Old Town & Užupis

You are standing at the heart of Vilnius — Cathedral Square, the great open plaza that has been the ceremonial centre of this city since the medieval Grand Duchy ruled half of Europe from here. The Cathedral of St Stanislaus and St Ladislaus rises in front of you, a neoclassical facade of white columns that replaced earlier Gothic and baroque structures on this same sacred hill. But before you look at the cathedral itself, look down. You are probably standing near one of the most photographed paving stones in Lithuania — a tile engraved with the word "stebuklas," which means miracle, marking the spot where the Baltic Way ended on the twenty-third of August, 1989.

On that day, approximately two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands across nearly seven hundred kilometres, forming a human chain from Tallinn to Vilnius to demand freedom from Soviet occupation. It was one of the most extraordinary acts of peaceful resistance in modern history, and it started right here. The Soviet Union still existed. These were people willing to stake their lives on the idea that it would not last much longer. They were right. Lithuania declared independence the following year, on the eleventh of March, 1990 — the first Soviet republic to do so.

Now climb. The path up to Gediminas Tower is steep enough to remind you why medieval rulers liked hilltops, and rewarding enough to forgive them for it. The tower you can see from most of the Old Town — the squat red-brick turret that appears on Lithuanian stamps, banknotes, and virtually every piece of tourism material ever produced — is all that survives of the Upper Castle built by Grand Duke Gediminas in the fourteenth century. The rest of the castle complex has been swallowed by time, vegetation, and centuries of building and rebuilding.

The tower itself is a museum now, but the real reason to climb is the view. From the top you can read the whole geography of Vilnius — the way the rivers Neris and Vilnia meet at the foot of the hill, the amber-and-red rooftop panorama of the Old Town spreading south, the modern city pushing north toward glass towers. On a clear day you can trace the boundary of the historic city walls, long since demolished, by the slight ridge they left in the landscape.

Descend back to Cathedral Square and walk around to the south side of the cathedral complex. You will find yourself in front of a vast, elegant Renaissance palace — the reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania — which stands on the exact spot where the original Lower Castle once housed the rulers of one of medieval Europe's greatest powers. There is something almost audacious about its presence here. The original palace was demolished by the Russian imperial authorities in eighteen-oh-one, as a deliberate act of cultural erasure. It sat as a gap in the city's historic fabric for two centuries. The reconstruction, completed in twenty-eighteen, is Lithuania's largest cultural project since independence — a political and emotional statement as much as an architectural one.

Step inside if you have the time, and you will find yourself walking through reconstructed state rooms, Renaissance courtyards, and museum galleries that trace the full arc of the Grand Duchy's history. The collection includes objects recovered from archaeological excavations on the site — ceramic tiles, metalwork, and everyday items that prove the palace was a real and functioning centre of European power, not a mythologised memory. The original floors, uncovered during excavations, have been preserved beneath glass panels that you walk over. It is an odd and wonderful sensation: standing on the actual medieval ground level, looking down at the stones that servants and diplomats and kings once crossed.

Walk south and east from the cathedral through the tangle of lanes that make up the heart of the Old Town, and you will arrive at one of the most breathtaking pieces of architecture in all of the Baltic states. St Anne's Church stops you. It is not large — the facade is only about twenty-three metres wide — but it is so intricately worked that your eye cannot settle. Thirty-three different types of red brick were used to construct its soaring Gothic spires, pinnacles, and tracery, and the effect in late afternoon light is like looking at something carved from terracotta lace. It was built at the end of the fifteenth century, and it remains one of the finest examples of Flamboyant Gothic architecture anywhere in Europe.

The legend about Napoleon Bonaparte and this church is almost certainly not true, but it is too good not to tell. When his army passed through Vilnius in eighteen-twelve on the way to Moscow, Napoleon is said to have stood before St Anne's and wished he could carry it back to Paris in the palm of his hand. Whether he said it or not, you understand the impulse. The church has the quality of a jewel — something so perfectly formed that possession feels like the only adequate response.

A short walk brings you to the entrance of Vilnius University, and stepping through the gate from the street into the first courtyard feels like falling into a different world. The university was founded by Jesuits in fifteen seventy-nine under a charter granted by King Stephen Bathory of Poland and Lithuania, making it the oldest university in the Baltic states and one of the oldest in Eastern Europe. It has been educating Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, and virtually everyone else who passed through this city for nearly four hundred and fifty years, and the evidence of that long intellectual life is written on every surface.

There are thirteen interconnected courtyards inside this complex. Thirteen. Wander through them and you will move from Renaissance arcades to baroque gateways to neoclassical library halls to Gothic church towers, all within a few hundred metres. The Grand Courtyard, the largest, is surrounded by a two-storey arcade whose walls are covered in frescoes restored after the Soviet period. The St John's Church attached to the university, with its elegant baroque bell tower visible from much of the Old Town, was used as a warehouse during the Soviet occupation and is now restored to its full decorative glory.

