Follow the path of language

Jonas Jablonskis Square, which is decorated with the sculpture ‘Šviesa’ (‘Light’) by the sculptor Vidmantas Gylikis and architect Marius Markūnas, was established in this place, and not by chance – the famous linguist lived in a nearby house on Kalvarijų Street from 1904 to 1906. 

Jablonskis formulated the principles of language standardisation, wrote several grammars, and standardised the spelling, laying the foundations of standard Lithuanian. It was very important for him to discover the laws of the Lithuanian language and to apply them in practice, to standardise the language in accordance with living human speech. It is true that even at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a debate in the press about the standardisation of the language, and some people perceived the normative spelling of Lithuanian as impoverishing rather than enriching the language. However, the Lithuanian Scientific Society, taking into account the arguments of linguistics, realised that it was necessary to start standardising the Lithuanian language. Jablonski introduced many new words: the names of days of the week and grammatical cases, a number of mathematical terms, words such as ‘ateitis’ (‘future’), ‘praeitis’ (‘past’), ‘įspūdis’ (‘impression’), ‘vaizduotė’ (‘imagination’), ‘rašytojas’ (‘writer’), ‘mokslininkas’ (‘scientist’), and many others that are still used to this day. An interesting detail is that Jablonskis’ daughter Ona is the mother of Professor Vytautas Landsbergis. 

The linguist Juozas Balčikonis made a significant contribution to the history of the Lithuanian language and dialectology; he was a researcher of place names, a folklore writer, and a translator and lived in this building from 1951 to 1969. In 1971, a commemorative plaque was unveiled in his honour. His greatest work was the editing of the Lithuanian Dictionary. In 1930, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the dictionary, continuing the work started by Kazimieras Būga in 1902. In 1947, when the second volume of the dictionary was published, Balčikonis received ideological reproaches from the Soviet authorities for capitalising the word ‘God’ and for the number of expressions ridiculing the Soviet system. As his work came under increasing scrutiny, the professor resigned as editor-in-chief and continued his principled stance towards the Soviet authorities. 

Balčikonis also had another passion – beekeeping. It is said that one very cold winter, his bees were overwintering at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature in the office of the academician Kostas Korsakas, who had gone to Moscow. The professor had laid straw there, which almost caught fire from a cigarette butt carelessly dropped by the caretaker…

The idea of a national library in Lithuania began to take shape at the beginning of the 19th century, but soon afterwards, printing in Latin characters was banned. After the ban was lifted, the Lithuanian Scientific Society, founded in 1907, started to collect Lithuanian literature. After Vilnius was annexed and occupied by the Polish authorities, the initial press collections remained in Vilnius, and the Central Bookstore of Lithuania, the forerunner of the National Library, was established in Kaunas, the temporary capital. During the Soviet and German occupation, books were burned by the ton, some rare and valuable publications were looted, and some were moved to special repositories inaccessible to readers. After the war, librarians and scholars risked their lives to travel around the Karaliaučiaus region (now Kaliningrad), searching through the ruins for books and manuscripts of significance to the history of Lithuanian literature. Even though they worked under the difficult conditions of wars and occupations, librarians managed to accumulate a collection of more than 5 million printed books and other documents over a 40-year period. It was not until 1963 that the library returned to Vilnius to purpose-built library premises. The library managed to establish a specialised Lithuanian Studies Department, the only one in the USSR, for language research fellows. In 1988, during the Soviet era, the library symbolically succeeded in securing the name for the library of Martynas Mažvydas, the author of the first Lithuanian book.

Immediately after the 40-year ban on printing in Latin characters was lifted, the first Lithuanian daily newspaper ‘Vilniaus žinios’ was printed in 1904-1909 in the printing house owned by Petras Vileišis. When Jonas Jablonskis was invited to work in its editorial office, he had warned that it would be difficult, and this indeed proved to be the case – there were neither sets of Lithuanian typefaces in Vilnius nor printing press workers capable of preparing a Lithuanian newspaper for the press. Those invited from Lithuania Minor were imbued with revolutionary sentiments and went on strike, and the people who were willing to work in the editorial office had no journalistic experience. Only P. Vileišis, who walked around the printing house with an issue of ‘The Times’ in his hands, imagined what the first Lithuanian daily newspaper should look like. Vileišis was officially the editor, but the early editions were edited by Jablonskis too. Incidentally, what Jablonskis corrected, Vileišis recorrected in his own way, and vice versa. Any daily newspaper could have envied the popularity of ‘Vilniaus žinios’ – its first issue had a circulation of 6,000 copies. The addresses of the subscribers demonstrated the extent of how far Lithuanians were scattered all over the world. The newspaper was sent to Kaunas, Suvalki, and Grodno provinces and further afield to Baku, Kazan, Latvia, Poland, Finland, and the USA.

