Four days in Vilnius: a Baroque capital with a breakaway republic across the stream

Cathedral Square is where Lithuania does everything: mass, protests, concerts, New Year. The cathedral looks Greek because it is, more or less: the first church here went up in 1251, reverted to pagan use twelve years later when the king was killed, and burnt down three times after that. The south tower collapsed in 1769 and what stands now is a neoclassical rebuild finished in 1801, a temple front with saints along the top. Go inside for the chapel of St Casimir, which survived from the previous building and is Baroque at full volume, black and white marble and silver. The crypt and the catacombs are visited by tour only. The free standing belfry, fifty seven metres, was a defensive tower before it was a bell tower.

Look down for the Stebuklas tile, the word means miracle, set into the paving of the square. It marks the southern end of the Baltic Way, the human chain of about two million people that linked Vilnius to Tallinn through Riga in August 1989 to demand independence. People still stand on it and turn round.

The long low palace behind the cathedral is not old. The Palace of the Grand Dukes was a fifteenth century seat, ruined in the wars with Russia and pulled down in 1801, and it was rebuilt from the 1990s onwards on the excavated foundations, at great expense, with a certain amount of public shouting about whether a replica was worth it and whether it should be blocking the view. Inside, the archaeology in the basement is the honest part and the reconstructed ceremonial halls are the spectacle.

End on the hill. Gediminas Castle is the upper of three castles that once stood here, and the cobbled path up takes ten minutes, or there is a funicular from the palace courtyard. The courtyard at the top is free and open late, and the view is the whole old town on one side, the glass towers of the new city across the river on the other, and the three white crosses on the hill opposite. The red brick tower holds a small museum. Come at sunset.

Vilnius University has been running since 1579 and its old campus is a warren rather than a building: linked courtyards, arcades, staircases and a bookshop, with the Church of St Johns in the middle of it. Four of the courtyards and the church are free to walk into, which almost nobody does, and the Smuglevičius hall with its painted ceiling is worth asking about. Come early, when students are crossing it and it is a university rather than a monument.

Work east to the river. St Anne's is a small flamboyant Gothic church of about 1500, built out of thirty three different shapes of brick and barely altered since, and there is a well worn story that Napoleon wanted to carry it back to Paris on the palm of his hand. Behind it, sharing the same lawn, the much larger Bernardine church is sixteenth century Gothic, was part of the city defences, and still has the loopholes in its walls for shooting at whoever was outside.

Then walk the length of the old town from north to south, down Pilies and Didžioji and Aušros Vartų, which is the route every visitor takes and is genuinely the best street in the Baltics. It passes the town hall, a neoclassical block of 1799 on a square used for fairs and demonstrations, and finishes at the Gate of Dawn.

The Gate of Dawn is the last of nine city gates and there is a chapel built over the arch holding an icon of the Virgin painted in the 1620s, which is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in this part of Europe. You reach the chapel through the Church of St Theresa next door, up a staircase; follow the headscarves. Mass is said daily in Lithuanian and in Polish. When the chapel windows are open the icon looks down onto the street, and people stop, kneel on the cobbles and pray where they stand, in the middle of the traffic.

The building on the corner of Gedimino and Aukų was the Gestapo headquarters, then the KGB's, for fifty years. It is now the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, and the names of people killed here are carved into the granite of the outside wall at street level. Inside, the offices and the basement are kept as they were found in 1991: the cells, the padded room, the water cell, and the execution chamber where over a thousand people were shot, with a glass floor over the excavation. It is not a curated experience and it is much stronger for that.

It is worth knowing what the museum does not do. Until 2018 it was called the Museum of Genocide Victims and it dealt almost entirely with Lithuanians under Soviet rule; the murder of about a hundred and ninety thousand Lithuanian Jews, most of them in the first months of the German occupation and much of it carried out by local auxiliaries, got a single cell in the basement. That has begun to change and it has not changed enough, which is itself part of what you are looking at.

Cross the city in the afternoon and cross the Vilnia stream, and the mood changes completely. Užupis was the run down quarter behind the old town, cheap because it flooded, and on 1 April 1997 the artists living there declared it an independent republic. It has a president, an anthem, an army of a dozen or so men, and a constitution mounted on mirrored plaques in twenty odd languages on Paupio gatvė, which includes the right to be unique, the right to be idle, the right to be misunderstood, and the observation that a dog has the right to be a dog. The angel in the main square, a trumpeting Gabriel raised on 1 April 2002, replaced an egg that stood there while the money was found.

Above Užupis is Three Crosses Hill, twenty minutes up through the park. Crosses have stood there since the early seventeenth century, commemorating a martyrdom story that is almost certainly invented, and they have been a political object ever since: banned by the tsarist authorities in 1869, rebuilt in concrete in 1916, blown up and buried by the Soviets in 1950, dug up and put back in 1989. The view over the old town at dusk is the best in the city.

Vilnius was one of the great Jewish cities of Europe. It had somewhere over a hundred synagogues and prayer houses, a printing industry that supplied the Yiddish speaking world, and the scholar it is still named for: Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon, who died in 1797 and whose rulings shaped Orthodox Judaism far beyond Lithuania. Between 1941 and 1944 essentially all of it was destroyed, along with about ninety five per cent of the people. The Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History tells that story across several small sites, and the one to go to is the Tolerance Centre in a former Yiddish theatre, which covers the community as it lived rather than only as it died.

Walk the streets between there and the market afterwards. The two wartime ghettos were laid out in these lanes, the boundaries are marked with plaques, and the Great Synagogue stood where a school playground now is: the Germans wrecked it and the Soviets finished the job in the 1950s, which is a sequence you will hear about more than once in this city.

Finish at Halės turgus. The main market hall was built in 1906, looks like a railway terminus from outside, and is still where Vilnius buys food: smoked meat, curd cheese, dark rye, mushrooms and berries by the bucket in season, and a couple of counters at the eastern end doing cheap hot plates. It is ten minutes from the railway and bus stations, which makes it the right last stop.