# Demographic history of Vilnius

The demographic history of Vilnius goes back to the times after the Last Glacial Period some 12 thousand years ago.

## Ancient period

In the eldership of Vilkpėdė, remnants of a Magdalenian settlement were found which date to c. 10000 BC. Around 1000 BC, the confluence of the Neris and Vilnia was densely inhabited by the Brushed Pottery culture, which had a half-hectare fortified settlement on Gediminas' Hill. Tribes of this culture inhabited present-day Lithuania east of the Šventoji River and in western Belarus. The descendants of this culture were a Baltic tribe, the Aukštaitians (English: Highlanders). According to historian Antanas Čaplinskas, who researched the surnames of Vilnius residents, the city's oldest surviving surnames are Lithuanian. Pagan Lithuanians primarily lived at the northern foot of Gediminas' Hill and in the Crooked Castle. Kairėnai, Pūčkoriai and Naujoji Vilnia had large settlements during the first millennium AD. The most densely-populated area was the confluence of the Neris and Vilnia, which had fortified homesteads.

## Medieval period

Vilnius was part of the Kingdom of Lithuania; King Mindaugas did not permanently live there, however, despite building Lithuania's first Catholic church for his coronation. The city began to develop in the late 13th century, during the reign of Grand Dukes Butvydas and Vytenis.
Vilnius' growth is attributed to Grand Duke Gediminas, who invited knights, merchants, doctors, craftspeople and others to come to the duchy to practice their trades and religion without restriction during the 14th century. However, the city's growth was limited by Teutonic Order attacks and the 1389–1392 Lithuanian Civil War. Invited by Grand Duke Gediminas, merchants and craftsmen began moving to Vilnius from the cities of the German Hanseatic League, France, Italy and Spain; Lithuanian surnames were replaced with German, Polish, and Russian ones. In the late 14th century, during the reign of Grand Duke Algirdas, Vilnius had a Ruthenian quarter (Latin: Civitas Ruthenica) in present-day Latako and Rusų Streets. Trade between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Ruthenian principalities was well-developed, with Ruthenian merchants and Ruthenian nobility living in the quarter. Vilnius' multiculturalism was increased by Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who introduced Litvaks, Tatars and Crimean Karaites. After several centuries, the number of local residents in Vilnius was smaller than the number of newcomers. However, according to an analysis of the 1572 tax registers, Lithuania had 850,000 residents; 680,000 were Lithuanians.

## Lithuanian Golden Age

It became a multicultural city, with 14th-century sources noting that it consisted of a Great (Lithuanian) city and a Ruthenian one. By the 16th century, German merchants, artisans, Jews and Tatars had also settled in Vilnius. During the 16th– and 17th-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the city's Polish-speaking population began to grow; by the middle of the 17th century, most writing was in Polish. During the Lithuanian Golden Age, Vilnius was a major city in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and home to the Lithuanian nobility; however, it was severely damaged by a 1610 fire.

## Russian and Swedish occupations

After the 1655 Battle of Vilnius the city was under Russian control until 1661. During the Great Northern War, the Swedish Empire controlled Vilnius from 1702 to 1709. The occupation ended with the Great Northern War plague outbreak, and the city took over 50 years to recover. According to historian Vytautas Merkys, the city lost much of its old population under Swedish and Russian domination during the 17th and 18th centuries; although they were replaced by newcomers, Lithuanians continued to live in Vilnius.
According to the first Commonwealth census in 1790, the Vilnius Voivodeship had a population of 718,571 and Vilnius County had 105,896 residents; after the Second Partition, the Grand Duchy had a population of 1,333,493. The city's population fell to 17,500 in 1796 due to the 1794 uprising, the last attempt to save it from Russian control. Vilnius was incorporated into the Russian Empire, and was its third-largest city at the beginning of the 19th century. The city was again affected by the 1830 November Uprising and the January Uprising in 1863. According to the 1897 Russian census, Vilnius had a population of 154,532 residents and the Vilna Governorate had 1,561,713. Vilnius' population became ethnically less Lithuanian. In the Russian census of 1897, 2.1 percent identified as Lithuanian speakers; speakers of Polish (30.8% percent) and Yiddish (40 percent) were the city's largest linguistic groups. According to parish censuses in 1857–1858, the Lithuanian population was between 23.6 and 50 percent in the Vilna Governorate. In 1863, ethnographer Roderich von Erckert identified the governate's largest ethnic group as Lithuanians (45.04 percent). Among the szlachta (nobility) in Vilnius in the 1897 census were 5,301 (46 percent) local nobles and 6,403 (54 percent) newcomers; of the newcomers, 24.1 percent were from the Vilna Governorate and the remainder from Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk and Kovno Governorates, Vistula Land and other regions.

