Vilnius first tried to build Mickiewicz a monument in 1925, when the city was Wilno and part of the Second Polish Republic. A contest was announced; sixty-seven designs were submitted; the jury, chaired by General Lucjan Żeligowski, gave first prize to the avant-garde sculptor Stanisław Szukalski. Szukalski's design was unforgettable, possibly because it was almost impossible to forget. The poet was naked, lying on a sacrificial altar atop a stepped pedestal in the shape of an Aztec pyramid. A White Eagle — the Polish national symbol — perched at his side, drinking blood from a wound in the poet's body. Reaction was, to put it mildly, divided. Polish intelligentsia, leadership, art critics, and ordinary citizens fought over the design with the kind of passion Vilnius reserves for poets. A second contest was held; Henryk Kuna won; nothing got built. The Second World War arrived, and the project was abandoned. Mickiewicz remained, for another forty-five years, a man without a Vilnius monument.

It is worth pausing on what Mickiewicz actually was, because the answer determines whose monument this is. He was born in Zaosie, in modern Belarus, to a family that spoke Polish at home and lived among Belarusian-speaking peasants. He was raised in Navahrudak (Nowogródek), which is also now in Belarus. He came to Vilnius for university in 1815, when Vilnius was part of the Russian Empire and had recently been the second city of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that Russia and Prussia had finished erasing from the map twenty years earlier. He wrote in Polish. The opening lines of his epic Pan Tadeusz — "Lithuania, my country! You are like good health" — are addressed to Lithuania but composed in Polish, and the Lithuania he meant was the Polish-Lithuanian one that no longer existed. Belarus claims him because he was born and raised there. Lithuania claims him because he loved it and lived in Vilnius. Poland claims him because he wrote in Polish and shaped the modern Polish national consciousness. All three are right.

The monument that finally got built came in the 1980s, late Soviet years, when Vilnius was a Soviet republic capital. The sculptor was Gediminas Jokūbonis, a major Lithuanian artist; the architect of the surrounding square was Vytautas Edmundas Čekanauskas. They unveiled it on April 18, 1984, beside Saint Anne's Church and the Bernardine Monastery, near the Neris River. The pose is restrained: Mickiewicz stands and leans against a broken column, eyes downcast, the granite weathered to a pale grey. The whole composition reaches 4.5 metres high. The stone came from Volhynia, in what is now western Ukraine — another piece of the old Commonwealth, another corner of the geography Mickiewicz wrote about. In 1996 the bas-reliefs that Henryk Kuna had carved for the monument that was never built were finally placed around its base. Six panels survive of the twelve originally planned, each depicting a scene from Mickiewicz's verse drama Dziady, or Forefathers' Eve.

On August 23, 1987, a small crowd gathered at the monument to commemorate the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the secret 1939 deal that had assigned the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere. Public mention of the pact had been forbidden in the USSR for nearly half a century. The rally was small and the speeches were modest, but it was the first openly political gathering in Soviet Lithuania since the war, and historians of the period generally treat it as the moment the independence movement that became Sąjūdis came into the open. The site was chosen partly because of the open ground around the monument, partly because the police would think twice about cracking down at the foot of a national poet who happened to be everyone's national poet at once. Within four years Lithuania was independent. The granite poet had not done it alone, but he had stood there while it happened.

Dziady — the poem cycle whose scenes ring the monument's base — is, among other things, about communing with the dead. In the old folk ritual it draws on, surviving family members would set out food and drink at the cemetery once a year and call back the spirits of those who had gone before, to ask their forgiveness or their counsel. It seems, in retrospect, a fitting choice for the bas-reliefs of a monument to a man whose nationality is contested by three modern states, in a square where a vanished empire's poets meet a recovered country's freedom. Mickiewicz wrote Dziady from exile, after Russian authorities expelled him from Vilnius in 1824 for organizing a Polish students' patriotic society. He never came back. The monument did not need him to. The poets in his verses always come home eventually, even if they have to be carried.