Follow the axis of Pilies Street south, through the commercial heart of the Old Town, and you will arrive at the one remaining gate in Vilnius's original city wall — the Gates of Dawn, known in Lithuanian as Aušros Vartai, the Gate of the Dawn. The original city walls had nine gates; this is the only one that survived. It was built in the sixteenth century as part of the defensive fortifications of the Lower Town, and above it, in a small chapel built directly into the gate structure, hangs one of the most venerated religious icons in the Catholic world.

Climb the stairs from the street level — you will find them on the right side of the gate — and enter the tiny chapel. There, above the altar, is the Image of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, known as the Black Madonna of Vilnius. She is painted on oak panels in a Byzantine style, her face serene and slightly sorrowful, draped in a golden robe that covers everything except her hands and face. The silver and gold votive offerings hanging around her — donated by the faithful over centuries — create a glittering frame around the image. She is said to work miracles, and people have been coming to this chapel to pray for specific things — health, safe passage, the release of prisoners, the survival of nations — since the seventeenth century.

Leave the Old Town proper and walk north along the bank of the Neris River toward the Antakalnis neighbourhood. The walk takes about fifteen minutes and the transition from cobblestone lanes to tree-lined boulevard is a pleasant one. You are heading to what many consider the greatest interior in all of Lithuania — St Peter and Paul's Church, built between sixteen-seventy-five and seventeen-oh-four under the patronage of the Lithuanian military commander Michał Kazimierz Pac.

Push open the heavy door and stop. The interior is one of the most extraordinary baroque spaces in Europe — and that is not an idle claim in a continent that has produced a great many extraordinary baroque spaces. Every surface of this church is covered in white stucco sculptural decoration: two thousand figures in total, from large dramatic groups in the dome and apses to tiny angels no bigger than your hand tucked into niches and column capitals. The work was done by Italian masters Gian Maria Galli and Pietro Perti and their assistants over more than thirty years, and the result is not merely decoration but a three-dimensional theological argument, every scene and figure placed with deliberate intention.

Cross the Vilnia River by the small pedestrian bridge near the Bernardine Church and you enter a different country — or at least, a neighbourhood that has been enthusiastically claiming to be one since the first of April, nineteen ninety-seven. Welcome to the Republic of Užupis, population approximately seven thousand, with its own president, its own constitution, its own army of twelve people, and an angel on a column in the main square who blows a horn toward the sky with the expression of someone who has just heard very good news.

The name Užupis means "beyond the river" in Lithuanian, and for most of its history this small neighbourhood on a bend of the Vilnia was the poorest and most neglected part of Vilnius — a place where artists, drifters, and people who could not afford anywhere else washed up. After Lithuanian independence in nineteen-ninety, it became what neglected urban quarters with cheap rents always become: a haven for artists, musicians, and creative people who turned its crumbling buildings into studios, galleries, and cafés. The declaration of independence on April Fool's Day nineteen ninety-seven was a joke — and also completely serious.

Leave Užupis and walk back into the heart of the Old Town to find one of the most quietly extraordinary public art projects in any European capital. Literatų Street is a narrow lane near the university, unremarkable at first glance, until you notice that every house wall along its length is covered in small ceramic, metal, and mixed-media plaques — each one commemorating a writer connected to Vilnius. There are currently over two hundred of them, and the collection grows every year.

The project was established in two-thousand-eight as a way of acknowledging the extraordinary literary culture that has passed through this city. Vilnius has been written in Lithuanian, Polish, Yiddish, Russian, German, Hebrew, and Belarusian — sometimes simultaneously, by authors who switched between languages the way other people switch between outfits. The medieval chroniclers wrote in Latin. The sixteenth-century humanists wrote in Polish. The great Yiddish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made Vilnius — which they called Vilne — one of the intellectual capitals of the Jewish world. The poet Moyshe Kulbak, the novelist Sholem Aleichem, and dozens of others passed through or lived in Vilna, as the city was also known, before the Holocaust destroyed the Jewish community that had given the city its character of the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Your walk ends where the life of the Old Town most visibly concentrates itself — on Pilies Street, the main artery of medieval Vilnius, running from Cathedral Square south toward the Gates of Dawn. The name means Castle Street, and it has been the commercial heart of the city since the fifteenth century, when merchants set up stalls here to sell goods to the inhabitants of the royal castle complex at its northern end. The street's limestone-paved surface, its baroque facades, its amber shops and coffee houses, its street musicians and linen vendors — all of it is a continuation of a commercial tradition that is genuinely, not just nominally, centuries old.

Walk its length slowly from the southern end toward Cathedral Square. The facades on both sides are a catalogue of baroque Vilnius: elaborately plastered buildings in shades of ochre, sienna, and cream, many of them concealing medieval stone construction behind the eighteenth-century plasterwork. Look up at the upper floors, above the shop signs. The decorative details — pilasters, cornices, window surrounds — were designed by craftsmen who knew exactly how to make a merchant's house look like something a nobleman would not be embarrassed to own.