In 1915, when Vilnius was under the administration of the Kaiser’s German army, the first gymnasium was founded here, where the language of instruction was Lithuanian. For several decades, this educational institution was the forge of Lithuanian identity and the most prominent centre of Lithuanian culture in the early 20th century, which did not die out even when the Vilnius region was under occupation. 

The school started on 18 October 1915, with five classes and 15 teachers, many of them authors of Lithuanian textbooks, creators of Lithuanian scientific terminology, and all of them promoters of the idea of national revival. Six of the teachers were elected to the Council of Lithuania and became signatories of the Act of Independence, and two – Aleksandras Stulginskis and Antanas Smetona – became Presidents of Lithuania. Graduates of the gymnasium have confessed that the most difficult exam to pass was the Lithuanian language exam (quotient). They also recalled the beautiful tradition introduced by Jonas Basanavičius for teachers and students to discuss gymnasium matters over a cup of cherry tea. 

The plaque commemorating the founders of the Gymnasium – Jonas Basanavičius, Mykolas Biržiška, and Povilas Gaidelionis – was created by the sculptor Darius Bražiūnas.

The oldest church in Vilnius and Lithuania – the Church of St. Nicholas – was the only church in Vilnius from 1901-1939 where services were held in Lithuanian. As the Lithuanian national movement gained momentum at the end of the 19th century, the Lithuanian educated society concentrated in Vilnius, but there was not a single church in the city where the Mass was celebrated in Lithuanian. It was only through the insistence of Antanas and Jonas Vileišis, Donatas Malinauskas, and Emilija Jasmantaitė-Vileišienė that the Bishop of Vilnius handed over the church to the Lithuanians on 31 December 1901 and appointed the priest Juozapas Kukta. The church building stood abandoned with no windows or floor. Within a year, it was repaired with money from the Vileišis family; not only was it renovated, but Mass was celebrated in Lithuanian here; a mutual aid society, an orphanage, and a choir were also formed, and a two-year elementary school was established. After the service, people would stand in groups in the churchyard chatting. The area under the altar of the Church of St Nicolas was once the hiding place for Lithuanian publications during the ban on the Lithuanian press, which is why the church became the centre of Lithuanian identity. In 1930, on the initiative of the Lithuanians of Vilnius County, a bust of Vytautas the Great was erected in the church to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his death.

This building was the Town Hall in the early 20th century. On 4-5 December 1905, the Great Vilnius Seimas was convened here, Petras Vileišis’ Lithuanian bookstore – the first in Vilnius – was opened, and it was decided to establish the Lithuanian Scientific Society here. The very next day, the elected organising committee announced that it would “take care of researching the Lithuanian nation and its land,” i.e. it would study the Lithuanian language, history, folklore, ethnography, collect archaeological and linguistic material, folklore, describe Lithuanian rites, castles, excavated artefacts, collected artworks, as well as books and manuscripts about Lithuania. During the 30 years of its existence, the Society worked under the conditions of war and occupation; despite being constantly persecuted, almost one and a half thousand enlightened people united and, by 1918, had already amassed huge Lithuanian studies treasures and laid the foundations of the Lithuanian national school and Lithuanian higher education institutions. Eighteen (out of the total of 20) signatories of the Lithuanian Independence Act on 16 February 1918 were members of the Lithuanian Scientific Society. The first to sign the Act was  Jonas Basanavičius, the founder of the Lithuanian Scientific Society and its long-time Chairman. In 2018, a monument was unveiled in front of the National Philharmonic in honour of the nation’s patriarch, and the Doctor’s testament from the first issue of the newspaper ‘Varpas’ (‘The Bell’) was engraved on its pedestal: “As the darkness of the night fades away when the dawn breaks on the earth, let the spirit of Lithuania shine through! Such is our longing and desire.” The monument was designed by the sculptors Gediminas Piekuras and Algirdas Rasimavičius and the architect Gediminas Antanas Sakalis. 

