Participants of the NATO PA Spring Session will be shown exhibitions featuring our country’s history and landscape

During the Spring Session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to take place in Vilnius from 30 May to 1 June, about 600 politicians and accompanying persons from more than 50 countries will have the opportunity to see the exhibitions featuring our country’s history and landscape.

The Exhibition Gallery in Building 1 of the Seimas houses the exhibition Lithuania: 10 Years in NATO that is arranged by the Office of the Seimas in cooperation with the Ministry of National Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that tells the story of our membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The exhibition presents Lithuania’s collaboration with other NATO countries and joint military exercises, participation in international peace-keeping missions, and the NATO air policing mission. It also provides an overview of our country’s involvement in NATO activities and in solving the key defence and security matters.

 The book exhibition 10th Anniversary of Lithuania’s Membership of NATO organised by the Seimas library will also be displayed to the visitors.

 The Exhibition Gallery in Building 1 also hosts the exhibition The Road to Freedom, where photographs and documents tell about Lithuania’s half-a-century long struggle for freedom. The exhibition was staged by the Office of the Seimas, the National Museum of Lithuania, and the Museum of Genocide Victims according to the concept of historian Dr Algirdas Jakubčionis. It opened first on 5 June 2008 in the Seimas during the international conference Fall of the Berlin Wall: from Budapest to Vilnius and was later exhibited in the Latvian Saeima, the Institute of the Latvian People’s Front, Lithuanian embassies, and the European Parliament in Brussels.

 Visitors will also have an opportunity to get to know our country better by viewing the photography exhibition Unseen Lithuania displayed in the passage between Buildings 2 and 3. The album Unseen Lithuania by Marius Jovaiša is the largest and most successful photo album in Lithuania. Marius Jovaiša captured a bird’s-eye view of the most beautiful landscapes, objects, phenomena and natural conditions in Lithuania and boldly expanded the traditional boundaries of aerography.

The Exhibition Gallery in Building 3 houses the exhibition Parallels. Lithuanian Architecture: Three Eras, Three Faces. The exposition by three authors shows the most prominent examples of the Lithuanian architecture representing the Modern Era (from 1918) in the Lithuanian history.

The Memorial to the Victims of 13 January at the Seimas will also open for the visitors. On 30 May – 1 June, the exposition will be supplemented with photos and children’s drawings illustrating the events in Kyiv in 2013–2014 and authentic items from Maidan. The situation in Ukraine is high on the agenda of the Spring Session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Goda Dobradziejūtė, Public Relations Unit, Communications Department, Office of the Seimas, tel. +370 5 239 6875, e-mail: [email protected]