Onet pencils a night of 1930s foxtrots into Vilnius’s Bernardine Garden

Polish portal Onet has noted that on 21 August Vilnius would once again dance to the music of the 1930s. The free open-air evening in the Bernardine Garden was to be hosted together with actor Maciej Musiał.

Onet presents the evening as a short trip back in time, to an era when dancing was part of everyday city life. Mała Orkiestra Dancingowa and Lithuania’s The Schwings were set to play live, with tangos, foxtrots, waltzes and swing, and songs in Lithuanian too.

The venue is no accident. In the early twentieth century, public dance evenings in parks and gardens were a regular fixture of Vilnius, and the Bernardine Garden, with its wooden pavilion and later its Summer Theatre, was among the best-loved meeting places. For Musiał, whose grandfather came from Vilnius, the garden carries a personal note: it was a place his grandfather used to visit. Historian Waldemar Wołkanowski reminds Onet’s readers that music and social life have long belonged to the city’s identity.

The portal also points out that the first edition, held in Vilnius in 2025, was the project’s debut outside Poland. Go Vilnius adds that Poles are choosing the city for short breaks in growing numbers (104,000 visited in 2025), and that an evening like this lets shared history be experienced together.