A local’s guide to Vilnius, Lithuania: the best bars, culture and bargain hotels

16.11.2023 - 17:51 / theguardian.com

This year has been a good one for Vilnius. The Lithuanian capital celebrated its 700th birthday on 25 January 2023, and a few months later it was named the European Union’s green capital for 2025. Perhaps most symbolically – as Lithuania continues to firmly reject its Soviet past and align itself closer with the west – Vilnius played host to the Nato summit in July.

In short, there’s a lot for the Vilnese to be proud of and happy about. Given the progress the city has made since I first fell in love with it almost 10 years ago, local people want to share their joy and sense of accomplishment with visitors seeking a good time. The city even recently established a “night office” to ensure a night out is as enjoyable, friendly and safe as possible.

To top it off, a recent survey carried out by the Post Office showed Vilnius to be the second best value city break in Europe.

Cheers, or “į sveikatą”, to the next 700 years!

Located eight kilometres out of the city centre, Lazdynai appears to be yet another microdistrict of drab, slightly crumbling Soviet tower blocks. But it isn’t. Not entirely, anyway. Built from 1963 to the early 1970s, this residential area was developed by a group of canny Lithuanian architects who drew on research trips to Finland to subversively create a western living space in the sprawling mass that was the Soviet Union. The topography of Lazdynai is layered, its roads wide, and architecture unique courtesy of the looping Architektų gatvė with its zigzag, conjoined five-storey Khrushchevkaapartment blocks and now dystopian-looking 16-storey monoliths. Lazdynai earned the Lenin prize – the highest award attainable in the USSR – for architecture in 1974, and it became a tourist attraction and the standard bearer for urban planning across the entire union. In light of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, microdistricts like this are a controversial topic in countries once illegally annexed by the USSR. Yet in my mind they remain a key part of Vilnius’s social fabric, and Lazdynai can make a strong claim to being the most important of them all.

Near to Vilnius town hall, Kazys Varnelis House-Museum is home to more than 40 exhibition spaces curated by the Lithuanian emigré artist Kazys Varnelis, who returned to the country in 1998 after almost four decades of living in the US. Varnelis is known for his optical artworks, which incorporate 3D illusions with elements of constructivism, minimalism and the abstract. They are considered by some to be modernist interpretations of Lithuanian folk art. In addition to his own work, the museum exhibits Asian art, sculpture, and historic furniture curated and collected by the artist, who died in 2010. It is also the only branch of the National Museum of