The winding labyrinthine streets of the Old Town are the kind of place you don’t mind getting lost in!
Although Vilnius was ravaged by wars and fires, and Renaissance and later Baroque ensembles were built, its street network remained Gothic, i.e., irregular. The street network in the city centre was never extensively reorganised, as the land plots with buildings (posesia) belonged to different jurisdictions (castle, bishop’s, magistrate’s, different Catholic monasteries, the Jewish community, etc.) – autonomously administered pockets of the city that were also often mosaically scattered around. The unfavourable hilly terrain also hindered the straightening and widening of the winding narrow streets, ascending and descending here and there.
During the Second World War, many buildings in the city centre were partly destroyed, and the post-war wave of modernisation swept away not only the badly affected neighbourhoods, but sometimes even the areas of the city that were only slightly affected by the war: the maze of narrow streets in the Jewish-populated part of the city disappeared, as did streets such as the cosy Ramailės cross-street; Kūdrų, Žuvų, and Tymo in Paupis, among others were also destroyed. Fortunately, however, many other small cosy streets and lanes have survived.
Do you know where to find the unofficial ‘Dwarf Passage’? Which building hides a narrow street in its inner corridors? This route offers a leisurely stroll through the surviving narrow streets and lanes of old Vilnius; although they have no official street status, they can still reveal their most interesting stories.
