50 Litų 150th anniversary of the National Museum of Lithuania

The Lithuanian National Museum traces its institutional origins to 1855, when the Museum of Antiquities was established in Vilnius under the Imperial Russian administration — an act of quiet cultural preservation at a time when Lithuanian language publishing was subject to severe censorship. The 150th anniversary this coin marks falls during Lithuania's first decade of renewed independence, lending the occasion a pointed historical weight that the museum's founders under tsarist rule could not have anticipated.