## 20th century

The city's population increased to 205,300 in 1909.
Population, 1530–1914 :
| Year | Population |
| 1530 | 30,000 |
| 1654 | 14,000 |
| 1766 | 60,000 |
| 1795 | 17,700 |
| 1800 | 31,000 |
| 1811 | 56,300 |
| 1818 | 33,600 |
| 1834 | 52,300 |
| 1861 | 60,500 |
| 1869 | 64,400 |
| 1880 | 89,600 |
| 1886 | 103,000 |
| 1897 | 154,500 |
| 1900 | 162,600 |
| 1911 | 238,600 |
| 1914 | 214,600 |
During World War I, thousands of residents were forced to flee, were killed, or were taken to labor camps; the city's 1919 population fell to 128,500. Vilnius recovered during the interwar period, with 209,442 residents in 1939, but its population fell to 110,000 in 1944.
The city's population increased as the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic; according to the 1989 census, it had 576,747 residents. Although Lithuania experienced much emigration after independence in 1990, Vilnius' population was almost unchanged (542,287 in 2001) and has increased every year since 2006; its 1 January 2020 population was 580,020.
The city's Lithuanian population reached a record low in 1931 (0.8 percent); Poles numbered 65.9 percent after the 1922 annexation of Vilnius Region by Poland and the Lithuanian retreat from the region to the temporary capital of Kaunas.
After the 1939 Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty, Lithuania regained one-third of Vilnius Region and tried to Lithuanize Vilnius by introducing Lithuanian laws. Prime Minister Antanas Merkys said that this was "to make everybody think like Lithuanians. First of all, it was and still is necessary to comb out the foreign element from the Vilnius Region". The Lithuanian government enacted a law in which those "who on 12 July 1920 (...) were regarded as Lithuanian nationals, and on 27 October 1939 were resident in the territory became Lithuanian nationals". About 150,000 Poles were repatriated from the Lithuanian SSR from 1945 to 1956. Nearly the entire Jewish population was exterminated during the Holocaust in Lithuania.
After World War II, the number of ethnic Lithuanians in Vilnius rebounded; however, Lithuanization was replaced with Sovietization. Following independence in 1990, Vilnius' ethnic-Lithuanian population increased to 63.2 percent in 2011 and 67.44 percent in 2021.

## Historic ethnic makeup

Historic ethnic makeup of Vilnius :
| Year | Lithuanians | Lithuanians | Poles | Poles | Russians | Russians | Jews | Jews | Others | Others | Total |
| 1897 | 3,131 | 2% | 47,795 | 31% | 30,967 | 20% | 61,847 | 40% | 10,792 | 7% | 154,532 |
| 1916 | 3,669 | 2.6% | 70,629 | 50.1% | 2,080 | 1.5% | 61,265 | 43.5% | 3,217 | 2.3% | 140,840 |
| 1917 | 2,909 | 2.1% | 74,466 | 53.65% | 2,212 | 1.6% | 57,516 | 41.44% | 1,872 | 0.77% | 138,787 |
| 1919 | 2,900 | 2.3% | 72,067 | 56.1% | 4,049 | 3.2% | 46,506 | 36.2% | 2,954 | 2.3% | 128,476 |
| 1923 | 1,445 | 0.9% | 100,830 | 60.2% | 4,669 | 2.8% | 56,168 | 33.5% | 4,342 | 2.6% | 167,454 |
| 1931 | 1,579 | 0.8% | 128,628 | 65.9% | 7,372 | 3.8% | 54,596 | 28% | 1,159 | 0.6% | 195,071 |
| 1941 | 52,370 | 28.1% | 94,511 | 50.7% | 6.712 | 3.6% | 30,179 | 16.2% | 2,541 | 1.4% | 186,313 |
| 1942 | 29,480 | 20.5% | 103,203 | 71.9% | 6,012 | 2% | — | — | 1,220 | 0.4% | 143,498 |
| 1951 | 55,300 | 30.8% | 37,700 | 21% | 59,700 | 33.3% | 5,500 | 3.1% | 21,100 | 11.8% | 179,300 |
| 1959 | 79,363 | 33.6% | 47,226 | 20% | 69,416 | 29.4% | 16,354 | 6.9% | 23,719 | 10% | 236,078 |
| 1970 | 159,156 | 42.8% | 68,261 | 18.6% | 91,004 | 24.5% | 16,491 | 4.4% | 37,188 | 10% | 372,100 |
| 1979 | 225,137 | 47.3% | 85,562 | 18% | 105,618 | 22.2% | 10,723 | 2.3% | 48,785 | 10.3% | 475,825 |
| 1989 | 291,527 | 50.5% | 108,239 | 18.8% | 116,618 | 20.2% | 9,109 | 1.6% | 51,524 | 8.9% | 576,747 |
| 2001 | 318,510 | 57.5% | 104,446 | 18.9% | 77,698 | 14.1% | 2,770 | 0.5% | 50,480 | 9.1% | 553,904 |
| 2011 | 337,000 | 63.2% | 88,380 | 16.5% | 64,275 | 12% | 2,026 | 0.4% | 45,976 | 8.6% | 535,631 |
| 2021 | 373,511 | 67.1% | 85,438 | 15.4% | 53,886 | 9.7% | — | — | 43,655 | 7.8% | 556,490 |