Vilnius and Its Population

Vilnius and its population.

The fact that the name of the biggest city in Lithuania, which is also its capital, has several slightly

different versions, Vilnius for Lithuanians, Wilno for Poles, and Vilna for Jews and Russians,

reflects its history full of events, a sort of melting pot of races, in which many ethnic groups

contended with each other for the predominance. Although its ethnic profile has changed several

times over the century, the Lithuanian one has always been a multicultural society since Medioeval

times. Nowadays, out of its 560.200 inhabitants, approximately the 57% is classified as

Lithuanian, which means direct descendant of the original Baltic tribes.

Poles form the largest minority, 18,7% of the population, and even within that small number, the

ethnic composition is quite complex: some of its members, descended from families with

Lithuanian origins, but influenced by Polish people during the long period of union with Poland,

while others are descendants of Belorussian turned Polish themselves.

With a rate of 14%, the Russians constitute the other main minority, although their number has

declined significantly since the collapse of communism, and continues to do so. In the Republic of

Lithuania between the wars, lived about 50,000 Russians, an amount that increased by seven times

during the Soviet era, when most of them were established in the country simultaneously with the

mass deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia. There are tensions between the local and the Russians,

who are often considered an undesirable discard of a regime of foreign occupation. However, since

the Russian minority is too small to constitute any threat, the relations are generally far more

relaxed here than in Latvia or Estonia.

During World War II, the Nazis Germans and the locals murdered 80,000 Jews from Vilnius, at the

forest of Ponar (Paneriai) and other nearby places, thus causing the almost complete...