Vilnius Old Town
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How it came to be
Vilnius began on a hill where the Neris and Vilnia rivers meet. A wooden castle stood there around 1000 AD, and the town grew in the 13th century amid wars against the Teutonic Order. The first written mention, in letters of Grand Duke Gediminas in 1323, already names it as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Jogaila granted the town city rights in 1387. By the 15th century the Grand Duchy stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and in 1579 King Stephen Bathory founded Vilnius University. Walls went up around the town in the early 16th century, and the old town still keeps its medieval streets radiating from the castle site.
Its Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings are the furthest east of their kind in Europe. The Lower Castle was demolished after the Third Partition of 1795, and the Great Synagogue after the Second World War. The old town was inscribed in 1994.
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