Vilnius holds a Guinness world record for the largest artwork — a labyrinth built from 3,000 television sets — and, by the city’s own count, one of only two Frank Zappa monuments in the world. Under one church lie 23 mummies; inside another stand about 2,000 stucco figures.
Every fact below is sourced to a named authority and dated, and where those authorities disagree we say so instead of picking the tidier number. For what to actually do once you arrive, start with our guide to things to do in Vilnius.
1. Vilnius University Opened Its Doors in 1579
Vilnius University was founded in 1579, when the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania issued a letter of privilege opening the Vilnius Academy. The university itself is careful with the superlative: it calls itself one of the oldest in Central and Eastern Europe, not the oldest.
That hedge matters, because plenty of guidebooks upgrade it to a flat superlative the university itself avoids. Its own wording, as of 2026, is the careful one — and it has been teaching from the same Old Town courtyards ever since.
2. Vilnius Is 61% Green Space
The city reports that 61% of Vilnius is green space, with trees covering 48% of it. The European Commission named it European Green Capital for 2025.
It is the kind of statistic you can feel on the ground rather than just read, and the figures here are the ones the city published as of 2026. Forest reaches into the suburbs, the river valleys stay wooded, and trees are rarely far from any address.
3. Užupis Has Its Own 41-Line Constitution
The district of Užupis, across the Vilnia from the Old Town, keeps its own constitution of 41 lines, fixed to a wall on Paupio Street in mirrored plaques.
Sources count it differently — the city says 41 articles, while Wikipedia describes 38 articles plus three mottos, which comes to the same 41 lines. They also disagree on the year it was declared and how many languages it now hangs in, so it is best read as what it is: a piece of neighbourhood theatre that outlived the joke.
4. The TV Tower Is Lithuania's Tallest Structure
The Vilnius TV Tower stands 326.5 metres tall, making it the tallest structure in Lithuania.
As of 2026 nothing in the country stands higher. There is a revolving restaurant partway up and, in season, an edge walk around the outside of the shaft; on a clear day the view reaches well past the city into the surrounding forest.
5. Vilnius Has One of Only Two Zappa Monuments
A bust of Frank Zappa was unveiled in Vilnius in 1995, sculpted by an artist who had previously made portraits of Lenin. The city describes itself as one of only two places in the world with a monument to him.
The city’s own page is careful about how it phrases this, and so are we. The other is a copy that went to Baltimore, the musician’s home town; Zappa himself had no connection to Lithuania at all.
6. Napoleon's Army Lies in a Mass Grave Here
In late autumn 2001, construction workers on the site of a former Soviet barracks uncovered a mass grave of soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The first excavation alone recovered between 1,000 and 2,000 skeletons, along with buttons, medals and coins that dated them.
The retreat from Moscow ended here for a great many of Napoleon’s men. The count above is the one recorded during the first dig, as of 2026; later summaries give higher totals as more of the site was worked.
7. The Gates of Dawn Is the Last Gate Standing
The Gates of Dawn went up between 1503 and 1514 as one of the gates in the Vilnius city wall, and it is the only one still standing.
How many there were to begin with depends who you ask — the city says ten, Wikipedia says nine. What is not in dispute is that when the walls came down at the turn of the nineteenth century, the chapel above this gate and its venerated painting were reason enough to leave the structure alone.
8. Gediminas' Tower Is All That's Left of the Castle
The red brick tower on the hill above the cathedral is the remaining fortification tower of the Upper Castle; Grand Duke Vytautas completed the first brick castle here in 1409.
It has carried the national flag through the moments that mattered, appeared on the litas, and turns up in a good deal of Lithuanian verse. For a hill in the middle of a capital city, it is a short and rewarding climb.
9. The University Library Dates to 1570
Vilnius University Library was founded in 1570 by the Jesuits, nine years before the university itself, and calls itself the earliest academic library in the Baltics. It now holds 5.4 million documents.
