Vilnius University

• 1. Introduction

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  By 1823, Vilnius University's student body had grown large enough to surpass Oxford's. That single fact signals what this Lithuanian institution has been across four centuries. It was never a modest provincial school but a significant center of European intellectual life.

  Stephen Báthory, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, established the university in 1579. In the centuries since, tsars have shuttered it and occupiers have seized its buildings. Whole faculties went underground, holding lectures and exams in private apartments. Scholars were deported to Soviet labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. A future Nobel laureate sat in its classrooms. How the institution survived all of that, and what it looks like today more than four centuries later, is what this documentary explores.

• 2. The Jesuit Academy

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  Walerian Protasewicz, the bishop of Vilnius, purchased several buildings in the city center in 1569. He established a preparatory college whose first students enrolled the following year. In 1570, Protasewicz also founded a library at the college. Sigismund II Augustus donated 2,500 books to that library in its first year of existence.

  Stephen Báthory granted the institution its formal university charter on the 1st of April, 1579. The institution took the name Academia et Universitas Vilnensis Societatis Iesu. On the 30th of October that same year, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull officially recognizing Vilnius College as a full university. From its inception, the university could confer Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees.

  The first rector, Piotr Skarga, recruited scholars from across Europe and oversaw the expansion of the library. Kazimierz Lew Sapieha was among the patrons who financed that growth. Lithuanians made up roughly a third of the student body in those early years. By 1586, approximately 700 students were enrolled; Germans, Poles, Swedes, and Hungarians filled the remaining seats. All instruction was conducted in Latin.

  In 1575, Duke Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł and Elżbieta Ogińska sponsored a printing house for the academy. It was one of the first such presses in the region. The press issued books in Latin and Polish. In 1595, it produced something unprecedented for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. That year, the press printed the first surviving book in the Lithuanian language within the Grand Duchy: Kathechismas, by Mikalojus Daukša.

  For two centuries after its founding, Vilnius University was the easternmost university in Europe.

• 3. Observatory and Constitution

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  Tomasz Żebrowski established the first astronomical observatory in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1753. It was only the fourth such professional facility in all of Europe. Twenty years later, the Commission of National Education took control of the academy. That body, formally established in 1773, has since been recognized as the world's first ministry of education.

  By 1773, Polish had replaced Latin as the language of instruction across the institution. The commission drew up a new statute and reshaped the academy into a modern university. A generation formed under this curriculum made European history on the 3rd of May, 1791. That day, they approved the Constitution of Lithuania and Poland, the second written constitution in the world after that of the United States.

  Professors improved the Astronomical Observatory, established a botanical garden, and organized the first scientific expedition to search for natural resources in Lithuania. Simonas Daukantas, shaped by this intellectual environment, became the first person to write Lithuania's history in the Lithuanian language. The poet Juliusz Słowacki was another figure who emerged from this era, later becoming a leading presence in Polish culture.

  Even after the abolition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the university maintained its intellectual vitality. In 1803, Tsar Alexander I accepted a new statute for the institution and renamed it the Imperial University of Vilna.

• 4. Closure and Rebirth

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  In 1823, a group of students were arrested for conspiring against the tsar. The poet Adam Mickiewicz was among them, charged through his membership in the secret society Filomaci. During the uprising of 1831, many students joined the rebels. Tsar Nicholas I responded on the 1st of May, 1832, by closing the university.

  Two faculties were carved off as separate institutions. The medical faculty was eventually absorbed into the University of Kyiv. The Catholic theological academy was later relocated to Poland, where it became the Catholic University of Lublin. The repression that followed banned Polish and Lithuanian from public education throughout the region.

  The first effort to restart intellectual life in Vilnius came on the 22nd of October, 1906. Polish intellectuals founded the Society of Friends of Science. During World War I, German occupation cut those efforts short. German officials closed the higher-education courses the society had tried to establish.

  Plans to reopen the university on the 1st of January, 1919, collapsed when the Red Army occupied the city. Polish forces expelled the Soviets in April 1919. Józef Piłsudski then authorized the opening of Stefan Batory University on the 28th of August, 1919.

