Through the labyrinth of the narrowest streets

Let’s start our walk from the unnamed, gated-off street, which is visible between Liejyklos Street 8 and 10. There used to be many such streets in Vilnius, but as the city grew denser or, conversely, as dense neighbourhoods were demolished, most of them eventually disappeared, swallowed up by the sprawling houses or the new squares that were created after the war.

At the intersection with the two 18th-century Classicist-style palaces – the De Reus (S. Skapo g. 2), Łopacińskis and later Sulistrowskis family properties (S. Skapo g. 4) – with their charming colonnades and triangular pediments, a street begins, named after Stanislovas Skapas, secretary of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, who built a house on his plot of land at the beginning of the 16th century. This street, which narrows to the west, used to have a slightly different trajectory, which is why the façade of the Renaissance building at Pilies g. 3 – now in the courtyard – is very ornate. The route changed as the street moved southwards, but the solemn façade has remained.

The street is often mistakenly described as the narrowest in Vilnius. However, the methods of those measurements are highly questionable – only part of the carriageway was measured, not the entire width of the street. With pavements, this street, which is only 3.2 m wide, is still one of the narrowest in the city. It is a romantic, cosy, medieval-looking cross-street connecting Universiteto and Pilies Streets.

Bernardinų Street is one of the oldest streets in Vilnius (it is mentioned in documents from the 16th century). It connected the territory of the Lower Castle with Bernardinų Gate in the city wall, which was located next to St. Anne’s Church. The western part of the cross-street, which narrows to a width of only 3.5 m, is interesting because it has high, windowless walls facing the street. This is a testimony from the Middle Ages: the city was quite insecure at that time, with dangers lurking in the streets not only at night, but also during the day, so the life of the citizens took place in the courtyard, behind thick and high blind walls and strong gates, where Renaissance and Baroque buildings were hidden. The further eastern part of the street was built up later, with several two-storey 18th- and 19th-century houses and the Baroque palace of the Olizars (Łopacińskis), with its expressive broken-roof configuration. The street, filled with an archaic atmosphere, has caught the eye of artists: scenes filmed on Bernardinų Street are recognisable in the most popular film in the Soviet Union, the musical released in English under various names, including ‘Gypsies are Found near Heaven’. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bernardinų Street was often the venue of open-air painting exhibitions and various festivals that attracted crowds of Vilnius residents. Today, the 240-metre-long street is quiet and peaceful, with a mysterious medieval atmosphere conducive to a leisurely stroll.

Several hundred years ago, three different confessions of faith and several nations came together here. Members of the German Catholic community, Polish and Lithuanian Catholic nuns, and the Bernardine Sisters (Clares) used to meet in the street on their way to pray at St. Anne’s Church, and the Ruthenian part of the town would stretch out towards Pilies Street. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Catholic Church of St. Michael and the Evangelical Reformed House of Worship once stood where the current site of the present Ministry of Education, Science, and Sports is located, while even further back, in the 15th century, the wooden Pokrov Orthodox Church could have been found here.

This narrow street, just 3.2 metres wide in places and 150 metres long, is a microworld of its own, where you just might be tempted to stay a little longer.

Among tourists, this is one of the most popular streets in the Old Town; it is also one of the oldest in Vilnius. It is no coincidence that one of the houses is decorated with the date 1661. The street takes its name from the glass-blowers who worked here – the owner of the first glass manufactory in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Martynas Paleckis owned a house with glass warehouses and a shop here. The glassworks founded in the countryside by Martynas’ father, Jonas Paleckis, who came from Poland had already been operational from 1525. From the middle of the 16th century onwards, this Evangelical Reformed family had glassworks on the right bank of the Neris River, between the suburbs of Šnipiškės and Žvejų.

The picturesque Stiklių Street, which narrows to 4.1 metres, has been on the cinema screens many times. It was the location for the filming of ‘The Parrot Speaking Yiddish’ (1990, directed by E. Sevela), the children’s film ‘The Adventures of Kalis the Sleuth’ (1976, directed by A. Žebriūnas), ‘The Adventures of Electronic’ (1979, directed by K. Bromberg), and the Pinocchio-style animation ‘The Adventures of Buratino’ (1975, directed by L. Nechajev), as well as other film scenes.

In the middle of the 16th century, the house at Didžioji g. 8 belonged to the pharmacist Mikalojus, and the adjacent house (number 10) is also connected with medicine – The Therapeutic Clinic, founded by Professor Joseph Frank of Vilnius University at the beginning of the 19th century. The first Maternity Institute in Europe was also located here. It was also the place where Frank, together with his French colleague Professor August Louis Bécu, founded the Vaccination Institute, where some of the first vaccinations on the continent were carried out – smallpox vaccines were produced and researched here.

