Stuttgarter Zeitung reports from Vilnius on five thousand walks past a royal secret

A walled-up niche, a bundle of 1939 newspapers and a corridor that looked like any other: German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung follows the trail of royal crowns that vanished beneath Vilnius Cathedral and have now come back into view.

The lost crowns of Vilnius Cathedral have caught the attention of Stuttgarter Zeitung, which tells their story to its German readers. When war loomed in 1939, the crowns and regalia of Alexander Jagiellon and of queens Elizabeth of Austria and Barbara Radziwill were sealed away in the cathedral crypts, and decades of searching and speculation followed. The paper describes how, in late 2024, specialists with endoscopic cameras finally traced them to a bricked-up stair niche, in a section of the crypt where guided tours already pass. The treasure lay wrapped in newspapers of the day, together with the rulers’ own jewellery, including gold rings set with rare gemstones.

The paper adds a detail that is hard to forget. Alina Pavasarytė from the cathedral’s museum administration has worked there for more than ten years and reckons she walked past the spot some 5,000 times. The corridor looked so ordinary that it would never have occurred to her to stop.

The names behind the find carry weight. The Jagiellons and the Habsburgs were among the most powerful dynasties in Europe, and Lithuania and Poland together once formed the continent’s largest state, reaching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The pieces are now on show in the exhibition “Hidden Within” at the Vilnius Church Heritage Museum until 30 January 2027. Curator Giedrė Mickūnaitė describes them as priceless.