The Adam Mickiewicz House Museum on Bernardinų Street marks the apartment where Poland's greatest poet — and one of the towering figures of 19th-century European Romanticism — lived as a student at Vilnius University in the early 19th century. Mickiewicz was born in the Vilnius region (then part of the Russian-controlled Duchy of Lithuania), and Vilnius, which he called Wilno, was central to his imagination.
The museum is small — two rooms displaying manuscripts, portraits, and objects associated with Mickiewicz's time in the city. For anyone who has read Mickiewicz (particularly the epic poem "Pan Tadeusz," set in the Lithuania of his childhood), the rooms have a particular resonance. The museum is also a reminder that Vilnius was a multilingual city of Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Russians, and Byelorussians, and that its culture belongs to all of them. Bernardinų St. 11. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00.