This agreement gave Lithuanians control of the city of Vilnius (, ), the old Lithuanian capital, but a city with a majority Polish population.

On 3 October, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, German ambassador in Moscow, informed Joachim Ribbentrop that the Soviet government was willing to cede the city of Vilnius and its environs.

Vilnius (; see also other names ) is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 554, 060 ( 838, 852 together with Vilnius County ) as of 2011.

Vilnius is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality.

Vilnius is classified as a Gamma global city according to GaWC studies, and is known for its Old Town of beautiful architecture, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

In the year 2009, Vilnius was the European Capital of Culture, together with the Austrian city of Linz.

Following the November Uprising in 1831, Vilnius University was closed and Russian repressions halted the further development of the city.

On 20 February 1922 after the highly contested election in Central Lithuania, the entire area was annexed by Poland, with the city becoming the capital of the Wilno Voivodship ( Wilno being the name of Vilnius in Polish ).

On 28 October 1939, the Red Army withdrew from the city to its suburbs ( to Naujoji Vilnia ) and Vilnius was given over to Lithuania.

The current Constitution, as did the earlier Lithuanian Constitution of 1922, mentions that ..." the capital of the State of Lithuania shall be the city of Vilnius, the long-standing historical capital of Lithuania ".

Vilnius has been rapidly transformed, and the town has emerged as a modern European city.

* Lithuania: In the Letters of Gediminas, Vilnius is named as the capital city.

* Vilnius, Lithuania receives its coat-of-arms, granted to the city in the seventh year of its existence.

Soon after Jagiello accession to the Polish throne, Jagiello granted Vilnius a city charter like that of Kraków, modeled on the Magdeburg Law ; and Vytautas issued a privilege to a Jewish commune of Trakai on almost the same terms as privileges issued to the Jews of Poland in the reigns of Boleslaus the Pious and Casimir the Great.

Relations with Catholic Lithuania were slightly more complicated because of the Polish occupation of Vilnius, a city and archiepiscopal seat, which Lithuania claimed as its own.

With one runway ( with CAT II certification ) and an estimated 2 million passengers a year, Vilnius International Airport is base to Wizz Air and Small Planet airlines, focus city to Ryanair and is served by a number of European regular and low-cost airlines, offering direct and connecting flights to many destinations.

In recent years, there have been proposals to open a Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the capital city of Lithuania.

It was originally held at the two main markets in Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as in the city streets.

Gediminas ' Tower is an important state and historic symbol of the city of Vilnius and of Lithuania itself.

By June 1920, the Polish armies were past Vilnius, Minsk and ( allied with the Directorate of Ukraine ) reached Kiev, but then the massive Bolshevik counteroffensive moved the Poles out of most of Ukraine and on the northern front arrived at the outskirts of Warsaw.

Many cities were granted the German system of laws ( Magdeburg rights ), with the largest of these being Vilnius, since 1322 the capital of the Grand Duchy.

The voivodeships with a majority ethnic Lithuanian population were Vilnius, Trakai and Samogitian voivodeships, and these three voivodeships comprised the political center of the state.

In the southern angle of Trakai voivodeship and south-eastern part of Vilnius voivodeship there were also many Belarusians ; in some of the south-eastern areas they were the major linguistic group.

His father's family were entrepreneurs, while his mother's father was the chief rabbi of Vilnius.

Orthodox Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius | Cathedral of the Theotokos, with Gediminas's Tower in background Lithuanians at the time, were a tiny minority, less than 10 % of the population.

These actions were encouraged by Soviet Union leaders until it was decided to use Vilnius as one of the pretexts to begin interfering in Lithuanian internal affairs.

His remains were interred in Vilnius.

Priests and monks were also invited to come and build churches at Vilnius and Navahradak.

The Union of Vilnius and Radom of 1401 confirmed Vytautas's status as grand duke under Władysław's overlordship, while assuring the title of grand duke to the heirs of Władysław rather than those of Vytautas: should Władysław die without heirs, the Lithuanian boyars were to elect a new monarch.

From the 13th to 15th century, Baltic and Ukrainian lands were consolidated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with its initial capital unknown, but which presumably could have been either Navahrudak, Voruta, Trakai, Kernavė or Vilnius.

