Klaipėda Sculpture Park

Western Lithuania

　　Established on the site of the main cemetery of the old Prussian city of Memel (Klaipėda in a former incarnation), in 1977, this L-shaped park became an outdoor sculpture gallery. It's dotted with more than 100 sculptures by 67 Lithuanian artists, erected between 1977 and 1991. Also here is the...

History Museum of Lithuania Minor

Western Lithuania

　　This creaky-floored little museum traces the origins of ‘Lithuania Minor’ (Kleinlitauen), as this coastal region was known during its several centuries as part of East Prussia. It exhibits Prussian maps, coins and artefacts of the Teutonic Order. Most attractive are the wooden furnishings, displays of folk art and traditional weaving...

Švyturys

Western Lithuania

　　Klaipėda is home to the country’s second-oldest brewery, where its biggest beer, Švyturys, has been brewed since 1784. Book through the tourist office or ask directly at the bar for tours of the brewery that include tastings of three or four beers (1½ to two hours, from €10 per person)....

Clock Museum

Western Lithuania

　　If you want to know what makes things tick, look no further than this niche museum that explores human measurement of time, from the earliest sundials to the latest quartz-powered Swiss watch, touching on water clocks, candle clocks and other ways of measuring time. Upstairs, the exhibition looks at the...

Pranas Domšaitis Gallery

Western Lithuania

　　This gallery is renowned for the bold works by the Prussian-born expressionist painter Pranas Domšaitis (1880–1965), who spent his last years in South Africa, plus former Lithuanian artists-in-exile. Besides a wealth of Lithuanian pastoral landscapes, there are some wonderful miniatures upstairs, as well as another permanent exhibition on ornate knobs....

Klaipėda Castle Museum

Western Lithuania

　　The castle museum is spread across four exhibition spaces around Klaipėda's castle – two of these are located in atmospherically lit tunnels and deal with the history of the castle and of Klaipėda as a port city; another features changing exhibitions of contemporary art. The highlight, however, is the Museum...

Hermann Blode Museum

Curonian Spit National Park

　　This small museum, occupying a hotel dating to 1867, commemorates the famous artists that have stayed here: Thomas Mann, Ludwig Passarge and (not least) Engelbert Humperdinck. ...

Evangelical-Lutheran Church

Curonian Spit National Park

　　This graceful red-brick church dates to 1888. Its peaceful woodland cemetery is pinpricked with krikstai – crosses carved from wood to help the deceased ascend to heaven more easily. ...

Thomas Mann Memorial Museum

Curonian Spit National Park

　　The German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann used to own this beautifully situated villa, which is now a museum with numerous original possessions. Mann spent each summer between 1930 and 1932 here, with his wife and children, before fleeing Germany in 1933. ...

Ethnographic Fisherman's Museum

Curonian Spit National Park

　　The Ethnographic Museum is a peek at Nida in the 19th century, with original weathervanes decorating the garden, and rooms inside arranged as they were a couple of centuries ago. Check out a traditional fishing vessel in the garden and the thicket of weathervanes. ...

Neringa History Museum

Curonian Spit National Park

　　Curonian Spit's three defining traditional crafts, fishing, crow-catching and amber collecting, are explained within this small regional museum. Look out for images of hardy fishermen sending dragnets underneath the ice of the lagoon in midwinter. Other fascinating photographs depict local hunters biting a crow’s neck to kill it, then taking...

Amber Gallery

Curonian Spit National Park

　　In an old fisher's hut on the northern side of town is this museum and shop devoted to amber. Staff introduce the mythic and supposed health-boosting properties of this fossilised resin. Visitors can peer through magnifying glasses at insects trapped in amber and explore the amber-ornamented garden. The museum doubles...

Nida Cemetery

Curonian Spit National Park

　　This delightful woodland cemetery features some fine examples of krikštai (wooden grave markers). Their origins hark back to Lithuania's pagan roots and these wooden markers with symmetrical carvings of plants, birds and more have been traditionally placed at the foot of a grave for centuries. Since the 19th century, the...

Parnidis Dune

Curonian Spit National Park

　　The 52m-high Parnidis Dune is simultaneously mighty and fragile. Past settlements around Nida have been engulfed by the moving sand dune but this is a delicate landscape of mountain pines, meadows and fine blonde sand speckled with purple searocket flowers. A 1700m-long path picks its way to a grand panorama...

House of Perkūnas

Kaunas

　　With ornate arches and turrets rippling from its brick facade, this late-15th-century mansion is a treasure of Kaunas' late-Gothic architecture. Built by merchants of the Hanseatic League, its interior is laid out to evoke the noble lifestyles of yesteryear: chandeliers, dining tables and a library with a small exhibition dedicated...

