Lithuania document photos online

For more than 70 years, Lithuania did not know where its own birth certificate was. The original handwritten Act of Independence, signed by twenty men in Vilnius on 16 February 1918, simply vanished. Then in March 2017 a Lithuanian professor sifting through the German Foreign Office archive in Berlin pulled out the missing document, restoring the founding paper of the modern state on the eve of its centenary. Few nations can name the exact day, the exact archive, and the exact scholar who recovered the legal text that made their passports possible.

• Passport power As of the early-2026 Henley Passport Index the Lithuanian passport ranks 9th in the world, opening 180 destinations visa-free or with visa on arrival.
• Security design The burgundy Lithuanian passport carries a laser-perforated eight-digit number burned by conical holes straight through every inside page and the back cover, so the figure lines up perfectly when you hold the booklet to the light.
• State symbol The cover and watermark show the Vytis, a mounted armoured knight charging with a raised sword, one of Europe's oldest national coats of arms still used on a modern identity document.
• Founding document Lithuania's original 1918 Act of Independence, the legal basis of its statehood and citizenship, was lost for over seven decades and only rediscovered in a German archive in 2017.
• Currency From 1922 the litas was redeemable by law for actual gold, each unit covered by 0.150462 grams of bullion the Bank of Lithuania kept stored abroad.
• Currency end Soviet authorities outlawed the litas outright from 25 March 1941, making mere possession of the national money illegal until it was revived in 1993 and finally retired for the euro in 2015.
• Largest in Europe At its 15th-century peak the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was the largest state in Europe, nearly three times the size of the country today.
• Centre of Europe In 1989 France's National Geographic Institute calculated the geographical centre of the whole European continent and placed it just 26 km north of Vilnius, near the village of Bernotai.