The holdings figure is the one published as of 2026. The central library still works out of its original rooms inside the old campus, and the frescoed White Hall and the Smuglevičius Hall are the ones visitors are shown — worth the detour even if you never open a book.
10. Napoleon Wanted to Pocket St Anne's Church
The late-Gothic Church of St. Anne was built using 33 different kinds of clay brick — an unusual amount of variety for a façade that reads, from across the street, as one continuous piece of red lacework.
The city tells a legend that Napoleon, on seeing it, wanted to carry the church home to Paris in the palm of his hand. It is repeated as fact almost everywhere; the city itself is careful to call it a legend, and so are we.
11. The Baltic Way Human Chain Started in Vilnius
On 23 August 1989, roughly two million people joined hands in a chain that ran from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn, linking the three Baltic capitals in a single unbroken line.
UNESCO puts the chain at 600 kilometres and other accounts at 675, which tells you something about measuring a line of people across three countries. Either way it was an extraordinary piece of coordination across three countries, and Lithuania declared independence the following March.
12. The Old Town's Tallest Building Is a Bell Tower
The bell tower of St Johns’ Church is the tallest building of Vilnius Old Town, at 69 metres. An observation platform partway up is reached by 193 wooden steps, or a lift if you would rather.
It sits inside the university’s Grand Courtyard, so the climb comes bundled with one of the better architectural walks in the city, and as of 2026 nothing in the Old Town has overtaken it. The view takes in St. Anne’s, the castle tower and the length of Pilies Street.
13. Vilnius Was a European Capital of Culture in 2009
Vilnius took the European Capital of Culture title for 2009 alongside Linz in Austria, staging around 1,500 events over the year for about 1.5 million people.
The year left more behind than a programme. The plaque project on Literatų Street started as part of it, and a good deal of the city’s current appetite for public art traces back to the same moment.
14. A Museum Sits Inside the Old KGB Headquarters
The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights was established in 1992 inside the former KGB headquarters — the same building that had held offices, a prison and an interrogation centre until independence was restored the year before.
The cells in the basement have been left much as they were, including the padded one. It is not a comfortable visit, and it is not meant to be; the names of the people held here are carved into the outside walls.
15. The First Book in Lithuania Was Printed Here
Francysk Skaryna set up the first printing house in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania here, and in 1522 he printed The Little Travel Book — the first book printed in the country.
Skaryna had already printed in Prague before bringing the craft north, and as of 2026 the university library still holds early Vilnius printings among its oldest collections. The trade he started here ran on for centuries.
16. One Church Holds About 2,000 Stucco Figures
The Church of St Peter and St Paul, which took its present form in 1676, holds an interior of some 2,000 stucco figures by Giovanni Pietro Perti.
The outside is plain to the point of severity, which makes the doorway something of an ambush. Saints, soldiers, animals and allegories cover every surface overhead, all of it worked in white plaster rather than paint or gilt.
17. Fourteen People Died Defending the TV Tower
When Soviet forces stormed the TV Tower and the radio and television building in January 1991, 14 unarmed defenders were killed and close to a thousand people were injured.
Unarmed civilians had surrounded both buildings for days. The date is now the Day of the Defenders of Freedom, and a memorial at the foot of the tower names each of the people who died.
18. Daniel Libeskind Designed the MO Museum
The MO Museum opened on 18 October 2018 in a building designed by Studio Libeskind with the Lithuanian practice Do Architects.
It began as a private collection belonging to two Lithuanian scientists and philanthropists, and it concentrates on Lithuanian art from the 1960s onward — the decades that are hardest to see anywhere else.
19. The Three Crosses Were Blown Up, Then Rebuilt
Soviet authorities demolished the Three Crosses monument in 1950. The 12-metre monument standing on the hill today went back up as Lithuania moved toward independence.
The broken originals were left where they fell and are still lying below the new ones, which is the detail visitors tend to walk past. Sources differ on the exact year the replacement was unveiled, so we will leave it at the end of the 1980s.
