Vilne, Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius

When I was a child, if ever the origins of the family were mentioned in conversation, and that wasn't often, I heard a different country named each time. The one time we came from Russia, they next we were from Poland and yet another time our family came from Lithuania. Rather confusing for a youngster growing up in Scotland. My family came from a number of places in modern-day Lithuania and Belarus but nowhere are the above claims more true than with regards to Vilnius. Vilnius was a prized and heavily disputed city of the Baltics. For the Lithuanians, Vilnius is the historical seat of their ancient kings. The Germans referred to it as "the jewel of the Polish crown". For the Jews, Vilnius was an important spiritual centre of Rabbinical Judaism which earned it the title Yerushalayim de Lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania). 'Jerusalem of Lithuania' has a strange ring to it in the context of modern-day Lithuania. However one has to realise that this was a term coined when Vilnius was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an empire stretching all the way from Estonia almost to the Black Sea coast of modern-day Ukraine, a territory of more than 1million square kilometres.

Betty's sister, Esther, with Esther's husband, Sam. This photo was taken around the turn of the century when Vilnius was part of the Russian Empire. In Cyrillic the name of the photographer, A. Tsinovets, Vilna [collection Diana Esptein]

Here is an historical timeline of the city of Vilnius charting its turbulent history.

Period	Rule	Event
6th July 1253	Grand Dutchy of Lithuania	Crowning of King Mindaugas
1st July 1569	Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth	Treaty of Lublin
24th October 1795	Russian Empire	Third partition of Poland
1915	German Empire	First World War
16th February 1918	Independant State of Lithuania	Act of Independance of Lithuania
5th January 1919	Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic	Soviet Army captures Vilnius
27th February 1919	Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic	A merge by Soviet authorities to strengthen the two Soviet Republics
21st April 1919	Second Polish Republic	Wilno offensive during the Polish-Soviet War
12th July 1920	Independant State of Lithuania	Soviet-Lithuanian Peace Treaty
9th October 1920	Republic of Central Lithuania	Formation of a state controlled by the Second Polish Republic
20th February 1922	Second Polish Republic	Vilnius Sejm vote for Polish annexation
19th September 1939	Soviet Union	Invasion of Poland after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
28th October 1939	Independant State of Lithuania	Soviet Army withdrawal from Vilnius
21st July 1940	Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic	Vote by pro-Soviet Seimas to become LSSR
24th June 1941	German Reich	Operation Barbarossa
13th July 1944	Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic	Capture of Vilnius by the Soviet Army
6th September 1991	Republic of Lithuania	Lithuania ceded by the Soviet Union

[Source: Wikipedia, compiled by author]