Jurgis Šlapelis, a cultural and public figure, although a doctor by education, worked as a linguist, teacher, dictionary compiler, publisher, and translator. Jonas Jablonskis not only taught him at the Mintauja Gymnasium but also hosted him in his home, where Jurgis met Vincas Kudirka, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, Pranas Mašiotas and other pivotal figures of the Lithuanian revival movement. On the initiative of J. Šlapelis, Lithuanian language improvement courses were established, which were also attended by Marija Piaseckaitė, who became his wife shortly afterwards. The bookshop opened by the Šlapeliai in 1906 operated without interruption for 40 years – during all five occupations of Lithuania. Marija took care of the bookshop through all those years, not only standing at the counter every day but also doing the bookkeeping and placing orders. And J. Šlapelis taught Latin, Lithuanian and Lithuanian history at Vytautas Magnus Gymnasium for more than ten years; he used to assign tasks to students returning to their home villages for the holidays to collect folklore and make a record of place names. The Šlapeliai did not lose heart when they were prosecuted for anti-state activities, i.e. for distributing illegal Lithuanian books. When Lithuania regained its independence, the last wish of Marija Šlapelienė was fulfilled by establishing a museum in the family house.

Konstantinas Sirvydas, a gifted young man from the Anykščiai region, was brought to Vilnius to study by the Jesuit monks who were serving a mission there. His paths of monasticism, studies and pastoral work took him to Nesvizh, Dorpat (Tartu) and Riga. From 1612, Sirvydas was a preacher at St. Johns’ Church, where he preached sermons mainly in Lithuanian. The preacher, assistant to the Rector of Vilnius University, and Professor K. Sirvydas became so popular that he was listened to by a packed church. His greatest contribution to the Lithuanian language is his dictionaries. His trilingual (Polish, Latin and Lithuanian) dictionary, published in Vilnius around 1620, is the first Lithuanian (and Baltic) dictionary, containing about 6,000 Lithuanian words (the only known defective copy of the dictionary is kept in Moscow). Until the middle of the 19th century, Sirvydas’ dictionaries remained the main and only printed Lithuanian dictionaries, influencing the whole further development of Lithuanian lexicography.

Simonas Daukantas came to Vilnius on foot with 10 roubles in his pocket, having walked the 300 km from Skuodas in a week. At the Gate of Dawn, he took an oath to write only in Lithuanian and fulfilled his oath to the full – he wrote his scientific works only in Lithuanian. In 1822, while studying at Vilnius University, he wrote the first history of Lithuania in Lithuanian, ‘Darbai senųjų lietuvių ir žemaičių’ (‘Feats of the Ancient Lithuanians and Samogitians’), which was not published until a century later in the restored Lithuanian Republic. He wrote ‘Būdą senovės lietuvių, kalnėnų ir žemaičių’ (‘The Way of the Ancient Lithuanians, Highlanders and Samogitians’) in St. Petersburg while working in the Senate and published it at his own expense in 1845.

S. Daukantas, a dedicated language promoter, published books for farmers at his own expense, promoted beekeeping, and collected folklore. He signed his name under the names of Devynakis, Šauklys, Žeimys, Vaineikis, Purvis, Ragaunis, and Mylė – ostensibly to give the impression that Lithuanians had many authors writing in their native language. S. Daukantas wrote down for posterity almost a thousand songs he heard – he used to walk around with a pencil tucked behind his left ear, always had a piece of paper handy, and would only go out in the city wearing a white shirt and his signature large red ribbon tied around his neck.

Martynas Mažvydas’s ‘Catechism’. Every year on 1 April, on the occasion of Vilnius University’s birthday, the University Library invites you to see the first Lithuanian book – Martynas Mažvydas’ Catechism’. Published in 1547, from a print run of 200-300 copies, only two copies have survived (the other is kept at the University of Toruń in Poland). The ‘Catechism’, which is housed at Vilnius University, came to Lithuania in 1957 from the Odessa Research Library, thanks to the efforts of Lev Vladimirov, who was the Director of Vilnius University Library at the time. Special conditions have currently been created for the preservation of this national treasure, and its true whereabouts for the rest of the year are not disclosed. 

The Mikalojus Daukša Courtyard. There is no clear evidence that the highly educated priest Mikalojus Daukša actually studied at Vilnius University, but he must have visited here when his translation from Polish of the ‘Catechism’ of the Spanish Jesuit Jacobo Ledesma was printed in the Vilnius Academy’s printing house in 1595. It is the oldest surviving Lithuanian book published in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and it is the first time that the name of Vilnius is mentioned in Lithuanian – WILNIUIE (in Vilnius).

In 1599, Daukša’s most famous work, ‘Postilė’ with ‘Preface to the Dear Reader’ (‘Postilė’ with ‘Prakalba į malonųjį skaitytoją’), was published here. This preface is a programme for a national state, a patriotic manifesto highlighting the essential needs of the language, the aspiration to incorporate the Lithuanian language into the life of the state, and the creation of the language of written Lithuanian. M. Daukša, who claimed to be descended from Vaidila, a nobleman from Vytautas the Great’s milieu, was convinced that language is a part of political identity and that the power of the state derives from language.

