Vilnius is the capital city of Lithuania, a small country in northern Europe on the east side of the Baltic Sea. It is Lithuania's largest city, with roughly half a million people, and it is where the government sits. Its old centre is famous — narrow streets, many churches, a lot of it built four or five hundred years ago and still standing — and it is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The city has a long and complicated history: it was the heart of a large medieval state, later ruled from Poland and then from Russia, and for most of the last century it was inside the Soviet Union. Lithuania became independent again in 1990, and since 2004 it has been in the European Union. In English we say it roughly VIL-nee-us. Because it is a place name, it is always written with a capital V, and it takes no "the" — you go to Vilnius, not to the Vilnius. One useful thing for a student: place names like this often keep the spelling of the local language, which is why the ending -ius looks unusual to English eyes. English did not invent this word; it borrowed it whole.