Ukmergė

Ukmergė is a city in Vilnius County in Lithuania, about 78 kilometres northwest of Vilnius, and the administrative centre of the Ukmergė District Municipality. Its older Lithuanian name was Vilkmergė, and it appears in Polish as Wiłkomierz and in Russian as Vilkomir. The settlement grew around a wooden fortress on a hill near the meeting of the Vilkmergė and Šventoji rivers. Written sources mention it from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it was attacked several times by the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order and burned to the ground in 1391. Its first Catholic church was built in 1387, soon after Lithuania began to adopt Christianity, and by the late fifteenth century written sources called it a city. Today the Old Town keeps its pattern of old streets and squares and its nineteenth and twentieth century buildings, and it is listed in the Registry of Cultural Property of Lithuania. At the 2021 census the city had 21,258 inhabitants.