Heaven Hell & the Snake Walking Tour by PhD Historian in Vilnius

They kept a snake in the house and fed it milk by hand; killing it brought disaster. That is where the walk opens, at the Bastion, with the Basilisk the city invented to explain its dead. From there: the Gate of Dawn and its wall of 8,000 silver hearts, legs and eyes left to buy a cure from heaven; three martyrs killed in 1347 whose bodies still refuse to decay; the Basilian Gate, built by the church that went over to Rome in 1596 to keep Moscow from claiming it; St Casimir's, built by a son to undo the nation his father turned Protestant; where Stendhal watched Napoleon's army freeze in 1812; the lane where a mob burned the rival church; and Cathedral Square, where a pagan fire burns under the cathedral of the last country in Europe to give up its gods.

Led by Dr Simonas Strelcovas, PhD historian and former museum director, from his own research, not a script. Not what year a building went up, but how ordinary people believed. For curious travellers and readers of history.