”Not all yet understand the true meaning of the Museum, thinking that it is something like Valhala, where morality and genius must be exalted. Not all yet understand that Archæology, trying to avoid empty inducements, today’s passions, is not obliged to flatter a nation’s pride. By collecting monuments of all that was alive and interesting in the past, history is given the right to evaluate, praise or condemn. In the faces of ancestors it is not looking for beauty, but likeness”. The first museum in Lithuania – the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities – was established almost a hundred and fifty years ago (1855) according to this statement of belief by of one of the most famous researchers of Lithuanian culture in mid-19th century, Adam Kirkor.