Guides

A reception will be held on 24 September on 19:00-21:00 at Grey Restaurant, Pilies g. 2, Vilnius, 01124 (€40; please include it with your registration fee if you wish to attend).

The excursions will take place on the afternoon of 26 September. 

• Tour guided by dr. Jekaterina Lavrinec, the co-founder of the Laboratory for Urban games and research Laimikis.lt, Vilnius TECH Faculty of Creative Industries

  Meeting point: Europe's square, by the fontain, Konstitucijos pr. 2, Vilnius

  Reading Šnipiškės: Urban Stories, Signs and the Urbingo Game  
   

  This interactive urban walk invites conference participants to explore Šnipiškės, one of Vilnius’ historic neighbourhoods, through the urban game Urbingo, developed by Laimikis.lt as a tool for exploring rapidly changing urban areas and documenting their material culture and local stories. Long represented as a marginal and crime-ridden neighbourhood, this historic suburb of Vilnius has many faces. Once associated with crafts, including ceramic production and glassmaking, Šnipiškės later accommodated new urban functions. The twentieth century brought the tragic loss of many of the families who had inhabited these houses, followed by profound changes in the neighbourhood’s ways of life, later echoed in the informal nickname “Shanghai”. While perceptions of Šnipiškės as a marginal neighbourhood have gradually shifted in recent years, behind its changing image lies a complex cultural landscape shaped by different stories and everyday practices.

  
  The walk will begin with an introduction to the history and transformation of this historic, multicultural neighbourhood, as well as to community-based activities in the area. Participants will then use Urbingo cards to navigate the wooden part of Šnipiškės, searching for architectural details, signs and traces of everyday life and connecting them with stories associated with particular places. Rather than presenting the neighbourhood through a single historical narrative, the walk approaches Šnipiškės as a multilayered urban landscape: wooden architecture, street patterns, and material details are explored alongside local stories and practices. In this way, participants encounter both the visible fabric of the neighbourhood and less visible layers of knowledge preserved and transmitted by its residents. Urban games can thus become tools for reading the city, documenting local heritage, and bringing together historical knowledge, material traces and local stories.

   

• Tour guided by dr. Laimonas Briedis, the author of the book Vilnius: City of Strangers (2009)

  Meeting point: at the fountain in the Sarbievijus Courtyard of the Department of Philology

  Vilnius: a stranger in Europe

  
  The tour explores Vilnius’s unsettled and meandering position in Europe. Following the paths of several foreign visitors and native exiles, this walking travelogue offers a semi-fictional engagement with locations across the Old Town, foregrounding the city’s polychromatic experiences and multicultural narratives. In a patchwork fashion, the tour traverses the textual and cultural spaces of Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, German, and other linguistic communities. Some of the material will be drawn from the lecture Beyond Vilnius: The Departure from Things Human (September 25), though the two are separate events. At the heart of the tour is a lingering question: whose voice speaks through the memory of Vilnius, and who is there to attend to it?

  
  The tour will last approximately an hour and a half, with some time reserved for questions and discussions. Please dress appropriately for the weather and wear comfortable shoes, as the streets and pavements of the Old Town can occasionally be tricky terrain. We will meet at 15.00 at the fountain in the Sarbievijus Courtyard of the Department of Philology. See you there!

Train

Airport–Vilnius route to the central station

Bus

Routes 88, 3G, 88N (night), 1, 2

Taxi

Estimated €9–16

Car sharing

CityBee and electric car options available

Buses

1G, 53

Trolleybuses

2, 7, 20

Public transport tickets cost €1–1.25 depending on purchase method. Vilniečio Card recommended for longer stays. The card is activated by tapping it on the reader on a bus or trolleybus. More information here.