20. Stranger Things Filmed in a Vilnius Prison
Lukiškės Prison closed on 2 July 2019 after more than a century in use, and the following year its blocks stood in for a Soviet prison in the fourth season of Stranger Things.
It reopened as a cultural site rather than being cleared away — studios, tours, concerts and a bar in the yard, still running as of 2026. You can walk the wings the production used, which is a strange sort of afterlife for a tsarist-era jail.
21. The Airport Terminal Is a 1950s Soviet Design
Construction of the airport’s landmark terminal started in 1949 and finished in 1954, in the standard Soviet airport style of the decade — columns, arches and sculpted figures over the entrance.
Travellers now pass through newer buildings alongside it, and its future has been argued over more than once. It is, for many arrivals, the first piece of period architecture they meet — before they have even reached the city.
22. The Cathedral's Belfry Was a Defensive Tower
The free-standing belfry beside the cathedral is 52 metres tall, and it did not begin as a bell tower at all: a defensive tower of the Lower Castle stood here first, with the bell stage added on top in 1522.
That is why it sits apart from the cathedral rather than attached to it, and why its lower courses look nothing like the neoclassical building next door. The clock face has been telling the Old Town the time since the eighteenth century.
23. One Street Is Papered With Writers
Literatų Street is hung with metal, wood and glass plaques honouring writers connected to Vilnius — a project a group of artists began in 2008 to revive a short, narrow lane.
It has since grown into an open-air gallery covering both walls, with pieces made by hundreds of different artists. Lithuanian authors dominate, but the street honours anyone with a claim on the city.
24. An Angel Watches Over Užupis
The bronze angel on the main square of Užupis commemorates Zenonas Šteinys, an artist who helped turn a rough district around. Urban legend credits the idea to a suggestion made by the Dalai Lama on a visit to the city.
Before the angel arrived the plinth carried an egg, which was sold at auction and now stands elsewhere in the city. Locals describe Šteinys as the district’s guardian angel, which is the whole point of the statue.
25. Balloons Drift Over the Old Town in Summer
Vilnius allows hot-air balloons over its Old Town, which — in the city’s own words — most cities simply do not allow. Flights have become much rarer, though: numbers have fallen 70 to 80 percent since stricter rules arrived in June 2023.
Those are the numbers as of 2026. Take-offs are still timed around wind and the airport’s traffic, and cluster on summer evenings; if you see them going up over the rooftops it is worth stopping to watch, because it happens far less often than the photographs suggest.
26. Vilnius Was Known as the Jerusalem of the North
Vilnius was for centuries a centre of Jewish learning substantial enough to earn the name Jerusalem of the North — a name the city's own tourism board still uses for its Jewish heritage trail.
The name was not a tourist slogan when it was earned. It described a city of yeshivas, printing houses and scholarship whose reach ran far beyond Lithuania, and whose institutions were destroyed inside three years in the 1940s. Several of the facts below are what is left of it.
27. The Vilna Gaon Lived and Died in Vilnius
Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman — the Vilna Gaon — lived from 1720 to 1797, and is believed to have lived on Žydų Street in the heart of the old Jewish quarter.
He was the towering figure of non-Hasidic Jewry, and his authority is the reason Vilnius rather than anywhere else became the intellectual capital of Lithuanian Jewry. A monument marks the site today; the Great Synagogue that stood beside it did not survive the war and the Soviet decades that followed.
28. The Great Ghetto Lasted Just Over Two Years
The Great Vilnius Ghetto was created on 6 September 1941 and liquidated two years later, in September 1943.
Sources differ on the day it ended — the city says 23 September, other accounts run it to the 24th — so we give the month. The Little Ghetto, a few streets away, lasted only weeks. The street names are ordinary Old Town addresses you will walk down without noticing.
29. Užupis Declared Independence on April Fools Day
The district of Užupis declared its independence on 1 April 1997, across an area of 0.6 square kilometres.
