Coverage / Lithuania
Lithuania
Northern Europe
A Baltic country on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, built around the UNESCO-listed old town of its capital Vilnius, the amber coast and shifting dunes of the Curonian Spit, lake-and-forest national parks, and a deep folk calendar of song celebrations, Shrovetide carnivals and pilgrimage sites.
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What you can do in Lithuania
Music & Culture Festivals
- Kaunas JazzKaunasAprKaunas Jazz has been the Baltics' benchmark jazz festival since 1991, when it launched just after Lithuania restored its independence. Every late April it takes over Kaunas, the interwar capital and now a UNESCO City of Design, with headline concerts in the National Kaunas Drama Theatre and other halls, spilling out to Vilnius, Palanga and smaller towns across the season. The 2026 edition marks the festival's thirty-fifth anniversary. It is programmed with an ear for both the American mainstream and European and Baltic players, and paired with an academic conference, so it rewards people who want to follow the music seriously rather than just drop in for a night.
- Lithuanian Song CelebrationVilniusJulThe Lithuanian Song Celebration is the emotional core of national culture, a mass song and dance festival that gathers as many as forty thousand singers, dancers and folk musicians in Vilnius roughly every four years. Held mainly at Vingis Park and the Zalgiris stadium, it climaxes in a massed choir concert where tens of thousands sing together and the crowd joins in. The tradition, shared with Latvia and Estonia, was named a UNESCO Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage in 2003, and to watch it is to see a small nation that sang its way out of Soviet rule do the thing that defines it. The next celebration is expected in 2028, after the centennial edition in 2024.
Witness / Attend
- UzgavenesRumsiskesFebUzgavenes is Lithuania's Shrovetide carnival, a pre-Lenten rite to chase out winter that predates the Christian calendar wrapped around it, and the Open-Air Museum at Rumsiskes stages the biggest version of it in the country. Villagers and visitors put on carved wooden masks of devils, goats, witches and the Jew-and-Hungarian trader figures, parade between the historic farmsteads, stage the mock battle of the fat Lasininis against the lean Kanapinis, and finally burn a straw effigy called More to end winter. You eat your way through stacks of pancakes as you go. It is folk tradition performed as living practice, in the open air, rather than displayed behind glass.
- Hill of CrossesSiauliaiMay Jun Jul Aug SepThe Hill of Crosses is one of the strangest and most moving sights in the Baltics. On a low mound sixteen kilometres north of Siauliai, pilgrims have planted crosses since around 1850, first for the dead of failed anti-tsarist uprisings, later as quiet resistance under Soviet rule when authorities bulldozed the hill several times and the crosses simply reappeared. Today more than fourteen thousand large crosses and tens of thousands of small ones cover it, still growing as visitors add their own. You can come any day and walk the paths in near silence, or time a visit to the annual feast in late July when the site fills with pilgrims and open-air Mass.
Best months at a glance
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