Pažaislis Monastery

Kaunas

　　Built by Camaldolese monks in the 17th century, this striking baroque monastery lies 9km east of central Kaunas, on a promontory jutting into the Kauno marios (Kaunas Sea). Given to the Russian Orthodox order by Tsar Alexander in 1831, it's a sumptuous if slightly run-down affair with a 50m-high cupola...

Choral Synagogue

Kaunas

　　Built in 1871, the only functioning synagogue of those that survived since 1941, and one of the few remnants of Kaunas' once-strong Jewish community, this is a remarkable dark-wood and gold bimah. Outside there's a memorial to 1600 children killed at the Ninth Fort. It's best to call ahead if...

Kiemo Galerija

Kaunas

　　Artist Vytenis Jakas moved into this courtyard over a decade ago and turned it into an ever-evolving art project, creating murals and transferring onto walls the photos of Jewish families that lived here before WWII. The 'Stick Your Memory' wall encourages you to join in and contribute a sentimental knick-knack...

Museum of Devils

Kaunas

　　This museum is devoted to the Devil, Lucifer, Satan, the fallen angel, the seducer, the cajoler, with over 3000 statuettes, carvings, masks and other images, collected over the years by landscape artist Antanas Žmuidzinavičius (1876–1966). There's a light-hearted exploration of the Horned One in various mythologies, plus a look at...

Sugihara House

Kaunas

　　Kaunas-based Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara (1900–86) saved around 6000 Jewish lives between 1939 and 1940, issuing transit visas to stranded Polish Jews who faced being forced into Soviet citizenship. When the Soviets annexed Lithuania and ordered all consulates be shut he asked for a short extension. Dubbed 'Japan's Schindler', he...

MK Čiurlionis National Museum of Art

Kaunas

　　One of Lithuania's oldest and grandest galleries, Kaunas' leading art museum (founded 1921) is the place to acquaint yourself with the dreamlike paintings of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), one of the country's greatest artists and composers. Elsewhere in the sizeable gallery are contemporary sculpture exhibitions, Lithuanian folk and religious art,...

Ninth Fort

Kaunas

　　Lithuania's dark 20th-century history is poignantly told here, 7km north of Kaunas. Begin in the sombre, church-like gallery with striking stained glass and exhibits detailing Lithuania's suffering under the Soviets and the Nazis. Then continue uphill to the Holocaust memorial and the WWI-era fort – a hard-labour prison in the...

Sts Johns' Church

Vilnius

　　The full name is 'Church of St Johns, St John the Baptist and St John the Apostle and Evangelist', but 'Sts Johns' (plural) will do nicely. Founded in 1387, it predates the 16th-century university within which it is situated, although the present late-baroque structure was built following an 18th-century fire....

Tolerance Centre

Vilnius

　　One of the main branches of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, the Tolerance Centre is simultaneously a museum of Jewish history and culture, and a performance space. Its multimedia exposition about the Holocaust is movingly framed from the perspective of a child, and stories of survival and defiance are...

Cathedral Square

Vilnius

　　Katedros aikštė buzzes with local life. In the 19th century markets and fairs were held here and a moat ran around what is now the square’s perimeter so that ships could sail to the cathedral door. Within the moat were walls and towers, the only remaining part of which is...

Cathedral Bell Tower

Vilnius

　　Climb the creaky stairs into the free-standing belfry of Vilnius Cathedral, once part of the city's 13th-century defences. Towering 57m high, it's one of the city's oldest brick buildings as well as Vilnius' most recognisable landmark. Bells dating back to the 15th century dangle in the small exhibition space, but...

Museum of Genocide Victims

Vilnius

　　This former headquarters of the KGB (and before them the Gestapo, Polish occupiers and Tsarist judiciary) houses a museum dedicated to thousands of members of the Lithuanian resistance who were murdered, imprisoned or deported by the Soviet Union from WWII until the 1960s. Backlit photographs, wooden annexes and a disorienting...

Vilnius University

Vilnius

　　Founded in 1579 during the Catholic Counter Reformation, Vilnius University was run by Jesuits for two centuries. During the 19th century it became one of Europe's greatest centres of learning, and the university survived shutdown by Tsar Nicholas I, rebranding under Soviet rule and closure by the Nazis. Its spectacular...

Vilnius Cathedral

Vilnius

　　Stately Vilnius Cathedral, divorced from its freestanding belfry, is a national symbol and the city's most instantly recognisable building. Known in full as the Cathedral of St Stanislav and St Vladislav, this columned neoclassical cathedral occupies a spot originally used for the worship of Perkūnas, the Lithuanian thunder god. 　　Register...

Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania

Vilnius

　　If you only see one museum in Vilnius, make it this one. On a site that has been settled since the 4th century AD stands the latest in a procession of fortified palaces, repeatedly remodelled, destroyed and rebuilt. The baroque palace, built for the 17th-century grand dukes, has been faithfully...