Ethnic and confessional aspects of a holiday in the city of Vilnius

This article analyzes ethnic and confessional aspects of the New Year festival in Vilnius city. It is based on fieldwork data collected through semistructured interviews, freeform conversations, published sources, and is grounded on the historicalcomparative method. The author shows that a celebration of the same festival among different ethnic and confessional groups of people living in one city, viewed historically, can create symbolic boundaries of otherness or, in some instances, reduce such boundaries