18th-century Vilnius – like a phoenix rising from the ashes

In the 18th century, many buildings in Vilnius were still wooden and densely packed together, so when a large fire broke out in a citizen’s house near the Royal Mill on 2 June 1737, almost half of the city of Vilnius burnt down. A decade later, the so-called Great Fire of Užupis broke out, starting in the brewery of a Jewish man named Rubin. As the flames died down, it became apparent that the city had lost as many as 469 houses, 12 churches (Catholic and Orthodox), 15 palaces, and many smaller buildings. The fire left over 100 empty plots of land and houses. Several thousand people left Vilnius due to the lack of food and shelter. However, lessons were not learnt; when the city had almost been rebuilt, in 1749, a spark from a kitchen chimney landed on the roof of a house near Subačiaus Gate and destroyed 292 residential houses, an Orthodox church, and 4 Catholic churches and monasteries. One can only imagine how many changes the old buildings of the city that have survived to this day have undergone; they have been restored and changed their exterior appearance many times. The Church of the Saint Johns and its Bell Tower, the University buildings, the churches of St. Casimir, St. Nicholas, and St. Trinity, and the Dominican churches were also rebuilt but no longer resembled their former buildings.

At the beginning of the 18th century, while the Great Northern War was still ongoing, and the armies of Sweden, Russia, and Saxony were marching through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, impoverishing the country, the plague reached Lithuania via Polish and German merchant ships. Although the population had little knowledge of the contagious infection and thought it was a punishment from God, the tactic of quarantine, all too familiar to us today, was nevertheless adopted. But nothing helped: at the time, people lived in poorer sanitary conditions in the growing city than in the remote Lithuanian countryside, and the contagion soon spread uncontrollably, taking the lives of around 33,700 people in Vilnius. If you look closely at the eastern facade of St Johns’ Church on Pilies Street, you will see an epitaph with a skull and crossbones marking the place where the ashes of three women who died during the plague were buried. In the Church of Saints Peter and Paul hangs a painting by a Franciscan Pelican entitled ‘The Plague in Vilnius in 1710 – The Virgin Mary of Grace protects people from the plague and other calamities: she holds the broken arrows of God’s wrath in her hands’. The plague, the war, and the cold winter brought another hardship – famine. Food was so hard to come by that some starving city dwellers had resorted to selling themselves into serfdom. As the city emptied, Augustus III sought to attract new inhabitants by inviting Jews to settle in Vilnius.

After the war, plague and famine, the city recovered, and new ideas flooded in. In the second half of the 18th century, Vilnius University began to revive. At that time, the famous French botanist Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert came to Vilnius Academy to teach in the Department of Natural History and settled in the house at Pilies g. 22. This professor laid the foundations for the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at Vilnius University, which still exists to this day. He planted 76 carts of plants near his house, which is how the first botanical garden in Vilnius came into being, with a greenhouse for pampered plants. Over 600 species of all kinds of plants grew on an area of 300 square metres. Gilibert was also interested in the flora of Lithuania and researched medicinal plants, publishing the five-volume work ‘Flora Lithuanica inchoata…’; several copies have circulated around the world and are still extant, but most of the copies were destroyed due to the ideas contained within the covers of the book that were deemed excessively progressive. Not all of Gilibert’s discoveries impressed his colleagues in Vilnius, and he was accused of promoting promiscuity because he had ‘discovered’ sex in plant inflorescences.

Do you remember your school days? Did you know that the foundations of the education system were laid in the 18th century? When the Jesuits left Vilnius, Vilnius University was left without any owners, so the Educational Commission was set up – Europe’s first secular ministry of education – to take over and reform education from the church. We also have it to thank for the foundations of our present-day education. The Educational Commission sought to make education compulsory for all social classes of children aged 7-12. The plan was to teach the natural and exact sciences, provide a general education, and instruction on practical agriculture and crafts, the mother tongue, and physical education. The first textbooks appeared in the second half of the 18th century, and children learned mathematics, physics, logic and botany from textbooks. Books, long considered a luxury, became an everyday attribute. In line with the ideology of the Enlightenment, the Teachers’ Seminary began to train teachers professionally.

What did the house of the most famous architect of the 18th century in the city, Laurynas Gucevičius, look like? Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, the house, which stood on the corner of K. Sirvydo Square in an upscale neighbourhood, was modest, unadorned, and distinguished only by its gateway decorated with classicistic details. It is worth taking a closer look at the pavement at the junction of Šv. Jono and Gaono Streets to find a circle of paving stones marking the location of where the rotunda tower of the architect’s house once stood. The building was given to the architect by his patron, Bishop Ignacy Jakub Massalski, for his services in the construction of the Verkiai Palace ensemble and the reconstruction of Vilnius Cathedral. Laurynas Gucevičius is known as the founder of Lithuanian Classicism architecture. He contributed to the appearance of the capital’s main buildings and drew up the first topographical plan of the western part of Vilnius. Most of us have probably heard of his most famous work – the reconstruction of Vilnius Cathedral, turning it into a pearl of classicism.

