The square itself is recent, by Vilnius standards. Until the early nineteenth century, the area in front of Vilnius Cathedral was densely built up with medieval and Renaissance houses, and parts of it were occupied by the Lower Castle complex. The square was created during the reconstruction and rebuilding of the cathedral itself in the early 1800s, when the older structures were cleared. It immediately became the main open space at the city's center. Russian imperial military parades drilled here. The annual St. Casimir's Fair, the most important folk fair in Lithuania, was held in the square through the nineteenth century until the German occupation of 1915, when the Polish administration that briefly governed the city moved the fair to Lukiskes Square. In 1905 a monument to Catherine the Great by the Russian Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolski was erected here, and in 1915 the same German occupation authorities allowed it to be torn down.

The cathedral's freestanding bell tower stands several yards apart from the cathedral itself, an arrangement uncommon outside Italy. The lower portion of the tower predates the cathedral significantly. The oldest underground square section was built in the thirteenth century on the bed of an old riverbed; it was likely a defensive tower of the medieval Lower Castle wall, with several small loop-holes still preserved in the lower courses. An older, less-supported tradition holds that the base of the tower was originally a small pagan temple before the Christianization of Lithuania, demolished and converted to a bell tower; modern historians dismiss that version, but the question of how old this stone is, and what it once held, has not been entirely settled. The upper sections were added in the eighteenth century. The neoclassical finish came in the nineteenth, during the same cathedral reconstruction that opened up the square.

On the eastern side of the square stands the bronze monument to Grand Duke Gediminas, the fourteenth-century ruler who, according to a famous legend involving a dream of an iron wolf howling on the hill above, founded Vilnius. The sculptor was Vytautas Kasuba; the monument was unveiled in 1996. Its origins are an unusual lesson in post-Soviet international cooperation. The bronze for the statue was donated by Lithuanian border guards who had confiscated it at the border, presumably from smugglers. The marble pedestal was a gift from the government of Ukraine. The casting work itself was done in Tallinn, free of charge, by a foundry that wanted to support the new monument. A statue of one country's founder, made of confiscated metal, set on a Ukrainian pedestal, cast for free in Estonia: it is a little parable of how the Baltic states put themselves back together in the 1990s.

The stebuklas stone is set into the paving roughly 50 paces northwest of the bell tower. It marks the spot where the Lithuanian end of the Baltic Way began. On August 23, 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had handed the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, between one and two million people, depending on whose count you trust, joined hands in a continuous chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. They sang Baltic national songs. They held flags from independent republics that had not legally existed for fifty years. The chain held for fifteen minutes. The Soviet response was essentially incoherent; the genie was out of the bottle. Lithuania declared its independence on March 11, 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so. The little stone that marks where the chain started carries no plaque saying any of this. You have to know.

Cathedral Square is still where Vilnius gathers. The city's tallest Christmas tree is erected here every December, often with elaborate themes that draw photographers from across Europe; it has appeared on lists of the most beautiful Christmas trees in the world. Outdoor nativity scenes go up nearby. The annual New Year's Eve celebration with fireworks happens in the square. The paving was thoroughly renovated in 2000 with light granite tiles, and the excavated remains of the Lower Castle's medieval fortifications were highlighted in the new paving with red-coloured granite, so that you can read the outline of vanished walls underfoot. The Hill of Three Crosses rises directly behind, with Gediminas Tower on its lower slope. To stand in Cathedral Square is to stand at the geographic, political, and emotional center of Lithuania, in front of a cathedral that has been a church and a barn and a Soviet picture gallery, on a square younger than American independence, on a stone where two million people once held hands.