Bernardine Cemetery

It was established in 1810 by the Bernardine monks of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, just east of the city center in the Užupis district, and is situated on an embankment of the Vilnia river.

Beginning in 2005, on the initiative of the Adam Mickiewicz Polish-Lithuanian foundation together with the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (one of the main initiators of the project was Andrzej Przewoźnik, a Polish historian who died in the airplane crash in Smolensk in 2010), conservation work on the cemetery (known in Polish as Cmentarz Bernardyński na Zarzeczu) commenced with the aim of restoring the necropolis for 2010, the two hundredth anniversary of the founding.

The restoration work was funded by private donors as well as through a joint effort by the Polish and Lithuanian governments.

More than a hundred historic tombstones have been renovated, most of them those of Polish and Lithuanian participants of the January Uprising, Home Army soldiers and the past faculty of the Stefan Batory University.

Numerous famous scientists, painters and Vilnius University, intellectuals, professors and other renowned people are buried there including:

Entrance to the cemetery
Chapel in the cemetery, built to commemorate the consecration of the cemetery