Panevezys (Panevėžys) is the largest city in Central Lithuania and the fifth largest city of the country. It’s at the junction of several principal roadways. The name of the settlement straddling the Nevezis was first mentioned in 1503 in a writing issued by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Alexander giving the domain to the priest of Ramygala.

A memorial to Alexander appeared in the center of Panevezys on the city’s 500th anniversary. The oldest extant building (Kranto gatve 21) served as the Upyte district court archive in 1614 and the venue for the area’s first museum exhibit in 1925. The present-day local museum is at Vasario 16-ios gatve 23.

The city acquired market and fair privileges from King John Casimir in 1661 but developed only at the end of the 19th century when it became a food processing center with mills, distilleries, sugar, dairy, and soap-making enterprises.

Its sugar and preservation factories are industrial monuments. The narrow-gauge Panevezys-Švencioneliai railway line facilitated the transportation of natural resources and was in use until the end of the 20th century.

A school for the nobility which moved to Panevezys in 1840 became a gymnasium in 1858. The town acquired a teacher’s seminary in 1872 and Naftal Feigenson’s printing house in 1880.

In 1905 it had a four-year school for girls which became the present-day V. Zemkalnis Gymnasium. The school’s memorial museum is dedicated to the poet Salomeja Neris who taught here in 1934-1936. The country’s first Lithuanian-teaching gymnasium, now named after Juozas Balcikonis, opened in Panevežys in 1915. Teachers in this building included cultural activists Juozas Balcikonis, Aleksandras Dambrauskas, Jonas Jablonskis, and Juozas Zikaras.

The present-day city center is in the old quarter and revolves around what is now called Laisves (Freedom) Square. In 1967 it acquired a new theater for the city’s renowned Juozas Miltinis theater company.

The adjacent Old Town has several buildings from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. Lining Respublikos Street is an art gallery, the city’s oldest Lithuanian bookshop, a bank, and the Juozas Balcikonis Gymnasium. Not far from Laisves Square is a park (an old riverbed) with a pond, pathways, bridges, and sculptures.

From the outside, the city’s oldest Catholic sanctuary, the Church of the Holy Trinity is reminiscent of an Orthodox church. The Piarist monks built it in the first half of the 18th century.

It returned to the Catholics in the 1920’s. It came in the care of the care of the Marian Fathers in 1927, was converted into an exhibition hall in the Soviet period, and returned to the Church in 1989.

A parish church was adapted and consecrated at the Neo-Baroque Cathedral of Christ the King in 1930. The Panevežys diocese followed in 1926.

Its ornate interior decor includes a statue of Christ the King under a canopy on the high altar, a composition of diocese church towers in the apse, and a painting depicting the victory of Lithuanian regiments led by St. Casimir at Polotsk in the presbytery.