Asta Plechavičiūtė (Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania)
The presentation invites you to travel around Vilnius. It is a twenty-minute-long “sightseeing tour,” during which we visit the places that children and teenagers envision when reading the books intended for them. About 120,920 young Vilnius residents (0-17 years old) currently live in Vilnius. A large number of them visit the city as tourists, some return from emigration, while others only temporarily settle here to escape from the calamities of war, etc. Despite this considerably high number, several generations of Vilnius residents grew up without books in which they could recognize their domestic space, where they played games, grew up, and lived through complex teenage experiences.
Therefore, the presentation oversees the more prominent changes that took place at the beginning of the 21st century, when Vilnius began to appear more often in literature for children and teenagers. In order to introduce children to the city’s historical personalities and complicated periods in history, more special cognitive literature about the city as a space in general and its specific places had been published. What kind of map of Vilnius unfolds before the eyes of children and teenagers, when they read the fairy tales and legends about Vilnius, in which fictional characters live, fall in love, and grieve? Which places in Vilnius did writers pay the most attention to, and which ones are still the ‘white spots’ on the map?