PIRAMÓNT | PAPER TRAIL | OPPOSITION | CEMETERIES
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VILNIUS—A massive new construction site is being dug up next door to the Soviet-era Sports Palace building in the Šnipiškės section of Vilnius. The former Sports Palace, now the subject of intense international debate over plans for a 25 million dollar conversion into a national conference center, itself “indisputably rests in the middle of the former cemetery,” as confirmed by the United States government a decade ago. But what is unknown is where that may leave this bordering site, which may or may not lie outside various hypothesized boundaries of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery, in use from the late fifteenth century to the 1830s. The last generations of pre-Holocaust Vilna Jewry called the cemetery Piramónt.