The date is the joke and the point at once. Alongside the constitution on Paupio Street there is a president, an anthem, a flag that changes with the season, and an annual independence day when the bridges are stamped like borders. None of it has any legal standing whatsoever.
30. Rasos Is the Oldest Cemetery in the City
Rasos Cemetery is the oldest in Vilnius; its new grounds were sanctified in April 1801, and as of 2026 nothing older is still in use in the city.
It is a hillside of leaning stones and ironwork under old trees, and it reads as a map of everyone who claimed the city. Lithuanian, Polish and Belarusian names sit within a few paths of one another, including the black slab holding the heart of Józef Piłsudski beside his mother.
31. Bernardine Cemetery Has Stood Since 1810
Bernardine Cemetery, the second-oldest in Vilnius, was founded in 1810 on the right bank of the Vilnia in Užupis.
It was left to go quietly wild for much of the twentieth century and has been slowly recovered since. The terraces climb the slope above the river, and it is the quietest place within ten minutes of the Old Town — worth the detour even if you know none of the names on the stones.
32. Vilnius First Appears in Writing in 1323
Vilnius first appears in writing in 1323, in letters Grand Duke Gediminas sent to European cities inviting merchants and craftspeople to come and settle.
That is the founding document, and it is an advertisement. The city marks 1323 as its beginning for that reason rather than any battle or charter, and the invitation set the pattern: a capital that filled up with Germans, Poles, Jews, Ruthenians and Tatars because its ruler asked them to come.
33. Einstein and Freud Backed a Vilnius Institute
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded here, and its 1925 honorary board included Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
YIVO was the world's leading centre for Yiddish scholarship, and it was run out of this city. Its building and its institutions here did not survive the war; the institute itself continues abroad. A plaque in the quarter marks what was here.
34. Pilies Street Appears in Annals from 1530
Pilies Street, the Old Town's main thoroughfare between Cathedral Square and the Town Hall Square, is named in historical annals as far back as 1530.
It is the spine of the Old Town and the route almost every visitor walks first, largely because it has been the route for five centuries. The buildings along it are a lesson in what happened when: Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque frontages sitting directly against one another.
35. A Pavement Tile Grants Wishes If You Spin On It
A single tile in Cathedral Square marked stebuklas — Lithuanian for miracle — is said to fulfil a wish if you spin on its axis.
The tile marks the Vilnius end of the Baltic Way, the human chain of 1989. That it has since become a wish-granting spot rather than a solemn marker is very much in keeping with the city. You will find it by the queue of people slowly turning on the spot.
36. The Town Hall Was First Mentioned in 1432
Vilnius Town Hall was first mentioned in 1432, and the building standing today was rebuilt in neoclassical style to a design by Laurynas Gucevičius in 1799.
The square in front of it has been the working centre of the city for that whole span — market, fairs, executions, and now concerts and Christmas stalls. The white portico is Gucevičius's, but there has been a town hall of some kind on this spot since the medieval city ran its own affairs.
37. St Casimir's Is the City's Oldest Baroque Church
The Church of St Casimir is the oldest Baroque church in Vilnius as of 2026, begun by the Jesuits in 1604.
Dates vary depending on what you are counting: the city gives 1604 for the start of construction, while other accounts date the finished church to 1618. The crown on its dome is the giveaway — it commemorates a royal saint, and it has been put back more than once after the building was made a museum of atheism under Soviet rule.
38. Twenty-Three Mummies Lie Under a City Church
Archaeologists registered a total of 23 mummies in the basements of the Dominican Church of the Holy Spirit in July 2011, a third of them children.
The bodies were preserved by the dry, cool air of the crypts rather than by any deliberate embalming, and they are thought to be victims of war or epidemic. The church above is one of the most extravagant Baroque interiors in the city, which makes what is underneath it a particularly strange contrast.