The famous European composer Michał Kleofas Ogiński, who lived in Vilnius, wrote mazurkas (a lively Polish dance from Mazovia), waltzes, marches, and polonaises. At that time, it was fashionable for a nobleman to make music, but his talent was unquestionable, even though he himself said: “I have never had the time or the inclination to seek recognition at the expense of my musical compositions…”. M.K. Ogiński travelled widely, and his music was a reflection of the fashions of the day. He was in contact with musical greats such as Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and took violin lessons from the Italian virtuoso Giovanni Battista Viotti. However, like other contemporaries of the Enlightenment, the nobleman M.K. Ogiński was not only a composer but also had more talents: he was a politician, a diplomat, and a member of the Seimas of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is believed that he composed the famous polonaise ‘Farewell to My Homeland’ while fleeing from Lithuania.

In the 18th century, Vilnius came to be known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, thanks to one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, better known as the Vilna Gaon or the Elijah of Vilna. At that time, Vilnius was home to around 5,000 Jews, who were divided into several smaller communities. As it happened, the Gaon did not establish any religious school. Until his death, he devoted most of his time to studying the Torah and revising the Talmud. He believed that only by understanding the world around us can religion be understood, which explains why he took such a keen interest in geography, mathematics, and other secular sciences. He spent most of his life in the Great Synagogue of Vilnius and in a building on Žydų Street, the site of which is now marked by a monument. The Gaon lived a very ascetic and private life, holding no official position in any community and taking little part in public debate; his writings were only published after his death, thanks to his children.

Prior to 1781, the Town Hall would have looked very different from the present-day appearance. Its clock tower would have been visible from afar; however, when this fell down, it served as an excellent excuse to reconstruct the whole building. Therefore, today, when we look at the Town Hall, we can see the neoclassical building designed by Laurynas Gucevičius. The architect had greater ambitions, however: if the most elegant of his options had been approved at the time, the Town Hall would have been extended to reach the middle of the square and would have featured a tall tower. However, for financial reasons, the Town Hall was built according to the most modest plans, the current design with a front portico and six columns. The ground floor of the building contained rooms for storing tools used for measuring and weighing, rooms for guards and clerks, entrances to shops, and a prison. The floor above contained the representative Hall of the Vaitas (the town administrator appointed by the Duke), the court and merchants’ rooms, the treasury, and the Great Hall with its two rows of pillars. Until 1840, the basement remained a prison for those sentenced to death.

In the 18th century, the face of Vilnius was shaped by two prominent architects, Laurynas Gucevičius and Johann Christoph Glaubitz. However, their visions were completely different. While Gucevičius focused on the clean lines of neoclassical architecture, Glaubitz created the city-legend of Vilnius as a ‘Baroque Pearl’. The German Johann Christoph Glaubitz came to Vilnius at the invitation of the Evangelical Lutheran congregation and stayed for a long time. After the Great Fire of Vilnius, Glaubitz was able to benefit from having the space to create original buildings. We have him to thank for the external appearance of the Church of the St. Johns and St. Catherine’s Church. It is believed that he also repaired the Cathedral Bell Tower, designed the interior of the Church of the Holy Spirit, and took care of the Basilian Monastery. The architect himself is believed to have lived in a two-storey house at Pranciškonų g. 6, which can be accessed through a passageway on Vokiečių Street; some sources refer to it as ‘Satan’s House’ because of a fragment from a mid-17th century mural depicting several dancing witches, a pipe-playing winged devil, a satyr, and a steaming pitcher jug. Death struck the architect at his workplace: he fell from some scaffolding while inspecting the work of the masons and met his death.

At the end of the 18th century, the first Vilnius City Theatre opened its doors in what is now the Lithuanian Theatre, Music, and Cinema Museum. The story of the theatre’s creation began when the twenty-year-old Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa was introduced to Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł at a masked ball. The first female playwright to write in Polish, Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa founded her own theatre in Nesvizh, which also used to tour to Vilnius. According to sources, it briefly operated in the Palace of the Radziwiłł family. At that time, the palace occupied almost the entire quarter, and today the beauty of the palace is only evidenced by a single surviving wing (flygel). The theatre remained in the Radziwiłł Palace until the middle of the 19th century, with a repertoire that kept pace with European fashions. On 8 May 1786, on the occasion of the name day of the ruler Stanislaw August, a play was staged based on the comedy ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by Pierre–Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. The performance took place just a couple of years after its premiere in Paris and only seven days after the premiere of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera in Vienna.