KGB Museum, Vilnius

Vilnius's former KGB headquarters, on Gediminas Avenue directly opposite Lukiškės Square, has one of the heaviest addresses in the city – a building that was a Soviet prison, then a Gestapo headquarters, then a KGB prison again, all inside a single decade.

A building with three occupations' worth of history

The basement first became a prison in 1940, right after Lithuania's Soviet annexation. Nazi Germany took the building over as Gestapo headquarters from 1941 to 1944 during its own occupation, and when Soviet forces retook the country, the KGB moved back in – running offices, a prison and an interrogation centre there from 1944 until Lithuanian independence in 1991. The museum inside, opened in 1992 as the Museum of Genocide Victims, was renamed the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in 2018, after international criticism that its original framing centred Soviet-era repression while giving little space to the Holocaust – a 2018 New York Times piece quoted historian Dovid Katz calling it "a 21st-century version of Holocaust denial." A small dedicated Holocaust exhibition was added in 2011, addressing a real gap given that more Jews were killed in Lithuania than in Germany itself, in both absolute and relative terms.

What's inside

A guided visit covers the building's former prison cells and execution chamber, along with interrogation rooms and exhibits on Soviet-era deportations and Lithuania's anti-Soviet partisan resistance – the kind of detail that turns an ordinary-looking office building into one of the more unsettling stops in the city.

Booking

The guided KGB Museum tour runs about 2 hours with a live guide, and is a well-reviewed, frequently sold-out option worth booking a day or two ahead. Pair it with the Soviet Vilnius walking tour for the wider city context, or the Vilnius Old Town walking tour for a completely different, older side of the city.