This extraordinary white church towering over the city came about through an idea for a house of worship in praise of Lithuanian independence in 1922. Work began over a decade later to a design by the Latvian architect Kārlis Reisons (1894-1981) who also designed the city’s Vytautas the Great Military Museum among other notable Kaunas buildings, although it wasn’t finished and consecrated until 2004. The main tower reaches 70m into the heavens and the plain albeit strangely moving interior has enough room for 3,000 worshippers. Used as a warehouse by the Nazis and a radio factory by the Soviets, the building was eventually handed back to the Catholic Church around the time of the country’s second independence in 1990 when work once again started on its completion. Outside and to the left are six graves, of which four are, somewhat bizarrely, empty. The other two hold the remains of Vytautas Kazlauskas (1919–2008), a Lithuanian priest who spent years working in the Vatican and Mykolas Krupavičius (1885-1970), another local gentleman of the cloth notable for his nationalist tendencies.