Qualla: Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights

Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guillaume Speurt from Vilnius, Lithuania, CC BY-SA 2.0. The basement is the part nobody forgets. Down a narrow staircase, past padded cells designed for prisoners declared mentally unstable, past a chamber labeled 'kitchen' on the original floor plan that was actually a place of execution, the museum has preserved what the KGB tried to erase. When the Soviets left this building in 1991, they covered the bullet-marked floor with concrete. The museum took the concrete back up. Over a thousand people were shot in this basement between 1944 and the early 1960s, roughly a third of them for the crime of resisting Soviet occupation. The building above stands across from Lukiškės Square in central Vilnius, an unremarkable stone facade completed in 1890 to house a tsarist court. Almost every regime that ruled Lithuania since then has used it for the same purpose.

Image: Guillaume Speurt from Vilnius, Lithuania | CC BY-SA 2.0

Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights: A Building of Many Hands

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernt Rostad from Oslo, Norway, CC BY 2.0. Few buildings in Europe carry such a sequence of occupants. Built as the courthouse of the Vilna Governorate in 1890, the structure was used by the German Empire during the First World War, then by the newborn Lithuanian army as a conscription center, then by Bolshevik commissars...

Image: Bernt Rostad from Oslo, Norway | CC BY 2.0

Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights: The Cost in Numbers

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mmh, CC0. Lithuania paid a steep price under Soviet rule. Mass deportations in June 1941 sent tens of thousands to Siberia, often in cattle cars in the middle of the night, and a second wave in 1944-1953 deported roughly 130,000 more. In total, around 280,000 Lithuanians were either deport...

Image: Mmh | CC0

Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights: What the Basement Holds

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kristian Frisk, CC BY-SA 2.0. The execution chamber is preserved as it was found, walls scarred where bullets passed through bodies. A glass floor in one section displays personal objects recovered from the mass graves at Tuskulėnai Manor, north of central Vilnius, where most of the basement victims were buri...

Image: Kristian Frisk | CC BY-SA 2.0

Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights: The Naming Question

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kaihsu Tai, CC BY-SA 3.0. Until 2018 the museum was called the Museum of Genocide Victims, a name that drew sustained international criticism for two reasons. First, only a small number of historians accept the framing of Soviet repression against ethnic Lithuanians as legal genocide, though the European ...

Image: Kaihsu Tai | CC BY-SA 3.0