The Department of Lithuanian Language. The Department of Lithuanian Language is one of the most important centres not only for the training of Lithuanian linguists but also for Lithuanian linguistics in Lithuania. The entrance hall next to the Department is decorated with one of the most beautiful works of 20th-century Lithuanian art – the fresco ‘Seasons’ by artist Petras Repšys, which depicts various Lithuanian customs and tells the epic story of long-lasting customs.

It was the Lithuanian language that brought the first President of Lithuania, Antanas Smetona, and his future wife, Sofija, together. Recommended as a gifted and polite student by his teacher of Ancient Greek and Latin Jonas Jablonskis, Smetona, who came from a family of seven children, prepared Sofia’s brother Roman for the entrance exams and taught him Lithuanian at the estate of the noble Chodakauskas family. When the couple met again, Smetona was already working at the Vilnius Land Bank (now the seat of the Bank of Lithuania) and immediately fell in love with her. They lived in this house from 1908 to 1909.  

From his youth, A. Smetona was interested in national ideas. He was a member of a secret Lithuanian organisation together with Jonas Jablonskis and Vincas Kudirka while still a student at Mintauja Gymnasium, but was soon expelled from the gymnasium for his national demands and refusal to pray in Russian. Although he was a lawyer by training, he edited various publications, taught ethics, ancient philosophy, and Lithuanian Stylistics at the University of Lithuania, and contributed greatly to the standardisation of the Lithuanian language, serving for several years as the Chairman of the Terminology Commission. He translated several classical works from Greek and was considered one of the best Lithuanian literary stylists of his time. He often mentioned the name of Vilnius in his work and public speaking: “We want a Lithuanian Lithuania with Vilnius as its capital, the cradle of Lithuania, where our national idea grew and matured, where all the roads to our freedom led < …>. Our ancient leaders are buried in Vilnius, and our great revivalists are buried there too”.

This sculpture by the sculptor Regimantas Midvikis and the architects Linas Krūgelis and Ričardas Krištapavičius pays homage to the Vileišiai brothers. Petras, Antanas and Jonas Vileišiai were the awakeners of the national revival and the founders of independent Lithuania; the sculpture depicts them sitting at a table. It symbolises their communion and devotion to the nation.

The eldest brother Petras Vileišis, a road engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist, was one of the heralds of the national revival and promoters of Lithuanian identity, and he constantly wrote letters to the Tsarist authorities to restore the freedom of the Lithuanian press. He and his associates searched for scattered Lithuanian intellectuals, corresponded with them and invited them to Vilnius to work for the nation. Jonas Basanavičius also responded to this invitation. Antanas Vileišis, a humanist physician, was one of the most prominent organisers and leaders of Lithuanian national activities in Vilnius. His wife, Emilija Jasmantaitė-Vileišienė, was also an active social activist and promoter of Lithuanian identity. Because of her strong character, she was mockingly referred to as the Queen of Lithuania without a Throne by the Vilnius Poles. Jonas Vileišis was a signatory of the Act of Independence and a lawyer who took an active part in Lithuania’s political, cultural, and social life at the beginning of the 19th century as the country sought its independence; he established schools, published textbooks, and headed several ministries for several inter-war Lithuanian governments.  

Constructed in 1904-1906 by the engineer Petras Vileišis according to the design of August Klein, the palace was a focal point of Lithuanian culture from its very first days: it housed the Lithuanian Scientific Society and its library, a printing house, a bookshop of Lithuanian books, and the first art exhibition. In 1939, the Institute of Lithuanian Studies was founded here; in 1952, the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature was established, while in 1990 – the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. In 1990, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language moved into its headquarters in the new building at P. Vileišio g. 5. The most significant work of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language is the collective work on the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language.

Pranas Razmukas, a librarian, lived and worked at Vileišiai Palace from 1932 to 2002. While studying at the Vilnius Teachers’ Seminary, he met Jonas Basanavičius in the library of the Lithuanian Scientific Society and was invited to work with him; he helped to complete the collection of Lithuanian studies. During the Polish occupation and the Second World War, Razmukas preserved the property of Vileišiai Palace, the Lithuanian Scientific Society’s manuscripts, the library, and many personal belongings of the patriarch of the nation. In 1999, Razmukas revealed the place he had walled up with Professor Mykolas Biržiška to conceal the documents during the war. When this wall was dismantled, the original minutes of the 1918 Lithuanian Council meetings were found. Some people are of the view that the original the Act of Independence of Lithuania must still be hidden within these walls because P. Vileišis, who was considered the richest Lithuanian at the time and who supervised the construction of the palace himself, must have made hiding places for his precious objects and documents.