Lithuanian prison, once a film set for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, could be turned into a major museum under plans put forward by the Lithuanian government. The Lukiškės prison, a historic prison located in the centre of the Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was built in 1904, when Lithuania was ruled by the Russian tsars, and closed its doors in 2019.
The Ministry of Finance has approved the regeneration plan, working in partnership with Turto bankas. Part of the prison building will also be given over to commercial and corporate bodies. Inga Urbonaitė-Vadoklienė, the project manager at Turto Bankas, tells ,“We are open to all kinds of suggestions. For instance, some [of the prison] premises could be turned into hotels, restaurants or other commercial spaces, while others may be used for cultural purposes. The prison complex could be a multifunctional centre and combine both cultural and commercial activities.”
Felix Ackermann, an academic at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, writes that “the prison complex, as it is today, could easily be a museum of 20th-century Vilnius. Such a museum would include Tsarist repressions against various nationalists and revolutionaries, particularly after the revolution of 1905. During World War I, the German-occupying regime used the prison for the mass incarceration of political activists like the Lithuanian publisher and lawyer Jonas Vileišis.”