Czesław Miłosz (born 30 June 1911 - died 14 August 2004) poet, essayist, prose writer, translator, lecturer, Nobel Prize winner for literature (1980). The son of Aleksander Miłosz (coat-of-arms Lubicz) and Veronika (née Kunat) of the coat-of-arms Topór, he was born in the Russian partition, in Szetejnie, on the Niewiaż river, in the Kiejdań district. He was baptised in Svoboda. He came from the Polish nobility that had settled in the heart of Lithuania since the 16th century. He belonged to a world that was very much connected to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and cultivated, according to Milosz's term, "the patriotism of home" - the attachment of his home area to the land of his ancestors, delivering the Nobel Lecture in Stockholm on 8 December 1980, in which he said: "It is good to be born in a small country where nature is human, to the measure of man, where different languages and different religions have coexisted over the centuries. I am thinking of Lithuania, the land of myths and poetry. And although my family has spoken Polish since the 16th century [...] as a result of which I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian poet, the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never left me. [...] It is a blessing if one has received from fate such a city of school and university studies as Vilnius [...].

Commemoration of Czeslaw Milosz at Vilnius University

In September 2011, the reading room of Vilnius University was named after Czesław Miłosz. The idea to name the emerging reading room after the Nobel Prize winner originated six months earlier. It was at this university that the future poet studied in 1921-1929.

In June 2011, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at Vilnius University, where the future Nobel laureate studied, inaugurating the Polish-Lithuanian celebrations of the poet's 100th birthday under the slogan 'Milosz Route'.

The granite plaque was placed in the Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski courtyard on the wall of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University. In addition to the poet's biography and bas-relief, the granite plaque bears the opening fragment of a poem from 1963: Never from thee, city, could I depart....

At the unveiling ceremony, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said that the poet's work uniting the two nations testifies to how fruitful and close cooperation between our peoples can be. The ceremony was followed by a literary and musical concert at St John's Church.