Until the construction of the student dormitory of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in the 1970s. The small street connected Pilies and Latako Streets. The history of this particular plot is very interesting. At the end of the 18th century, there were two taverns and a café, and at the beginning of the 19th century there was a perfumery shop run by J. Skavezanis, a merchant of Italian origin, which was later passed on to J. Bolechowski. In the 19th century, a confectionery shop and a glovemaker operated from the building. From 1870 to 1922, it housed a printing house founded by Albert Syrkin and his son, which employed more than 100 people at the end of the 19th century, and was one of the oldest bookshops in the city. In 1886, the widow Sara Syrkin inherited the business and named it the ‘Albert Syrkin Printing House’ after her husband. In addition to the bookshop and the printing house, it also sold sewing machines and haberdashery.

A tunnel only one metre in width leads to an irregularly configured enclosed courtyard. In the early 17th century, Pilies and Rusų Streets were connected by a lane, which disappeared in later times, and which bordered the small brick Orthodox Church of St. Joan and belfry. After a fire in 1610, the street disappeared during the reconstruction of the burnt buildings, and some of the walls of the church may have been used for the construction of a dwelling house. In the 17th and later centuries, the owners of the buildings changed frequently, one of whom was Scottish, another of Italian origin. In the first third of the 19th century, a pharmacy and a pavement café owned by the Bavarian-born J. Guth existed here. Between the wars, this building was one of the most important centres of Lithuanian identity in Vilnius, and housed the Lithuanian Charity Society.

The 140-metre street reaches its narrowest point of just 2.9 metres at the bend of this 4-metre-high incline. In the early 17th century, the lane leading to the Protestant house of worship on the site of the current Ministry of Education was known as ‘Kalvinų Zboro’ (Calvinist Church) Street in documents. From the 19th century onwards, Literatų Street became home to bookbinders and bookshops. In the early 19th century, university students used to gather in the attic of the corner house on Pilies and Literatų Streets (Literatų g. 1), which was known colloquially as ‘Dog Mound’ among young people. Adam Mickiewicz, the great bard of Romanticism in poetry and poetic drama, lived and worked in this building in the early 19th century. It was demolished after the war and only the entrance gate remains. 

In 2011, at the initiative of the ‘Modern Art Centre’ (now ‘MO Museum’), a wall was unveiled, decorated with dedications honouring literary figures associated with Vilnius. There are as many as 250 of these artistic inclusions on the street, each created by different artists using different techniques, and each original – a kind of ‘secret’ that is interesting to examine up close. 

In the 1988 documentary ‘Shadows of the Old Town’, a resident of Literatų Street complained about the living conditions there – the buildings were in a state of disrepair, they had no kitchens or place to wash, no repairs were promised, and his family would be happy to move to a more residential area, say, to Pašilaičiai, a housing district that was still under construction at that time. Fast-forward a few years, and there is no shortage of people in Vilnius who dream of settling in Literatų Street.

From the end of the 13th century, this part of the city was heavily populated by Ruthenians (the ancestors of today’s Ukrainians and Belarusians) and the Russian Orthodox dwellers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; it was therefore naturally known as the Russian quarter or Russian town. From the 13th century onwards, the Lithuanian state expanded steadily to the east, including the duchies of Polotsk, Turov-Pinsk, Kiev, Chernigov, Smolensk, and Volhynia. Two thirds of the state’s population and about half of the inhabitants of Vilnius in the 14th-15th centuries were Orthodox Slavs. Merchants and craftsmen moved to the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in large numbers. In the 14th and 16th centuries, in the vicinity of the present-day Literatų and Rusų streets, there were even several wooden Orthodox churches: Our Lady of Protection, St. Catherine, St. John the Apostle, St. Michael the Archangel, the Nativity of Christ, and the Saviour, all of which eventually decayed.

In the 17-18th centuries, this part of the city belonged to the jurisdiction of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Kiev (most of the Orthodox Christians in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania became Greek Catholic after the Union of Brest in 1596).

The end of Rusų Street is dominated by view of the Orthodox Cathedral of the Theotokos – the Lithuanian Orthodox Cathedral. Some sources say that Duchess Juliana of Tver, wife of Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania, and Duchess Elena of Moscow, wife of Alexander, are buried in the crypt. The building dates back to Gothic times and acquired its present appearance reminiscent of medieval Georgian Orthodox shrines in the second half of the 19th century. This house of worship adorned the postage stamp issued by the Lithuanian Post Office in June 2021, ‘Lithuanian National Minorities and Communities: Russians’.

When approaching the building at Savičiaus g. 11, where M. K. Čiurlionis lived and worked from 1907 to 1908, a corridor opens in the archway of the courtyard gate on the left, leading to a unnamed street one metre wide. In the last decade, this place was discovered by the citizens of Vilnius and is also favourite among tourists from abroad; it is often considered the narrowest street in Vilnius.

