Lukiškės Prison offers guided tours in English around the penitentiary, which show you the old temporary holding cells, the interrogation room, the exercise blocks, and finally, the cell where criminals sentenced to life spent their time.
It also served as the biggest and most modern prison in the Russian Empire, and was the only prison to build places of worship for Russian-Orthodox, Roman-Catholic, and Jewish inmates.
Martyna first took me around the courtyard and pointed out the different blocks, the festival square, plus the new sauna shack – which is in fact a new addition along with its ice-y plunge pool.
The cells had all been emptied since the prisoners left, so the confined spaces the inmates lived in felt much colder and unfeeling than they would have before.
The off-bright lighting was uncomfortable, and all I could think about was the fact that two people could share one of these cells and how my childhood bedroom, which I shared with my sister, was bigger than this – and how that was hard.
