Fabijoniškės

Fabijoniškės is one of the last Soviet-era residential areas to have been constructed in Vilnius. It was designed at a similar time as Pašilaičiai, and the creative team of both districts was led by the same person – the architect Kazimieras Balėnas. Fabijoniškės consists of the northern and southern parts separated by Ateities Street and each part differs in its urban structure. If you ask any older Vilnius resident which street was named M. Gorkio in Soviet times, you will probably get the answer ‘Pilies g.’, but in 1987 this name was transferred to the newly built Fabijoniškės. On some blocks of flats, you can still see the old street name faintly peeking through the paint. The block you are standing in front of gained significance on our TV screens – it was from the roof of S. Stanevičiaus g. 47 that Boris Shcherbina and Valery Legasov looked down on the city of Pripyat, abandoned and empty due to the Chernobyl catastrophe.

As Vilnius expanded with factory-built pre-fabricated blocks of flats for several decades in a row, monotony inevitably set in. In order to achieve variety, the city’s architects have turned to a different type of house – monolithic reinforced concrete blocks. These had greater architectural expressive potential, and these tall tower houses were intended to give each neighbourhood a unique character. Please note that the mighty blocks in Fabijoniškės are different from their ‘brothers’ in Šeškinė, Justiniškės, Lazdynai and Pašilaičiai. Chernobyl fans will easily recognise the monolithic tower blocks and the adjacent street from the Pripyat evacuation scene – blue and white buses stood while thousands of citizens flocked to them.

Older residents of the area remember that there used to be a cemetery on this hill, but it was knocked down to make way for the new secondary school. It is a standard building, typical of those also found in other districts of late Soviet-era Vilnius, and standing next to it can give you a feeling of déjà vu. The school has recently been renovated, but the Chernobyl filmmakers managed to capture it on film before the renovation. ‘Ateities’ school became the set for a secret meeting between Komiuk, Legasov, and Shcherbina, as well as for several evacuation scenes, while the enlistment of young boys for an emergency response operation was filmed in the school gym.

Fabijoniškės Avenue is an oasis of calm – there are plenty of people around, but it’s set well back from the noisiest streets, so it’s almost always quiet. For the director of the ‘Chernobyl’ series, this location was one of the most important in choosing the right location for Pripyat – it was how he imagined the ideal Soviet city. Other factors also contributed: Fabijoniškės is still a relatively young residential area, with no renovated houses or mature trees, and its population is almost identical to that of Pripyat in 1986. If you look around, you will see an occasional terraced blocks, the three-storey parts of which help to create a cosier and more intimate feeling in what is otherwise one of the largest residential areas of Vilnius. It is worth noting that the residents were rewarded for the inconvenience caused to them during filming with tidied up car parks, abundant flower beds, removed graffiti, and new playgrounds for children.

Since time immemorial, a number of villages have been located along the historically important Ukmergė road, which connected Vilnius with Riga. Historical sources do not reveal exactly when Fabijoniškės was founded, but the first mention of the village was in 1812, when Napoleon’s army inflicted losses on Verkių Manor and its villages. It is believed that broad beans were once widely cultivated in the village, as the Latin word for bean is faba. Let’s leave the discovery of the precise facts to the scholars and take a short walk around the former village of Fabijoniškės. Although almost all the houses have been renovated, it is often the case that an old farmhouse is hiding under the veneer of a fresh ‘shell’. A wooden cross used to stand at the intersection of Juzeliūno and Kaimelio Streets, and an old village well has been preserved near the house at Juzeliūnas g. 8. The Puipos brothers – the painter Audrius and the film director Algimantas – also hail from the former village.

In December 2018, the first swimming pool in Vilnius built with municipal funds during the independence period opened its doors. The eight-lane, 25-metre pool is for both amateurs and professionals and also a sports club, a training room and a sauna area. The designers of the building deliberately opted for a minimalist architectural expression, aiming for visual clarity, simplicity, monumentality, an impression of free accessibility, and high energy efficiency (Class A).

If you stepped on the poorly vegetated hill, you would have no idea that there was a former landfill underfoot. Waste was first dumped in the decommissioned sand and gravel quarry back in 1962 and the accumulation of waste finished in 1987. The landfill area grew to 15 hectares over a quarter of a century, and the depth of household waste averages 12 metres, with the maximum being 18 metres. After closure, the landfill site was covered with a layer of recultivation soil ranging from a few centimetres to 2 metres thick. The more observant will notice the small monitoring posts painted blue, which are used by environmentalists to update the status of the site every year, based on hydro-chemical analyses of the gas and water. The popular tales about ‘houses on landfill’ are not grounded in accuracy – in fact, hardly any building would be able to stand on such soil.

It is probably no coincidence that composers living in Fabijoniškės like to find inspiration in the nearby Visoriai Forest. Back in the 1980s, during the design process, architects pointed out that the inhabitants of the district would be able to enjoy a significant expanse of old forest that has survived on their doorstep. Despite the growth of the city, this green corner remained. Thanks to active volunteers, the Visoriai Forest is continuously tidied up and maintained, and trails have been marked out (e.g., the ‘Balsiukų trail’, and ‘Augintinių’ trail). Some of the tracks that are popular for leisure walks today are the roads preserved since olden times that connected the villages in the area. The forest is also home to trenches and concrete pillars with Polish inscriptions from the interwar period. Incidentally, the name ‘Visoriai’ is an artificial transformation of the old Polish name Wiszary.