The professed Jesuits’ monastery and cloisters, which now belong to the Jesuit Gymnasium, have been located next to the walled Augustijonų and Šv. Kazimiero Streets since the 17th century. In the past, the buildings housed not only the professed Jesuits who went through three stages of formation and took their last solemn vows of obedience to the Pope (professio), but also the Provincial Superior of the Lithuanian Jesuit Province. The Jesuit Province, under the leadership of the Provincial Superior, in the middle of the 17th and 18th centuries covered not only almost the whole of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including Smolensk, but also Livonia with Riga and Tallinn, Royal Prussia with Koenigsberg, as well as Mazury and Mazovia with Warsaw. Invited to Lithuania in 1569 by Vilnius Bishop W. Protasewicz, the Jesuits soon established a network of schools and colleges, founded the most prominent university in Eastern Europe, Vilnius University, and published books. The Jesuits were among the most educated people in Lithuania. It is due to their efforts that impressive ensembles of churches and monasteries sprang up in the region. Saint Casimir’s Church, which is connected to the Palace of the Professed, was the most important Jesuit church in Lithuania. 

The narrow Šv. Kazimiero Street, which winds over a low hill, is marked by an arch over the street, connecting the blocks of the same property on different sides of the street.

The building at Subačiaus g. 16 has a very narrow passageway, 65-80 cm wide, leading to a yard. In some countries, such alleyways have the official status of a street and are considered to be among the narrowest in the world. The passage on Subačiaus Street is marked by a sign reading ‘Avelių Brydė’ (meaning pathway trodden in a field by lambs!), but until this is a registered street name, it cannot claim to be in the top ten of the narrowest lanes in the world.

Arklių Street is one of the oldest streets in Vilnius. This is evidenced by the several Gothic-style houses at Arklių g. 4 and 16 with inter-storey friezes (an ornamental brick band above the ground floor) and vertically oriented pediments. It is also one of the most densely built-up streets in Vilnius (in some places only 3.1 m wide), with the usual atmosphere of a medieval city. Arklių Street used to connect Vilnius City Hall and the horse market, which is reflected in its name. The street is also famous for its theatres. The huge palace belonging to the Oginskis family is home to the State Youth Theatre, the entrance to the ‘Lėlė’ Puppet Theatre is next to a cheerful wall, and a monumental plaque marks the Jewish theatre that gave hope and faith to the ghetto inhabitants during the worst times of the war. Until the 1951 fire, there was another building on the site of the wall, which housed another theatre, known since the beginning of the 20th century as the ‘Palas’.

This narrow, cobbled street, which before the war was at the very heart of the Jewish quarters of Vilnius, is a relic of the once densely packed labyrinth of similar streets, which was crushed by the post-war demolition of the quarters near the old Vokiečių Street. The street takes its name from the one-storey meat market building with its enclosed courtyard, which used to sell exclusively kosher meat in more than 40 outlets. This market building stood in front of the house at Mėsinių g. 3A. Most of the blocks in the surrounding area adjacent to Mėsinių g. were demolished after the war. In 2005, only the 60th quarter of Vilnius Old Town (encompassing Dysnos, Ašmenos, and Mėsinių Streets) was rebuilt according to the drawings; the Jewish Culture and Information Centre is housed in one of the buildings here.

In contrast to the Old Towns of Riga, Tallinn, or Krakow, where the blocks are rather tiny, the blocks of Vilnius Old Town are often huge, hiding several closed courtyards inside, connected by systems of narrow corridors, tunnels, and gateway interstices, forming unnamed streets. One of these streets is accessed through an opening in the courtyard of Vokiečių g. 24. It is nicknamed the ‘Dwarf Passage’ because of its low ceiling. On the wall of this unnamed street, you can find a brick map of Lithuania, a wooden sculpture in a niche, inscriptions left in the bricks of the interstitial wall, and other intriguing curiosities.

The Adomas Mickevičius Public Library of Vilnius County hides many secrets in its interiors. The library buildings have two addresses: Trakų g. 10 and part of the premises are located in the adjacent building, numbered 12. These used to be two separate properties. When Countess Zofija Tyszkiewicz acquired the two properties in 1863, the buildings were merged, and the boundary between the two lots remains visible only in the corridor of the Children’s Library.

City Wall Street, named in 2006, was supposed to connect Trakų and Klaipėdos Streets, and its route was to run parallel to the city’s former defensive wall, fragments of which have been preserved along/by Klaipėdos Street. However, the sheds, which had become part of an apartment, blocking the new street near the intersection with Trakų Street could not be removed. Also, a new block of flats, with a stairwell containing a fragment of the city wall, was built up alongside the street, which was close to Klaipėdos Street, which raised the question of whether the street still existed at all. Finally, a locked gate has been added by Trakų Street. For the last few years, several sections of this ghostly street, which no longer leads to Klaipėdos Street but only to the adjacent bar, are reopened to the public during the opening hours of the bar, and are now used as a miniature yard barely a metre wide.