Lazdynai

In the past, one of the main attractions of the area was the ‘Erfurtas’ restaurant on the second floor of the shopping centre. Why is its name so strange? In 1972, the town twinning agreement between Vilnius and the East German city of Erfurt was signed, and on this occasion a shopping and service centre was opened, including a 150-seat restaurant. Although it was very far from the city centre, the restaurant was renowned as one of the best in all of Vilnius, not only for its exquisite interior, but also for its good evening programme, with one of the first variety shows and a light striptease show. Viktoras Malinauskas, Janina Miščiukaitė, Ala Pugačiova, Laima Vaikulė, Boris Moisejev and other well-known artists of the time performed at ‘Erfurtas’. It was not easy to get into such a good restaurant – you had to make a reservation two weeks in advance and bring the receptionist a certain amount of money in advance or, as you might guess, grease their palm by slipping something into their pocket. In the daytime, when the adult buzz had died down, schoolchildren would come to ‘Erfurtas’ for lunch. Nowadays, the sign with the old name is gone, but any resident of Lazdynai who is asked where ‘Erfurtas’ used to be will be able to point to the exact location. The decorative highlight of the place is the weathervane sculpture ‘Vėtrungė’ by Teodoras Kazimieras Valaitis, created in 1973. When the district’s developers demanded that the sculpture should be dynamic, and T. K. Valaitis indeed created it so that when the wind blows, ‘Vėtrungė’ moves.

You are in micro-district I, where the construction of Lazdynai first began. Those who were first to settle here still remember the occasional wooden house from the village of Leszczyniaki that once stood here. One of the reasons why Lazdynai was awarded the Lenin Prize was the pedestrian alleys. They are designed to avoid traffic noise and pollution, and their widths are designed to cope with the really heavy flow of commuters. The alleyway of micro-district I is the widest and most beautiful in the district, which is why it used to be one of the places foreign visitors were shown. The first inhabitants of the district remember how they had to take care of the outside of their houses – it was not deemed acceptable for a tourist to see multicoloured laundry drying on balconies (by the way, travellers usually visited the district during working hours when it was empty). To commemorate the triumph of Lazdynai, a stone with an inscription proclaiming that Lazdynai had won the Lenin Prize was placed in a rectangular flower bed nearby. Although the plaque is no longer there, the stone is still in place – you will easily recognise the niche of the plaque that remains. The adjacent tall building reminds us that Lazdyņai was the first district to have 12-storey large-palete apartment buildings in Vilnius in 1969. The alley is also the site of the former ‘Riešutas’ shop, and across the road is the Lazdynai Secondary School, built in 1971, in whose yard the famous children’s science fiction TV mini-series ‘Elektroniko nuotykiai’ (The Adventures of Electronic) was filmed in 1979. The stone retaining walls were also the subject of pompous praise at the time, and were seen as a creative landscaping solution. However, it was later discovered that they were made from the slabs of memorial stones from the destroyed Jewish cemetery.

In Soviet times, educational institutions were built according to standard designs. However, for a district as unique as Lazdynai, the idea was to create a truly distinctive school. It was designed by a young architect, Česlovas Mazūras, and the drawings materialised into a building in 1974. Mazūras was awarded a prize. What makes it special? The school was built from standard structural elements, but the creative use of details and the unevenness of the terrain gave it an original look. The building consists of four two-storey teaching blocks, arranged in terraces and connected by a three-storey communal block. The relief is particularly pronounced in the interior of the school. The exterior decoration is red brickwork and grey plaster (slightly changed after the renovation). Pictures of the circular school yards were popular in Soviet-era photo albums. Incidentally, the round garages clustered next to the residential blocks are equally original.

When 5, 9 and 12-storey blocks of flats were built, the skylines of the districts started to be filled with new landmarks – tower blocks made of monolithic expanded clay concrete. In 1978, the construction of the first 16-storey blocks in Lithuania (although the number of storeys could be as high as 17) began in Lazdynai. The site had been earmarked for them as early as 1966 in the Lazdynai project, but it was not until eleven years later that these giants actually started to rise. The construction of the first ‘skyscraper’ attracted extraordinary attention, not only from builders and designers, but also from curious Vilnius residents. In the north-western part of the district, five so-called ‘A’ type monolithic blocks designed by C. Mazūras and J. Rusteika were built within five years, and are marked with the numbers 55, 59, 65, 67 and 112 on Architektų g. The oldest and the one that has attracted the most attention is block 67, which is the first pioneer. Its expressive terraces made it more expressive than its later ‘B’ type 16-storey ‘brothers’ built on the other side of Laisvės pr. (77, 79, 91, 184, Architektų g.). The monoliths of Lazdynai are beautiful to some and repulsive to others, but they have undoubtedly become a new feature on the horizon of Vilnius, welcoming the visitor from the West to the city. For a long time, the upper technical floors of these buildings even featured huge billboards with the logos of the Vilnius Central Department Store and the Vilnius House Building Group of Enterprises.