  Despite being the smallest and most poorly financed Polish university of its time, Stefan Batory quickly attracted scholars of international standing. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Marian Zdziechowski, and Henryk Niewodniczański were among those on its faculty. Among its students was Czesław Miłosz, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. The library grew to 600,000 volumes, including historic and cartographic materials still in the university's possession today.

  During the 1930s, anti-Semitism at Stefan Batory intensified sharply. The university introduced a system of ghetto benches, requiring Jewish students to sit in separate areas. Violence broke out; the university closed for two weeks during January 1937. Rector Władysław Marian Jakowicki resigned in protest over the ghetto bench policy. 54 Jewish students were expelled, though they were allowed to return the following day under a compromise arrangement.

  When Soviet forces entered Poland in September 1939, the university's next ordeal was already underway.

• 5. War and Soviet Rule

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  Lithuanian authorities closed the university on the 15th of December, 1939. All faculty, staff, and approximately 3,000 students were dismissed at once. Around 600 students ended up in a refugee camp. A new Lithuanian-language institution was opened in its place, governed according to the statute of Vytautas Magnus University of Kaunas.

  Professors Iwo Jaworski, Kazimierz Petrusewicz, and Bronisław Wróblewski were among those who refused to stop teaching after the closure. Diplomas awarded through these clandestine courses were later accepted by Polish universities.

  Between September 1939 and July 1941, Soviet authorities arrested and deported nineteen Polish faculty members. Nine of them perished. Five were victims of the Katyn massacre: Professors Tadeusz Kolaczyński, Piotr Oficjalski, Włodzimierz Godłowski, Konstanty Pietkiewicz, and Konstanty Sokol-Sokolowski.

  German forces occupied the city in 1941. Under the Nazi occupation, all Jewish teachers were expelled from the university, followed by all Jewish students. Nearly all Jewish members of the university community subsequently became victims of the Holocaust. In 1944, many Polish students participated in Operation Ostra Brama. Most were later arrested by the NKVD and suffered reprisals for their involvement with the Armia Krajowa resistance.

  After 1945, most of the Polish mathematicians, humanists, and biologists joined Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. A number of the medical faculty formed the core of the newly founded Medical University of Gdańsk. In 1955, the institution was given a new Soviet name: the Vilnius Order of the Red Banner of Labour State University of Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas.

  Mass repressions eased after Stalin's death, but political persecution persisted. Between 1958 and 1961, the Department of Lithuanian Literature was targeted in a sustained political campaign. Four teachers were forced to leave the university as a result.

  On the 12th of June, 1990, the Supreme Council of Lithuania approved a new statute for the university, declaring its autonomy.

• 6. Science and Memory

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  Professor Virginijus Šikšnys leads the Department of Protein-DNA Interactions at Vilnius University's Institute of Biotechnology. He contributed fundamental research to the development of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology. That technology is often called 'gene scissors.' For his work, Šikšnys received the Kavli Prize in nanosciences, the Warren Alpert prize, and the Novozymes prize.

  In 2004, Professor Valentina Dagienė established the International Challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking, known as BEBRAS. The name is Lithuanian for 'Beaver.' BEBRAS has since been adopted in over 60 countries, reaching school students of all ages.

  More than a third of all doctoral theses completed in Lithuania are defended at Vilnius University. Each year, the university produces over 3,000 research publications and runs more than 400 research projects. In 2020, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory established a Partnership Institute at the university's Life Sciences Centre, focused on genome editing research.

  Since 2016, the university has belonged to the Coimbra Group, a network of prestigious European universities. It is also a founding member of the ARQUS European University Alliance, which unites nine research universities across Europe. Partners include institutions in Granada, Graz, Leipzig, Lyon, Maynooth, Minho, Padua, and Wroclaw.

  In the QS World University Rankings for 2025, the institution placed 439th globally and 72nd among Northern European universities. The Recovering Memory project, launched in 2016, established a symbolic Memory Diploma to honor members of the university community expelled by totalitarian regimes. The Vilnius University Foundation, established on the 6th of April, 2016, became the first university endowment in Lithuania.

  The library Walerian Protasewicz founded in 1570 now holds over five million documents, making it the oldest academic library in the Baltic region.