3 March 2016, 5:00pm

Umney Lecture Theatre, Robinson College, University of Cambridge

As part of the 'Sense of Place' lecture series, the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES) and the Department of Slavonic Studies hosted Professor David Frick from University of California Berkeley for a lecture entitled The City Destroyed, the City Restored: Wilno in the Mid-Seventeenth Century.

Professor Frick evocatively presented the cacophony of bells and the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional diversity that filled the city of Wilno (Vilnius). The second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was home to Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews and Tatars. The city was conquered, heavily destroyed, and occupied by Muscovite forces from 8 August 1655 until early December 1661.

Professor David Frick is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California Berkeley, where he has worked on Polish sacred philology of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Poland-Lithuania in the age of confessionalisation, and networks and neighbourhoods in seventeenth-century Wilno.