Who is the most outstanding person who lived in Vilnius – Čiurlionis, Mickiewicz or Miłosz?

Which Vilnius person left the biggest mark on the culture of Europe and the whole World, judging from a 21st century point of view?

Contemporary Lithuania which grew out of the national revival that occurred on the threshold of the 19th and 20th centuries puts forward Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911). Čiurlionis was the first to start merging music with visual arts; nobody had tried to paint Sonatas before him.

Vilnius had a thriving cultural life before that as well, and Polish Romanticism was born in Vilnius when Poetry by Adam Mickiewicz was published in Vilnius in 1822.

More than a hundred years later Czesław Milosz, who put a sense of freedom into poetry, consciously acknowledged this poetic tradition. To Milosz, Vilnius forever remained the city of his youth and studies.

Accepting the Nobel literary Prize in 1980 Czesław Miłosz said: It is a blessing if one receives from fate to be schooled and attend university studies in such a city as Vilno. A bizarre city of baroque architecture transplanted to northern forests and of history fixed in every stone, a city of forty Roman Catholic churches and of numerous synagogues. In those days the Jews called it a Jerusalem of the North.