An additional 15, 000 had migrated to Ryazan or were settled as prisoners in the 16th and 17th centuries in Lithuania ( Vilnius, Grodno and Podolia ).

Other projects in Rio de Janeiro, Vilnius, Salzburg, Guadalajara and Taichung were also considered but not completed.

Apart from Magdeburg itself, notable towns based on Magdeburg Law ( or its local variants ) were Biecz, Frysztak, Sandomierz, Kraków, Kurów, Minsk, Polotsk, Poznań, Ropczyce, Łódź, Wrocław, Szczecin, Złotoryja, Vilnius, Trakai, Kaunas, Hrodna, Kiev, Lviv, Czernowitz ( currently Chernivtsi in Ukraine ), Brody, Lutsk, Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Sanok, Sniatyn, Nizhyn, Bardejov, Humenné and Krupina, among others.

After World War II, the excavation works were restarted by Vilnius University in 1979, and then again by the Lithuanian Institute of History between 1980 – 1983.

Later that year, the network connection lines, directly connecting Vilnius to Moscow, were shut down.

His heart and viscera were interred in the Chapel of St. Casimir of Vilnius Cathedral.

On January 13, 1991, fourteen non-violent protesters in Vilnius died and hundreds were injured defending the Vilnius Television Tower and the Parliament from Soviet assault troops and tanks.

The December note did not address the issue of Galicia, since it had been a part of the Austrian Empire rather than the Russian, nor did it address the Polish-Lithuanian dispute over the Vilnius Region, since those borders were demarcated at the time by the Foch Line.

The six biggest cities of Poland ( as for January 1, 1939 ) were Warsaw, Łódź, Lwów, Poznań, Kraków and Vilnius ( Wilno ).

The strikes resulted in a deepened backlash for the party, and as of 1910 there were legal Bundist trade unions in only four cities, Białystok, Vilnius, Riga and Lodz.

The building complex “ Vilnius Business Harbour ” was built in 2008, and one of its towers is now the 5th tallest building in Lithuania.

Gediminas Tower named after the founder of Vilnius, although it was built considerably later.

He protected the Catholic as well as the Orthodox clergy ; he raised the Lithuanian army to the highest state of efficiency then attainable ; defended his borders with a chain of strong fortresses and built numerous castles in towns including Vilnius.

At first he moved the capital to the newly built town of Trakai, but in c. 1320 re-established a permanent capital in Vilnius.

Towers taller than 300 metres were built in Kiev, Tashkent, Almaty, Riga, Berlin, Vilnius, Tallinn, Yerevan, St. Petersburg and Baku.

It was built in 1974 and was named as the 40th Vilnius high school.

It was built between 1503 and 1522 as a part of defensive fortifications for the city of Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Although several Orthodox churches were indeed built in Vilnius during his reign, later assertions about his baptism find no corroboration in sources dating from Algirdas ' life, leading most scholars to reject them as spurious.

The street, built in 1836, was initially known as St. George Avenue, Mickiewicz Street (), when Vilnius was under Polish rule ( 1922 – 1939 ) and Adolf Hitler Street during the Nazi Germany occupation.

The town was built on the main road leading from Vilnius to Minsk.

There is a bust monument built in his honor in the Old Town of Vilnius in the middle of the square of his name.

It is believed that St. Anne's Church, built in Vilnius Lower Castle before 1390, was so named in Anna's honor.

Kenesas in Lithuania were built in the 14th century ; in Trakai, Biržai, Kėdainiai, Panevėžys and Vilnius.

Fabijoniškės, located in the northern part of Vilnius, is one of the newest districts of Vilnius municipality, built in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

Three original wooden mosques remain now ( in villages of Nemėžis, Keturiasdešimt Totorių ( both in Vilnius district municipality ) and Raižiai ( Alytus district municipality ), typically having relatively large Muslim populations ), as well as a new brick mosque built in Kaunas during the period of interwar independence of Lithuania ( in the 1930s ) to commemorate the anniversary of Vytautas, the duke who brought Tatars and Islam to Lithuania.

The old Astronomical observatory of Vilnius University, opened in 1753, and the new University observatory near the Vingis Park, built in 1921, gradually appeared inside the Vilnius city with no conditions for astronomical observations.

Siemens Arena was built in the Vilnius Entertainment Park territory and is the first object of this park, which is still under development.