Gediminas' Tower

Tradition holds that Grand Duke Gediminas was hunting in the woods of the Šventaragis Valley when he brought down a wild bull on a hilltop above the meeting of the Neris and Vilnia rivers, grew weary, and camped there for the night. He dreamed of a great iron wolf standing on the hill and howling as loudly as a hundred wolves; his court magician, Lizdeika, read the dream as an omen to found a city on that spot, one that would become famous across the world. Gediminas built the city, naming it Vilnius after the Vilnia, with a castle at its centre — the castle whose only surviving part is the tower that still bears his name.

Historians and archaeologists believe the first fortification on the hill, raised under Gediminas in timber, may date to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Wanting the castle hill ringed by water, he had a moat dug and filled, diverting the Vilnia into the new course it still follows around the hill's eastern side.

Grand Duke Vytautas is credited with completing a brick castle on the hill in 1409, yet the French diplomat Ghillebert de Lannoy, who visited in 1413–1414, described the castle he saw as standing on a sandy hill, built of wood and reinforced with brick, stone and earthworks — with the town below still open and unwalled. In 1419 fire destroyed the timber castle. It was rebuilt in stronger materials, unhewn stone and brick bound with lime mortar, in Gothic style, with three towers, a ceremonial palace and outbuildings; the surviving western tower rose four storeys, square at its base and octagonal above, while of the smaller northern tower only remnants survive. The castle was repaired and altered again in the sixteenth century without its overall appearance changing; a drawing from that period shows it reduced to two round, three-storey towers ringed by defensive palace buildings pierced with loopholes.

By the seventeenth century the Upper Castle had been abandoned and a prison for the nobility was installed within it. Fighting during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars with Russia left the castle badly damaged, and it was not rebuilt afterwards.

The surviving western tower was rebuilt in 1933 by the Polish architect Jan Borowski, then restored again in 1948–1949, when a museum was installed across its three floors beneath a viewing platform. A further reconstruction in 1995 reinforced the hillside and the paths leading up to it and added lighting, and the museum's exhibition was renewed at the same time. On 7 October 1988, during the movement to restore Lithuanian independence, the flag of Lithuania was re-hoisted atop the tower. Gediminas' Tower was depicted on the former national currency, the litas, and is named in Lithuanian patriotic poems and folk songs.

The tower belongs to the Vilnius Castles Reserve and is Vilnius's most visited site, drawing an estimated 150,000-plus people a year; its museum holds models of the Vilnius castles of the 14th–17th centuries alongside armaments and iconographic material. A reconstruction of the Grand Dukes' palace that once stood at the foot of the hill was completed in 2009.