- Type
- Fortress
- Origins
- 1879 · 19th century per Wikidata: founding, first mention or construction
- Coordinates
- 54.8989°, 23.8854°
History
In 1879 Tsar Alexander II approved the building of a fortress at Kaunas to guard the Russian Empire's western border against Germany. From 1882 a ring of forts, batteries and depots rose around the city, extended and modernised right up to 1915. In August 1915, during the First World War, the German army took the fortress after a siege of only about two weeks. Between the wars the forts served the Lithuanian army and as prisons. Under German occupation the Ninth Fort became a site of mass executions in which tens of thousands of people were murdered, most of them Jews from the Kaunas ghetto.
What to see
The most visited site is the Ninth Fort, with its museum, casemates and the monumental memorial to the victims unveiled in 1984. The Seventh Fort houses a museum on the history of the fortress and its soldiers, and elsewhere you can see ruined forts, ramparts, powder magazines and old barracks. A trail through the districts of Kaunas shows the scale of the former defences.
Wikipedia article Wikidata Q2478089
Popularity: articles about this site in 18 Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia language editions and others).