Visit Kaunas

First impressions of Kaunas

Kaunas is Lithuania's second city and its modernist masterpiece — the interwar capital from 1920 to 1940 (when Poland controlled Vilnius), and the place where the newly independent Lithuanian Republic poured its national ambitions into a remarkable burst of Bauhaus, Art Deco, and functionalist architecture that has only recently been rediscovered. UNESCO added the city's 1919–1939 modernist core to the World Heritage List in 2023, and a walk around the New Town with its sleek concrete-and-glass commercial buildings (the Pažaislis Christ's Resurrection Basilica, Vytautas the Great War Museum, and the Central Post Office are highlights) is the cultural reveal of the city. The medieval Old Town to the west is more familiar: Town Hall Square ('the White Swan' for its elegant 16th-century Renaissance city hall), the red-brick gothic House of Perkūnas, and the 14th-century Kaunas Castle on the riverbank where the Neris meets the Nemunas. The Devil's Museum (a deeply weird and brilliant collection of 3,000 devil figurines from across the world), the M.K. Čiurlionis Art Museum (the visionary Lithuanian symbolist painter), and the moving Ninth Fort — a haunting WWII memorial on the site of mass executions — are all essential. Kaunas was a European Capital of Culture in 2022, and the legacy has stuck.