About museum
Vilnius City
Museum
Administration:
Vokiečių st. 6, Vilnius
The Vilnius City Museum is a young institution, founded for the purpose of educating local people and visitors about Lithuania’s capital.
Our goals are:
To provide knowledge: to present less-known and sometimes inconvenient details of Vilnius’ history, to help visitors shape factual opinions and better understand the city as it is today.
To develop critical thinking skills: we seek to introduce different approaches, deconstruct myths, and ask questions that have no single right answer.
To build empathy: we share the stories and micro-stories of real individuals, allowing visitors to step into other people’s shoes, and understand what led them to make decisions and to act the way they did.
The museum has four branches: 6 Vokiečių St, Markučiai Manor, Beatričė’s House, and the Centre for Wooden Architecture.
To us, the city consists of its natural surroundings (flora, fauna, weather and bodies of water), its man-made structures (buildings, public spaces and architectural, urban and engineering features), and its culture (religions, languages, ethnic groups, details from daily life, and the art and science that are developed here).
The Vilnius City Museum
- Presents new interpretations of the culture and history of Vilnius in a contemporary way, brings to light forgotten and inconvenient narratives, and creates a space for the dialogue of cultures.
- Reacts to current events, encourages conversations between different parts of the city’s population, and asks questions, instead of just presenting answers.
- Applies an interdisciplinary research approach, and collaborates with specialists from various fields, such as urban planning, architecture, sociology, anthropology, history, conservation, visual art, literature, music, science, and the history of technology.
- Is a trustworthy partner for local people and guests seeking to get to know the city, provides information, collects knowledge accumulated by its residents, and gives visitors a voice, instead of focusing solely on spreading its own message.
The museum puts on exhibitions, educational programmes, tours, conferences, discussions and meetings, it collects artefacts and stories linked to Vilnius, it communicates and collaborates with the city’s residents, it promotes the formation of communities and their activities, it conducts research and publishes books, and plans to set up a workshop for restoring architectural details in the city’s wooden buildings.
Our values: openness, respect, collaboration, professionalism, constant improvement, creativity, awareness.
The museum’s branches:
- 6 Vokiečių St: hosts two or three exhibitions about Vilnius and its residents every year. By the end of 2027, the branch is set to move to the Kirdiejai Mansion (at 4 and 6 Barboros Radvilaitės St), where it will present a permanent exhibition about the city, and house the entire administration of the Vilnius City Museum.
- Markučiai Manor: an authentic example of 19th-century wooden architecture nestling in its own park. The house has an exhibition focusing on the district of Markučiai and the story of an engineer’s family in the Russian Empire.
- Beatričė’s House: a typical three-room flat, once the home of the partially sighted singer Beatričė Grincevičiūtė (1911–1988). The exhibition paints a picture of cultural life in Soviet Vilnius, the housing policies of the time, and the challenges faced by those with a visual impairment.
- The Centre for Wooden Architecture: presents, documents and fosters the tradition of wooden architecture in Vilnius, and promotes contemporary wooden architecture in the city.
The latter three branches became part of the Vilnius City Museum in 2025. The merging of these institutions marked the beginning of a period of transformation: we are reviewing, updating and developing the displays in each branch, so that they remain current, dynamic and relevant. An estate, a Soviet flat, a house, and a mansion in the Old Town tell the stories of people who lived in Vilnius at different times, adding to each other’s narratives, and allowing visitors to form a fuller and more intriguing picture of the city.
The founder and sole shareholder of the museum is the Vilnius City Municipality.
The origins of the Vilnius City Museum go back to 2018, when a feasibility study for a museum and research centre was conducted at the initiative of three Vilnius scholars: the art historian and culture manager Dr Rasa Antanavičiūtė, the architectural historian Dr Marija Drėmaitė, and the historian Dr Karolis Kučiauskas.
The founding of the Vilnius City Museum was catalysed by an important event, the 700th anniversary of the first written mention of Vilnius in 2023. The founding document of the new museum was signed on 6 February 2020. Just over a year later, on 26 March 2021, it opened its doors to the first visitors, immediately after a reduction of the more severe Covid-19 lockdown measures.
For four years, the institution operated under the name the Vilnius Museum, and had a single venue at 6 Vokiečių St. In 2025, the following three museums that came under the auspices of the Vilnius City Municipality merged with the museum:
The Markučiai Manor Museum (formerly the Alexander Pushkin Literary Museum, established in 1948, now Markučiai Manor, at 124 Subačiaus St)
The Beatričė Grincevičiūtė Memorial House-Museum (established in 1993, now Beatričė’s House, at 12 Vienuolio St)
The Museum of Urban Wooden Architecture (opened in 2022, now the Centre for Wooden Architecture, at 52 Polocko St)
These museums are now exhibition spaces of the Vilnius City Museum, along with the Vilnius Museum’s original premises on Vokiečių St.
City museums began to emerge when cities developed and transformed at a rapid rate. The first museum of this kind, Le Musée Carnavalet, was founded in 1866 in Paris, when Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann launched a grand project to reconstruct Paris. However, most city museums were founded in the late 19th or the early 20th century: a city museum was established in Berlin in 1874, in London in 1912, in New York in 1923, and in Warsaw in 1936.
The earliest-known mention of the idea to set up a city museum in Vilnius dates from 1912, and was discovered in Ziemia, a Warsaw-based weekly about regional history. The idea received more serious attention during the interwar period, when Vilnius and its region were part of the Republic of Poland. Those concerned in the deliberations decided that a museum was necessary, and discussed the possible venues and content. On 15 March 1933, a council was formed and tasked with writing up its charter.
Even though the museum began accumulating various collections, for the first six years it had no headquarters. A space was finally allocated for the museum in March 1939 and the first exhibition was due to open in the autumn of the same year, but the Second World War interrupted these plans. Vilnius was returned to Lithuania and soon became the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. In 1941 the name and the theme of the museum changed: it became the Vilnius Museum of Art, while the Vilnius City Museum ceased to exist. After the war, the Vilnius Museum of Art grew into what is now the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.
During the Soviet period and after 1990, the idea of a city museum occasionally resurfaced, but it led nowhere.
Nearly a century has passed from the first efforts to establish an institution for the people of the continually changing city of Vilnius, to the museum becoming a reality.