Lithuania · Old Town
Vilnius
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Vilnius is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Vilniaus universitetas 1,500 points
A block you are allowed to walk into. Take the arch on Universiteto street and keep going: the courtyards open one into the next, and each belonged to somebody with an opinion about the last.
Aušros Vartai 500 points
The last of the city gates still standing, with a room built into the top of it and a window looking down at the lane. Walkers halt in the archway without being asked to.
Lietuvos Respublikos prezidentūra 500 points
A calm yellow front around a courtyard, with a guard at the entrance and a flag that tells you whether anyone important is home.
Šv. Onos bažnyčia 500 points
A small church that stops walkers mid-step, with a belfry beside it behind a wall and a gate. The square outside shows you the ensemble from one side only, and that is the side to stand on.
Vilniaus Šv. Stanislovo ir Šv. Vladislovo arkikatedra bazilika 500 points
White, wide, and standing alone on its own square, with a bell tower that does not touch it. Walk the square before the building: the ground there has a story of its own.
Šv. Kazimiero bažnyčia 250 points
The one with the royal crown on top, which is a strange thing to put on a church and an excellent reason to look up. It was built to the pattern of the Jesuits' mother church in Rome, and it is the only one in the country that was.
Šv. Kotrynos bažnyčia 250 points
Two towers over Vilniaus street and a silhouette that keeps turning up as you walk the Old Town. The nave is a concert hall now, with a garden in front, and the acoustics are why people come back.
Šv. Mikalojaus bažnyčia 250 points
Small, low, and set back behind a wall on its own lane, so you can walk past it twice. Do not. It is older than it looks, and it looks old.
Vilniaus gynybinės sienos Bastėja 250 points
The hillside above Bokšto street is hollow. What is under there was built to be pointed outwards, and for a long time nobody could go in. Now you can.
Vilniaus Rotušė 250 points
A white portico at the wide end of Didžioji street, facing a square that has been a market, a stage and a meeting point. The columns are the newest thing about it.
Eating
Actual food.
The streets here are medieval and the food is not. Rye was the everyday meal in this country until the middle of the last century. The potato only arrived at the end of the 17th. Cepelinai and kugelis, the two dishes everyone calls Lithuanian, were invented in towns like this one, where too many nationalities cooked side by side to leave a recipe alone. I am older than the menu, and I do not mind.
With meat
Kibinai
Crescent pies of yeast dough with a chopped mutton filling, baked in the oven. They came with the Karaim, who settled here in the 14th and 15th centuries, and whose language is spoken in Lithuania and nowhere else. One of the few things on this list older than the potato.
Poultry, cheese and vegetable fillings exist now too, so say which one you want.
Sources: Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, karaimai, Go Vilnius, 10 Foods that represent Vilnius
Didžkukuliai (cepelinai)
Grated raw potato wrapped around minced meat, boiled, and eaten under a sauce of crackling and sour cream. It reached Lithuania from East Prussia at the start of the last century. The most Lithuanian thing on the menu is about a hundred years old, and I find that reassuring.
Sources: Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, didžkukuliai, Go Vilnius, 10 Foods that represent Vilnius
Bulvių plokštainis (kugelis)
A slab of grated potato baked in the oven, with onion, pepper and a bay leaf in it. Lithuania has baked it since the end of the 19th century, and at first it was what you made for guests. Winter food, because it wants a stove that is already lit.
Sour cream and lingonberry jam are the other usual finishes. Say so at the counter if you would rather skip the bacon sauce.
Vegetarian
Šaltibarščiai
Cold beetroot soup, pink to an alarming degree, with kefir, cucumber, dill and hard boiled egg. Eastern Lithuania has made it in summer for a long time, and before kefir the sourness came out of bread dough. Hot boiled potatoes come on a separate plate, and they are half the point.
It is summer food. Out of season, ask before you get your hopes up.
Sources: Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, lietuvių valgiai, Go Vilnius, What is a pink soup (šaltibarščiai)
Bulviniai sklindžiai
Pancakes of grated potato, eaten with sour cream. Eastern Lithuania baked them the size of the whole pan and ate them for breakfast, which tells you what a morning was expected to carry.
The pan is often greased with bacon. Ask, and ask for them plain, because the filling can be meat.
Šakotis
A hollow cone of cake baked in front of an open fire on a turning spit, so the batter runs off into spikes and hardens there. Thirty to a hundred and twenty eggs, depending on the size of it. The more spikes it carries, the more respected the baker, which is the fairest scoring system I have met.
Sources: Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, šakotis, Go Vilnius, 10 Foods that represent Vilnius
Vegan
Plikyta ruginė duona
Dark rye, and the scalded loaf is the one to look for: the flour goes into hot water and the dough then sours for up to three days. It comes out sweet and sour at once and it keeps for ages. Salt and caraway were the only seasonings it ever had.
Milk and whey turn up in some doughs. Ask at the bakery counter.
Grikiai su grybais
Buckwheat, grown on the sandy hills east and south of here, boiled into porridge or baked into small pies with a mushroom filling. The forest supplied the mushrooms and the household salted or dried whatever was left for winter. A whole meal off a forest floor.
Crackling or butter often get stirred in at the end. Ask for it without.
Prėskučiai su aguonpieniu
Small hard knots of lean dough with poppy seed, and a jug of sweetened poppy milk poured over them. They belong to the Christmas Eve supper, and the milk is ground poppy seed and water. Plant milk, long before anybody thought of selling it.
Some bakeries put butter in the dough now. Ask.
