The historic town hall of Lithuania’s capital Vilnius lies at the heart of an implausibly photogenic old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This seat of the city administration is a modestly imposing late eighteenth-century building, gleaming in an impeccably refreshed coat of cream paint, exuding civic prosperity and continuity.  Close up, on the right hand side of its colonnaded portico, a plaque from the 1990s commemorates a new and unbreakable alliance between the United States and Lithuania. In front of the old town hall is a delightful, nearly triangular square, full of well-dressed local citizens and well-behaved tourists.

A walk around the Vilnius of today is a beguiling encounter with the best of western Europe

The scene is stereotypically western European, exuding prosperity, stability and a slightly staid, almost timeless elegance.  At the edge of the square, traffic moves sedately past: an electric taxi, almost silently; a government Mercedes, similarly unobtrusive, with only the slightest scent of diesel wafting from its exhaust; plus a calming procession of bicycles and e-scooters.  At café tables on the edge of the square, evening aperitifs are taken, sunglasses are raised onto foreheads or placed carefully into the v-necks of fine pullovers, and designer handbags are elegantly positioned.  The scene on an early summer’s evening is reminiscent of one of the quieter provincial towns of northern Italy.

Yet the ambience of the new city office of Vilnius sounds a less reassuring note. The new office is housed in a tower-block of some twenty storeys, in a slightly quirky, unexceptional post-modernist style.  This building serves all the routine functions of the city mayor’s departments: housing, planning, local taxation, and so on.  It’s on the opposite side of the River Neris to the old town, in a development zone where recent commercial architecture reveals the dynamism of the modern Lithuanian economy.

What catches the eye from below this new city office is a line-up of massive banners draped over windows and a viewing gallery on the top floors of the building.  It’s a statement to the city below and to anyone who can read that pervasive lingua franca of the Western world, English.  Alongside flat-banner versions of the Lithuanian tricolour, the city flag, and the distinctive blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, a massive block-letter slogan proclaims ‘Putin, The Hague is waiting for you’.  This is the kind of punchy slogan one might expect to encounter on a banner at a university sit-in or on a city-centre demonstration.  Yet it’s a semi-permanent fixture on the town hall offices of Lithuania’s capital city, a city some 38 km from the country’s border with Lukashenko’s brutal Belarus, and a mere 200 km or so from the border with Russia’s highly militarised exclave oblast (region) of Kaliningrad.

In strategic and cultural terms, Vilnius is situated on the knife-edge of Europe’s current geopolitical status quo.  Staunch support of NATO (the city hosted the 2023 NATO conference with enthusiasm), the USA and the European Union defines the allegiance of this small country with its tiny population, complex language and even more complex history.

A walk around the Vilnius of today is a beguiling encounter with the best of western Europe.  There are attractive shops and impeccably restored buildings.  Charm exudes from the small-scale non-grid pattern streets, and at almost every corner of the old town, a beautifully restored church comes into view.  From the outward appearance of the old town, one might reasonably suppose that this was a city that had enjoyed centuries of peace and prosperity: a kind of Eastern European Porto or Bristol.  But the reality of history, recent and less recent, is very different.

One of the most distinctive sounds of the centre of Vilnius – until a few weeks ago at least – was that of the wailing traction motors and sparking clicks of the antique Soviet-era trolleybuses.  These stately, rusting vehicles, with their rudimentary build-quality and implausibly dim yellow interior lighting were still trundling the city when I was last there, though I gather that by the time this article is published, they will have been consigned to history.  These vehicles, especially on dark winter evenings, established a uniquely unsettling sound, somehow a reminder of a another age, stealing upon the ears at a sinister pitch, rather in the manner of a dreaded but much anticipated air-raid siren.

Consistent expressions of bellicose antipathy from Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus form an existential anxiety which plays out as a dissonant background menace in Vilnius.  On recent visits, everyone I spoke to – predominantly sophisticated, highly educated and optimistic Lithuanians – talked to me with dread of impending Russian aggression.  “Why”, asked one prominent local politician, over lunch in one of Vilnius’s many up-market restaurants, “does Russia have a consistent history of attacking its neighbours?  We seem to go through short intermissions in our history when that aggression pauses, but we know it’s set to return.  We know where the Russian tanks are, and we know they’re pointing down the roads towards our country, ready for the next attack.”