39. Up to 70,000 Were Killed at Paneriai
Between 1941 and 1944, tens of thousands of people were killed at Paneriai on the edge of Vilnius, most of them Jews from the Vilnius region.
The city gives a range of 50,000 to 70,000; wider accounts put the total higher still once Polish and Soviet victims are counted. It is a pine wood ten kilometres from the Old Town, and the pits are still visible. There is a small museum and a set of memorials, and it is a difficult, necessary visit.
40. A Sculpture of 3,000 TV Sets Holds a World Record
At Europos Parkas outside the city stands a labyrinth built from 3,000 television sets, entered in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest artwork — still recorded as such as of 2026.
The work is credited to Gintaras Karosas and has a toppled statue of Lenin at its centre, which tells you what it is about. The city's own page calls it LNK Infomedis and the artist calls it LNK Infotree; it is the same sculpture either way.
41. The Cathedral Stands on a Pagan Temple Site
Vilnius Cathedral was built on the site of a former pagan temple, and a sixteenth-century account places a stone temple to the Baltic god Perkūnas here.
The account is old and much argued over, but excavation under the cathedral did turn up earlier altars and floors. Here the change of faith is a literal one — the new religion built directly on top of the old.
42. Vytautas the Great Died in Trakai Island Castle
Trakai Island Castle, a short trip from Vilnius on an island in Lake Galvė, was completed around 1409 by Vytautas the Great, who died in this castle in 1430.
Vytautas ruled Lithuania at its largest extent, and he died here waiting for a crown that never arrived. The castle was a ruin for centuries and was rebuilt in the twentieth century, which is why it looks so improbably complete; the wooden bridge out to it is part of the experience.
43. Medininkai Is the Largest Castle of Its Type
Medininkai Castle, near Vilnius, enclosed a defensive perimeter of 6.5 hectares — the largest enclosure-type castle in Lithuania as of 2026.
An enclosure castle is essentially a walled field with towers, built to hold people and livestock rather than to impress anyone. Medininkai sat on the road east and took the brunt of the Teutonic wars. Only one of its four towers still stands to full height, and you can climb it.
44. The Real Doctor Dolittle Practised in Vilnius
Zemach Shabad, a Vilnius doctor, was the prototype for Doctor Aybolit — the kindly animal doctor of a Russian children's poem — and was honoured with a monument in the Square of the Ghetto Victims.
Aybolit is the Doctor Dolittle of the Russian-speaking world, and generations of children grew up on him without knowing he was a real physician from this city. The statue shows Shabad talking to a girl holding a cat, which is exactly the right register for the man it commemorates.
45. Lithuania Declared Independence on Didžioji Street
The Act of Independence of Lithuania was signed on 16 February 1918 at 30 Didžioji Street in Vilnius, in a building now known as the House of the Signatories.
Twenty men signed it in a rented room above a street of shops. February 16 is still the national day, and the house is now a museum you can walk into from the pavement.
46. A Cherry Park Honours a Japanese Diplomat
The Chiune Sugihara Sakura Park on the bank of the Neris honours the Japanese diplomat whose visas let thousands of Jews escape Lithuania, and its trees bloom for about two weeks each spring.
Sugihara wrote transit visas by hand, far past the point his government sanctioned, for people with nowhere else to go. The park was a gift from Japan, and the blossom lands in April or sometimes May. For two weeks the whole riverbank turns out to sit under it.
47. A Second UNESCO Site Sits Half an Hour Away
Kernavė, a medieval capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Neris valley near Vilnius, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004.
Five green hillforts sit in a row above the river, and that is nearly all that is above ground — the town that stood between them burned in the medieval wars and was never rebuilt. It is one of the best-preserved medieval archaeological sites in northern Europe, and it is a half-hour drive from the capital.
48. The Old Town Covers 3.59 Square Kilometres
Vilnius Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, covers 3.59 square kilometres — one of the largest surviving medieval old towns in northern Europe.
