In Vilnius , if you wander a few minutes west from the charming old town, you will eventually come to a little river with love locks adorning the iron bridge and a mermaid watching from a niche in the embankment. Cross over and you’re in Užupis , which, appropriately, means “the other side of the river”. But you’ve traversed more than a waterway. You’re in a renegade “republic” that declared independence from the Lithuanian capital on April Fool’s Day 1997.

It does feel like you’re somewhere else, like you’ve somehow been transported . In an area of not even a quarter of a square mile and 7,000 residents, there are apparently more artists than in the rest of the capital – a city with a population of almost 608,000. The common number I hear is that one out of seven residents a workin

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