Panevėžys is a city under its way of solving the problems inherited from Soviet past. You can meet „memorials“ of the soviet times, such as the 12 floor hotel, standing in a central square just before Juozas Miltinis drama theater. The hotel was built here in seventies to accommodate theater audience, coming from Moscow and Leningrad to watch the performance of the most famous Soviet drama actors under the direction of brilliant maestro. Today drama theater lost its foreign audience and the hotel is about hardly to survive, but maestro still sits in its provocative pose before the theater and acting traditions are kept and carried. A unique Puppet Wagon Theatre visiting the remotest Lithuanian towns and villages in summer is awarded a prestigious prize of a well-known Danish fairy teller H. Ch. Andersen. In front of another small theater the figure of the great world dreamer and humanist Don Kichot stands. Further, modern art is finding its place in the city: the Photography Gallery is the centre of photo artists famous in Lithuania and abroad; the Art Gallery has accumulated treasures of ceramic works. Panevėžys is often called the Mecca of ceramic artists: 129 artists from 30 countries have created in 15 symposia. Modern sculptures decorate the Old River Bed, which is like a visiting card of the city, proving the fact that for many years Panevėžys has been a coziest and greenest city. It is also the place, where the water mill of 1848, nowadays reconstructed into luxurious hotel ROMANTIC, survived.

Most of the soviet-style industries introduced in Panevėžys during the recovery period after the world war II are bankrupt now, and the last of them was TV screens production giant Ekranas, which was abruptly closed in 2006. More than two hundreds highly skilled electronics industry professionals moved to small business, and some of them concentrated around Panevėžys Mechatronics Center (PMC), claiming their ambitions of creating MEMS research and development center in collaboration with several universities, municipal and state governments and high-tech companies. Today PMC runs single Lithuanian clean room with public access, possessing advanced electron lithography and basic microfabrication capabilities. It is under its way of gathering finances for further development.