scale and coherence of that architectural legacy is genuinely surprising. The city was rebuilt extensively in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Jesuits and the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, and the result — a dense grid of white and ochre facades, dozens of church towers, and courtyards concealed behind street-level archways — has a quality that larger and better-known cities rarely match. The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is best understood by getting deliberately lost in it.

Užupis and Creative Culture

Užupis is a neighbourhood on the eastern edge of the old town, separated from it by the Vilnia river, which declared itself an independent republic on 1 April 1997 and has maintained the fiction with cheerful commitment ever since. The quarter has its own constitution, posted on plaques in multiple languages on the main street, and its own ambassador, who receives visitors in an appropriately informal way. More substantially, Užupis has become the creative center of Vilnius, with galleries, artist studios, and independent cafés that have made it the most visited neighbourhood in the city.

Food and Restaurant Culture

Vilnius has developed one of the most interesting food scenes in the Baltic states, combining Lithuanian culinary traditions with a new generation of chefs using local ingredients in more ambitious ways. The Halės turgus market hall in the center of the city is the best place to encounter the raw material — smoked meats, dark rye bread, mushrooms, berries, and the amber-colored honey for which Lithuania is known. The restaurant scene in the old town and the Naujamiestis district runs from traditional cepelinai (potato dumplings filled with meat) to contemporary tasting menus that have received international recognition.

History and Memory

Vilnius has a difficult and layered history that the city's cultural institutions approach honestly. The city was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe before the Second World War — known across the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania — and the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum documents that history and its near-total destruction with unflinching care. The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, in the former KGB headquarters, covers both the Soviet and German occupations in a building that still contains the detention cells used during both periods.

Baroque Vilnius, the Republic of Užupis and the City's Independent Spirit

Vilnius has the largest baroque old town of any city in northern Europe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose 1,487 classified buildings span five centuries of architectural development from the medieval foundations of Gediminas Tower through to the 18th-century baroque churches that define the city's skyline. The Church of St Anne, a Gothic red-brick structure so admired that Napoleon allegedly wished to carry it back to Paris on the palm of his hand, stands at the entrance to the Užupis quarter, the most characterful district in the city. Užupis declared itself an independent republic on 1 April 1997, complete with a constitution posted in multiple languages on the wall of Paupio Street that includes the right to be happy, the right to be unhappy, and the right to be unique — and has maintained its identity as an artists' quarter and conceptual republic ever since. The Hill of Three Crosses, above the old town, provides the most comprehensive view of Vilnius from any accessible point in the city, while the Gediminas Tower on the Castle Hill above Cathedral Square contains the National Museum of Lithuania's archaeological collections from the site. The Vilnius Choral Synagogue and the Paneriai Memorial site, where approximately 100,000 people — the majority of them Jewish residents of Vilnius — were killed during the Second World War, together represent a dimension of the city's history whose weight and scale is inseparable from any serious engagement with what Vilnius was and what it has become. The Jewish heritage of Vilnius, which was known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" before 1941 and was one of the most significant centers of Jewish religious scholarship and cultural life in eastern Europe, is documented in the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum and in the street maps that show the two ghetto districts established during the German occupation. The Trakai Island Castle, 28 kilometres west of Vilnius and set on an island in a lake within a national park, is the most visited historical monument in Lithuania and one of the most photogenic medieval castle sites in the Baltic region, accessible by train and bus from the capital. The Grūtas Park near Druskininkai, a sculpture park of Soviet-era statues removed from public spaces after Lithuanian independence in 1990, offers a deliberately provocative form of engagement with the Soviet period that has no direct equivalent elsewhere in the region. The Vilnius Street Art Festival each August brings international and Lithuanian muralists to walls across the city, creating an outdoor gallery that has made Vilnius one of the most visited destinations for street art in the Baltic region.