Qualla: Vytautas the Great War Museum

Vytautas the Great War Museum: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vcohen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every day at midday, 49 bells in the tower above Kaunas play Oi, neverk motušėle - Don't Cry, Mother - a Lithuanian war song from another century, drifting across Vienybės aikštė while office workers eat their lunches and tourists tilt their heads up. The carillon is part of the Vytautas the Great War Museum, and the song was chosen on purpose. Inside the building is the wreckage of an aircraft called Lituanica, the bones of a transatlantic flight that ended in a German pine forest in 1933. Don't cry, mother. The bells say it again at noon tomorrow, and the day after, and every day since 1956.

Image: Vcohen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vytautas the Great War Museum: An Art Deco Statement of Independence

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-shared) Hugo.arg, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum was founded in 1921 by physician and archaeologist Vladas Nagevičius, three years after Lithuania declared independence and while the new republic was still working out what it meant to be Lithuanian. The original collection outgrew its first home, and a new building w...

Image: (WT-shared) Hugo.arg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vytautas the Great War Museum: Lituanica

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanislovas01, CC BY-SA 4.0. The aircraft hangs inside, what is left of it. On 15 July 1933, two Lithuanian-American pilots - Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas - took off from New York's Floyd Bennett Field in a Bellanca CH-300 they had renamed Lituanica. They flew non-stop across the Atlantic and reached E...

Image: Stanislovas01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vytautas the Great War Museum: The Crypt and the Erasure

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HaSt, CC BY-SA 4.0. Behind the museum is the Crypt to Those Perished for the Freedom of Lithuania, built in 1938. When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in 1940, the crypt was vandalized. When the Soviets came back after 1944, what was left of the memorial to Lithuanian independence fighters was destro...

Image: HaSt | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vytautas the Great War Museum: Bells from Mechelen

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rimantas Lazdynas, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 35-bell Kaunas Carillon was cast in Belgium in 1935 and first played from the tower in 1937. The first carillonist was the composer Viktoras Kuprevičius. His son Giedrius took over later. After the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in the Netherlands restored the instrument in 2005-200...

Image: Rimantas Lazdynas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vytautas the Great War Museum: What the Cases Hold

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Creative at lt.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The galleries cover Lithuanian military history from prehistoric times forward: bronze-age weapons, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at its 14th- and 15th-century maximum extent, the defense of Kaunas Fortress against the Germans in 1915, the army of the interwar republic, the partis...

Image: Creative at lt.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0