Almost every topic involves the history of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Readers will find everything here: watershed events in Lithuanian history, epoch-making victories, equally important cultural achievements, episodes and curiosities of everyday life, and great men and women. Its genre should perhaps be called a cocktail of history that combines image and word, academic knowledge and journalism, and various episodes and themes, past and present. This book, with its many illustrations, maps, and excerpts from primary sources, is also different. We live in the 21st century surrounded by modern digital technologies that are changing the conventional understanding of books. Now we are free, so let us not be afraid to challenge this still flowing river of lies and to honestly assess the past. Like in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, villains became heroes and heroes became criminals. During the Soviet occupation, the history of Lithuania was rewritten by strangers, silencing and falsifying facts for generations of people, brainwashing them. The tumult of lavish banquets, the triumph and fall of powerful empires, the murkiness of the political conspiracies, and the riveting romances of the royals are like a medley of images from old memories, grandparents’ stories, books, TV shows, and computer games.
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