At one of the city’s impressive state schools, a senior ‘gymnasium’ (grammar school equivalent) I visited classes and was given a tour around the school’s museum.  What leapt out at me was not the lovingly-curated collection of historical electrical oddments such as cassette players and early personal computers, but poignant memorabilia of, and a monument to, a young woman killed by the Soviet authorities as Lithuania gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.  This woman – Loreta Asanavičiutė – was the only female participant in a protest which took place near the city’s TV mast.  She was run over by a Soviet tank, and died shortly afterwards of her injuries.  Before becoming a seamstress, she had been a pupil at the school.  Her memorial plaque in a sober dark grey granite adorns the school’s entrance lobby.

“My husband and I are thinking carefully about the choice of school for our daughter when she finishes nursery,” a colleague tells me.  “Unfortunately, we have to take the idea of a Russian attack into account when making our plans.”  She is driving me back to the town centre after a visit to another impressive city high school.  At one street corner she points out a new building, half-completed, but with no sign of building in progress.  “That was going to be a Russian cultural centre,” she tells me, “but since the war in Ukraine started, the project has been abandoned.”

In several out-of-town shop car-parks I spot a handful of Belarus registration plates, quite a common sight in a city to which rich drivers from that country come in search of their fix of western goods and experiences.  But in the course of three recent visits, I didn’t see a single Russian number-plate.  Yet I heard plenty of Russian spoken in the streets, a reminder that this is a country with a significant Russian minority, whose status is ambiguous in a city where every bus destination screen proclaims in LED form: ‘Vilnius ❤️ Ukraine’ in alternation with the route-number and destination.  And unlike such gestures of solidarity in other parts of the West, these slogans indicate more than a mere gesture: Ukrainian citizens in Vilnius are given free travel on the city’s public transport.

My host tells me that acute worries abound concerning alleged provocations of the city’s Russian minority, as there are fears of Putin using such as a pretext for military attack on Lithuania.  “Ethnic Russians are very well treated here and have full rights, and if they don’t like it, there’s an obvious place they can go”.  It’s a statement which contrasts with the liberal, progressive atmosphere evident in the city, where LGBTQ+ rainbow banners adorn balconies, albeit not in quite the same quantity as those in Ukrainian blue and yellow.

Something just beneath the surface of this most attractive and liberal of cities attests to past horrors as well as current fears of a perilous tomorrow.  Vilnius’s old town is full of extraordinary churches, most Roman Catholic, and many in an exuberant baroque style.  All either appear in a remarkable state of repair, or are about to receive remarkable repairs, and a number have been converted to secular uses, such as the Basilica of St Catherine which is a leading music venue.

Yet history tells us that this city was one of the great urban centres of European Judaism, with around 100 synagogues in the early years of the twentieth century. Where are they now?  In the wake of the holocaust, repurposed, abandoned, demolished, largely forgotten – a tragic footnote to the mainstream historical narrative. I spot one historic synagogue still in use, but it lies off the tourist trail, behind a sadly inevitable security fence. The heart of the ghetto to which the city’s Jews were herded and then brutally confined in horrific circumstances during World War II is now an area of boutique hotels and tourist restaurants.

Vilnius is the capital of a nation-state, with Lithuanian culture at the heart of it.  The detailed history of this geographical territory lies far beyond the scope of this short article. But if you seek a clue to the historical complexity of this country and its capital, look for example at the plaque commemorating the founder of Vilnius’s historic university. The plaque proclaims in Latin: ‘Stephen Bathory 28th September 1533 – 12th December 1586. King of Poland. Grand Duke of Lithuania. Duke of Transylvania. Founder of the University of Vilnius.’

If you pause outside one of the city’s many Catholic Churches during a service, tune in to the spoken liturgy: it’s likely you’ll hear it in Polish, the language of a significant minority in the city, and a very significant constituent amongst regular Catholic worshippers.  Vilnius is a city which features large in the national narrative of Poland.

Yet it is recent history and its manipulation by Putin’s Russia which gnaws relentlessly at the very being of today’s citizens of Vilnius.  As debate over the status of Ukraine and a resolution to the conflict there preoccupies politicians and strategists, a visit to Vilnius and conversations with its citizens are a reminder that on the frontier between the West and Putin’s Russia and its satellite, history is here and now, and worries about containing an aggressive and mighty neighbour are existential, pressing concerns.

Any skeptics about the value of the West, and the appeal it commands for the citizens of the Baltic states, Lithuania not least, should take a visit to Vilnius.  Many a citizen of Vilnius would advise a visit sooner rather than later.