President Gitanas Nausėda declared on May 15, 2026, that demolishing the Vilnius Concert and Sports Palace would be irresponsible because the building is, in his words, an architektūros paveldo objektas — an architectural heritage object recognized on Lithuania’s state register.

Lithuanian courts, in 2017, could not find a substantive route to adjudicate a Jewish objection to a plaque honoring Jonas Noreika, a Holocaust perpetrator, mounted on the heritage-listed Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Same Republic. Same heritage system. Same register logic. Two directions.

The Cultural Heritage Department under the Ministry of Culture protected the plaque against every legal challenge brought against it. It is now extending the same protection to a Soviet structure built over a Jewish cemetery. My Jewish-memory objections have never been resolved on the merits. That asymmetry is not procedure. It is heritage hierarchy.

I tested that hierarchy in 2017.

In March of that year, I asked the Cultural Heritage Department how a plaque honoring Noreika could legally exist on a heritage-listed building under Lithuanian heritage law. The Department took forty-five days to reply. Its response, Ref. (11.13)2-794, dated April 5, 2017, was not a legal answer. It was bureaucratic deflection. The Department did not answer the statutory question I had asked.

Lithuanian administrative procedure provided a one-month deadline to challenge that reply. The Department’s own delay had consumed nearly that entire period. In May 2017, I filed a complaint in the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court.

What followed was an eight-week sequence of three rulings by two courts. The system foreclosed merits review without ever reaching the merits.

On June 15, 2017, Judge Mefodija Povilaitienė of the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, in Case No. eI-3995-281/2017, refused to accept the complaint as filed. The court did not decide whether the deadline had been missed. It required me to reformulate the complaint as an annulment claim, prove the receipt date of the April 5 letter, request a term extension if the deadline had been missed, and produce a representation contract. The deadline to comply was July 3, 2017. The ruling was not appealable in its operative parts.

The Department’s delay had created the procedural pressure. The court treated that pressure as if the Department had been a stranger to it.

On August 2, 2017, the Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court, in Case No. eAS-680-502/2017, annulled the lower-court ruling. A three-judge panel — Artūras Drigotas as rapporteur, Dalia........

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