Kaunas travel guide

Top 10 sights in Kaunas

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1. 

   1© Creative at lt.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Ninth Fort

   A fort of the Kaunas defences that the Germans used as a killing ground: something like fifty thousand people were shot in the fields around it, most of them Lithuanian Jews, along with French Jews deported here in 1942. A concrete memorial thirty-two metres high stands over the pits.

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2. 

   2© Kaunas-City_Hall_Square_1.jpg: Flickr upload bot derivative work: Rabanus Flavus · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Kaunas Cathedral Basilica

   Cathedral of Kaunas, begun around 1413 as a Gothic parish church and given a baroque interior after 1655. It is the largest Gothic building in Lithuania.

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3. 

   3© Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kaunas Castle

   A castle of the mid-fourteenth century on the spit where the Neris joins the Nemunas, and the first stone fortress in Lithuania — built against the Teutonic Order, who took it in 1362 after a three-week siege. A third of it has been washed away by the river.

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   Kaunas Fortress

   A ring of forts and batteries built by the Russian empire between 1882 and 1915 to hold its western frontier, covering sixty-five square kilometres and the largest defensive work in the empire. The Germans took it in eleven days in 1915.

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   5© Augustas Didžgalvis · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Pažaislis Monastery

   The largest monastery complex in Lithuania and the country's finest baroque building, begun in 1667 by Italian architects for the Camaldolese order. Its church has more coloured marble in it than any other in the former Grand Duchy.

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6. 

   6© Stanislovas01 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Lithuanian Zoo

   The oldest scientific zoo in Lithuania, opened in 1938 in an oak wood in Kaunas, on about sixteen hectares. It concentrates on European species and on breeding for reintroduction.

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7. 

   7© Creative at Lithuanian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kovno Ghetto

   The ghetto the Germans created in the Slobodka suburb in 1941, into which some thirty thousand Jews were forced. Kaunas had been a centre of Jewish learning; a Japanese consul in this city, Chiune Sugihara, issued thousands of transit visas in 1940 against his instructions.

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8. 

   8© Andrijana F · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Žmuidzinavičius Museum

   A museum holding some three thousand carvings of devils from around the world, begun as a private collection by the painter Antanas Žmuidzinavičius, who kept adding to it until he died in 1966. The house he collected them in is the museum.

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   Church of Vytautas the Great, Kaunas

   A Gothic church of about 1400 on the riverbank, the oldest in Kaunas, and the only cruciform Gothic church in Lithuania with side chapels. Napoleon's retreating army used it as an ammunition store, and the river has flooded it repeatedly.

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10. 

    10© Original uploader was Algirdas at lt.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

    St. Michael the Archangel Church

    The church that closes the pedestrian avenue Laisvės alėja in Kaunas, also known as the Garrison Church. It was built in Neo-Byzantine style between 1891 and 1895, under Russian imperial rule, for the Orthodox garrison of Kaunas Fortress.

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1. 

   1© Algirdas at Lithuanian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kaunas Mosque

   A mosque of 1930, the only brick mosque in the Baltic states and one of only four in Lithuania, built for the Lipka Tatars who have lived here since the fourteenth century — Muslim cavalry settled by the grand dukes and never assimilated away.

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   2© Vdkaromuziejus · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Vytautas the Great War Museum

   A museum of 1936 in art deco and early functionalism, whose central exhibit is the wreckage of the Lituanica, the aircraft in which two Lithuanian Americans flew the Atlantic from New York in 1933 and crashed in Germany hours short of Kaunas.

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3. 

   3© Original uploader was Creative at lt.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Vilijampolė

   A district on the right bank at the confluence of the two rivers, a separate town until the twentieth century and known in Yiddish as Slobodka. Its yeshiva was among the most influential in eastern Europe, and the ghetto of 1941 was here.

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4. 

   4© Pofka · CC BY-SA 4.0

   M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum

   A group of art museums in Kaunas built around the work of the painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Founded in 1921, it opened temporary galleries in 1925.

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5. 

   5© Creative at Lithuanian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Napoleon's Hill

   An earthwork hill of 63.3 metres on the left bank of the Nemunas in Kaunas in Lithuania, between the Panemunė bridge and the railway bridge. Its proper name is the Jiesia hill fort, but it has been called Napoleon's Hill since the nineteenth century.

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   6© Kaunofortas · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Seventh Fort

   A defensive work in the Žaliakalnis district of Kaunas, built in the first phase of construction of Kaunas Fortress. It was the last brick fort of the fortress to be completed.

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   7© Wojsyl · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kaunas Synagogue

   A synagogue of 1872 mixing baroque, Renaissance and Moorish revival, and one of only two working choral synagogues left in Lithuania. A memorial in its garden lists the names of the twelve hundred Kaunas children murdered in the ghetto.

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   8© Original uploader was Algirdas at lt.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Freedom Monument

   A monument in Kaunas in Lithuania by the sculptor Juozas Zikaras. It was unveiled in 1928 for the tenth anniversary of the restoration of independence, when Kaunas was the provisional capital.

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   9© Vilensija · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Žaliakalnis

   A district of Kaunas, the second city of Lithuania. Its name means the green hill; it lies north of the old town and the centre between the valleys of the Neris and the Girstupis, and had 38,480 residents in 2006.

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10. 

    10© Creative at Lithuanian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Ąžuolynas

    A park of about eighty-four hectares in the Žaliakalnis district of Kaunas. Its name means the oak grove, and it is the largest stand of mature oaks inside any European city.

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