It is big enough that a visitor rarely reaches the edges of it. Within the boundary there are roughly fifteen hundred buildings across seventy-odd streets, and the reason it survived is unromantic: the city was too poor to modernise it and too peripheral for anyone to flatten it.
49. Romain Gary Grew Up in Vilnius
Romain Gary — the only writer to win the Prix Goncourt twice — was born in Vilnius as Roman Kacew, and a sculpture of him as a boy stands near the house where he lived.
He won the second Goncourt under an invented identity, which the prize's rules forbid, and was not found out in his lifetime. The statue shows a small, fragile child clutching a shoe. It stands on a busy corner, and plenty of people walk straight past it.
50. Vingis Park Is the Largest Park in the City
Vingis Park is the largest park in Vilnius as of 2026, and its open-air stage held a mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II in 1993 as well as the Sąjūdis rallies of 1988.
The Sąjūdis meetings here drew crowds that made the independence movement impossible to ignore, and the stage has been in constant use ever since. It sits in a bend of the Neris — vingis means bend — with the whole loop of the river around it.
Where to Go Next in Vilnius
Much of what is above is walkable: the castle hill, the cathedral and its belfry, the university courtyards and Užupis all sit within the Old Town and its immediate edge. The TV Tower, the airport terminal and the prison are short trips out.
For opening times, routes and what is worth queueing for, our full guide to things to do in Vilnius covers the city attraction by attraction, and the Lithuania hub has the rest of the country.
How We Checked These Facts
Every claim on this page was read off a named authority rather than recalled — the city’s own tourism board, Vilnius University and its library, the Seimas, the European Commission, UNESCO, and the museums and institutions concerned, with peer-reviewed and encyclopedic sources behind the historical ones. Each fact carries at least two independent sources and links to one of them. Where the sources disagree, as they do on the number of city gates, the length of the Baltic Way and the year the Three Crosses went back up, we give the disagreement rather than the tidier answer. Where a source hedges — the Zappa monument, the Napoleon legend, the university’s age — we hedge with it. Figures that move were read in August 2026.
FAQ: Interesting Facts About Vilnius
What is Vilnius best known for?
Its Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with a baroque skyline of churches, the self-declared artists’ republic of Užupis, and a great deal of forest and parkland inside the city boundary.
Is Vilnius really 61% green space?
That is the figure the city publishes, with trees covering 48%. It was named European Green Capital for 2025 by the European Commission, which assessed the city’s environmental record as part of the award.
Why is there a Frank Zappa statue in Vilnius?
It was put up in 1995 by local enthusiasts as a gesture about newly won artistic freedom, sculpted by an artist who had previously made busts of Lenin. Zappa had no connection to Lithuania. The city describes Vilnius as one of only two places in the world with a monument to him.
Is Užupis a real country?
No. It is a district of Vilnius that declared itself a republic as a piece of neighbourhood theatre, with a constitution of 41 lines on Paupio Street, a president and an annual independence day. It has no legal standing, and Lithuanian law applies there like anywhere else.
What happened at the Vilnius TV Tower in 1991?
Soviet forces stormed the tower and the radio and television building in January 1991 while unarmed civilians surrounded them. Fourteen defenders were killed and close to a thousand people injured. The date is now marked as the Day of the Defenders of Freedom.
Are Napoleon’s soldiers really buried under Vilnius?
Yes. In late autumn 2001 construction workers uncovered a mass grave of Grande Armée soldiers on the site of a former Soviet barracks; the first excavation alone recovered between 1,000 and 2,000 skeletons, identified by buttons, medals and coins.
Can you still ride a hot-air balloon over Vilnius?
Yes, but far less often than you might expect from the photographs. Stricter rules introduced in June 2023 cut flight numbers by 70 to 80 percent, and take-offs are timed around wind conditions and airport traffic.
What was the first book printed in Lithuania?
The Little Travel Book, printed in Vilnius in 1522 by Francysk Skaryna, who had set up the first printing house in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania here after working in Prague.