Voruta

Voruta is named in a written source only once: the Hypatian Chronicle records that Mindaugas, the first and only crowned king of Lithuania, defended himself there in 1251 during an internal war against his nephews Tautvilas and Edivydas and their ally, Duke Vykintas of Samogitia. By the chronicle's account, rather than meet the besieging army in open battle, Mindaugas held the castle and sent his brother-in-law out on a night raid that scattered part of the attacking force; Tautvilas then withdrew to Samogitia. Mindaugas is recorded holding a castle on two further occasions in the sources, but neither its name nor its location is given, and it is unclear whether the two mentions even refer to the same place.

Some 19th- and 20th-century historians dubbed Voruta "the first capital of Lithuania" and tried to pin down its location; around fifteen sites have been proposed in total, and some of those theories have since been largely discredited. Others argue Voruta was not an actual place, but a misreading of a word meaning "capital"; the philologist Kazimieras Būga separately held that the word voruta itself simply meant "castle", or perhaps "wooden fortress".

The Šeimyniškėliai hillfort, in Anykščiai district, was first proposed as the site in 1935 by the Latvian ethnologist Eduards Volters and has more recently been argued for by historian Tomas Baranauskas and archaeologist G. Zabiela, based partly on the resemblance between "Voruta" and the name of a stream running past the hillfort, and partly on archaeological finds there of a wooden castle built around the mid-13th century in a previously unoccupied place. Despite the uncertainty, Voruta remains a familiar name in Lithuania, spoken of more often as a legendary early capital than pinned down as an actual fortress.