Late breakfast
Beigelistai where locals go
A small bakery on a lane full of bookshops, boiling and baking bagels every morning. This region is reckoned the bagel's cradle. The bagel left when the Jewish community that baked it did, and the recipe was fetched back from New York. About seven euros, no reservation, and cramped, which is the correct amount of room for bread.
There are plant based fillings, so ask which ones. The house favourite is not one of them. Come in the morning, while the batch is fresh.
Sources: 15min.lt, Kur Vilniuje ieškoti šviežių beigelių?, Neakivaizdinis Vilnius, Beigelistai (Literatų g.), Augalyn, Beigelistai (Literatų g.), Geriausias brunch Vilniuje, Beigelistai, Gabija Rimkutė
Afternoon coffee
Strange Love Bernardinai worth the detour
A coffee house at the gate of the Bernardinai garden, off the ring and up the hill side. They roast their own beans, differently every day, from farms small enough that a whole crop can land here. Desserts are made in the house and there is a patio to sit on. Roasted differently every day is more variety than I have had in six centuries.
Sources: Go Vilnius, Vilnius Coffee Crawl, Neakivaizdinis Vilnius, Strange Love, Made in Vilnius, 7 vietos Vilniuje, kuriose atrasite ne tik kokybišką kavą, bet ir jaukumą
Dinner
Neringa the old one
Somebody has been feeding people at this address since 1959, and the room has not been allowed to change. The state listed the interior as a protected architecture monument in 1970. Teachers, doctors and actors met here then, and the Kyiv cutlet they ordered is still on the card. A protected ceiling and an unretired recipe. I approve of both.
There is live music on Friday and Saturday evenings, and the house charges a small amount at the door for it.
Sources: 15min.lt, Legendinis restoranas „Neringa“ užgesino šviesas, Open House Vilnius, Neringa viešbutis ir restoranas (2016), Coldwarsites, Neringa Restaurant. Vilnius
Checked 4 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Vilnius.
The river gets there first. The Vilnia comes down eighty kilometres of Lithuania and runs into the Neris at the foot of the castle hill, and when this place first turns up in writing, in 1323, the writing calls it Vilnia too. City named after water. I approve: water is the only thing older here than the hills.
Sources: www.vle.lt, whc.unesco.org
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
On glacial hills where two rivers meet. The Neris comes through wide, the Vilnia arrives narrow and fast, and between them stands a hill with a wooden castle on it from about the year 1000. People had been camping on these hills on and off since the Neolithic. The Old Town still fans out from that castle in a rough circle, which is why the streets bend the way they do.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The settlement did not become a town until the 13th century, and by 1323 it was already the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It stayed the political centre of that state until the end of the 18th century. In the 15th century the Grand Duchy reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and this was the town it was run from. Five centuries of building later, the street pattern is still the medieval one.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1323–1569
For two and a half centuries this is the capital of a state that keeps getting bigger, and everything on this walk that looks expensive was paid for by that. A town of many languages and many faiths from early on, which is unusual enough that UNESCO says so out loud.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
- 1569–1795
Lithuania and Poland run one state together, and Vilnius keeps its job. The baroque you are walking through is this era's, and the local style became so particular that it carries the city's name and travelled back out across the whole Grand Duchy. It ends in 1795 with the third partition.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
- 1795–1990
For most of two centuries the decisions about this city were made in other cities. The Lower Castle came down after 1795 and its foundations are under the square in front of the cathedral. In 1832 the university was closed outright, and it stayed closed for the better part of a hundred years, which tells you what the new arrangement thought of the place.
Sources: whc.unesco.org, www.vu.lt
- 1990–
Independence restored on 11 March 1990, and the country still marks the day every year. The Old Town has been on the World Heritage list since not long after.
Sources: www.govilnius.lt
The emblem
What the shield means.
A big man wading a river with a child on his shoulder. That is Saint Christopher, whose name means the one who carries Christ, and who according to his story carried people across the water for a living. A city that grew where two rivers meet put a ferryman on its shield. He holds a staff with a double cross on top, and that cross is not decoration: it stood for whoever granted the city its rights.
Sources: lt.wikipedia.org
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
A wooden castle stood on the hill by about the year 1000, and people had been camping on these glacial hills on and off since the Neolithic. The town is the recent part of this arrangement.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
The Vilnia drops about four metres for every kilometre over its last stretch into town, against one and a half metres per kilometre across the whole river. That is mountain-stream behaviour in a place with no mountains.
Sources: www.vle.lt
The listed Old Town covers 352 hectares and its plan is basically circular, radiating out from the castle. The small streets cut it into irregular blocks, and the big squares were pushed in later.
Sources: whc.unesco.org
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- gatvė (g.)
- Street, and the workhorse. Almost every name on this map ends in a small g with a dot, and that dot is doing the work of six letters.
- skersgatvis (skg.)
- A cross-lane, the short one that cuts between two proper streets. Baltasis skg. is a white one. They are quick and I like them for that.
- aikštė (a.)
- A square. Rotušės a. is the town hall's. A square is where a street stops being a corridor and starts being a room.
- takas (tak.)
- A path rather than a street. Vilnios tak. follows the fast little river. Paths have dots on them too.
- prospektas (pr.)
- An avenue, built wide on purpose and much younger than the lanes around it. Gedimino pr. is the one, and it is the only place in this Old Town where you can see a long way in a straight line.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 58streets
- 860dots
- 14.4km of street
- 19.4km on foot
- 5.5hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.