In his memoirs, the architect V. Čekanauskas mentions that Lazdynai had everything except a church. During the Soviet years, he secretly hoped that with the change in the political environment, he would be able to design it too. When Lithuania became independent, such an opportunity arose: first, in 1990, the parish of St. Bosco was established. The chapel (south-west building) was built in 1993-1995 by the Salesian monks who serve it. While the church was being built, services were held in the schools of Lazdynai, and in the warmer months of the year, Mass was celebrated on the meadow by the cross. In 1996, the site was consecrated and the construction of the church started according to the project of V. Čekanauskas. In 2000-2001, the construction was completed and the first mass was celebrated. The rectangular bell tower is the architect’s replica of the bell towers of the wooden churches in Lithuania that impressed him. At the request of the Salesians, a gym and leisure areas were built, and camps were organised to attract young residents of Lazdynai to the church (the Salesian Order and their inspiration, St. John Bosco, are known as the patrons of young people).

It is common to hear about sorcerers and herbalists living in rural areas of Lithuania. Nevertheless, the capital city also had its own soothsayer, one of the most famous and influential in Lithuania – Eugenija Šimkūnaitė (1920-1996). It is important to note that she was not just a collector of herbs, but a habilitated doctor of biological sciences, respected in the world of pharmacists. You could find ‘Aunt Dilgėlė’ (Aunt Nettle) gathering herbs around Lazdynai, and it was easy to recognise her from her distinctive outfit – ‘kerzai’, a man’s jacket and beret. According to residents, Šimkūnaitė even ‘prophesied’ the location of the TV tower when she was gathering herbs in the still empty meadow, and told the future Karoliniškės district developer, Kazimieras Balėnas, that the place would be heard around the world. In fact, the events of January 13 did echo widely. Šimkūnaitė is commemorated in Lazdynai in three ways: there is a small street near the Lazdynai Bridge named after her; a five-storey block of flats on Erfurto g. 4, which may seem unremarkable at first glance but houses the Eugenija Šimkūnaitė Memorial Apartment Museum, which is full of exhibits; and a memorial stone dedicated to the herbalist (designed by J. Gencevičius) was placed in a small square on Laisvės pr. in 2013. Around the stone, 12 cherry trees were also planted – E. Šimkūnaitė wanted a cherry tree to be planted on her grave (as it was done in her native Tauragnai), but this wish was implemented with even greater ambition in Vilnius in Lazdynai. The number 12 was chosen as a symbol of months. Although it is difficult for cherry trees to grow in an urbanised environment (mainly due to malicious human interference), the caring guardians of Šimkūnaitė’s memory take care of and nurture them.

Crossing an underpass with functioning food kiosks, you enter the micro-district called Lazdynai IV. Here, you are greeted by perhaps one of the sexiest sculptures in Vilnius – ‘The Builder’. The work by Antanas Dimžlys, which was added to the space between the houses in 1980, is known by both the residents and the official literature in two different ways, as ‘The Worker’ or ‘The Builder’. The expressive man depicted in the stone reminds us that it was not only the designers who brought fame to Lazdynai, but also the builders who toiled under difficult conditions. The district was even built during the harsh winter period and overcoming the difficulties of constructing during such cold conditions was often mentioned.

Lazdyņai is full of elements that are invisible to the average person’s eye, which have also contributed significantly to the district’s fame. One of its most characteristic reflections is the obtuse-angled, elongated five-storey blocks. This was another way in which the architects tried to make friends with the hilly terrain. The flats on the corner site have non-standard trapezoidal rooms. This and other modifications in Lazdynai required a great deal of effort on the part of the construction workers, which led to constant disputes between them and the architects. In the end, a more interesting idea won out, and Lazdynai became home to a wider variety of buildings than rectangular boxes. The curved houses are particularly striking from a bird’s-eye view of the city’s skyline: from the ground, the monolithic towers are the calling card of Lazdynai, and from above, these five-storey blocks stand out.

In this part of the district, the main shopping and service centre was an institution with the not very imaginative name ‘Lazdynai’. In addition to the shop, there was also a café and a beer bar, but, unlike in ‘Erfurtas’, they were not luxurious. Drunken bar-goers had a penchant for defacing the nearby sculpture of a horse and rider ‘Rytas’ by Gediminas Karalius; they would break the horse’s legs, or scribble something on the rider’s bottom… The problem was that the sculpture originally stood on a low concrete base. In 1983, after incessant acts of vandalism, Henrikas Šilgalis had the sculpture placed on a much higher pedestal, which was impossible to reach. The ‘Horse’, as it is called by the inhabitants of Lazdynai, was popular in Soviet-era publications about the city, and was even justifiably called the symbol of the new Vilnius. It is one of the most striking sculptures of the time and still looks elegant today. The ‘horse’ serves even today as a meeting point for the inhabitants of the district.

One of the reasons why Lazdynai has earned its fame is its friendly coexistence with nature. Rather than radically changing the terrain and cutting down old trees, the designers intended to leave many pockets of green. In parts of the district, they still provide refreshment today. However, the most spectacular natural feature in the district is Plikakalnio escarpment. It has a relative height of 59 m and is second only to the Pūčkoriai escarpment (relative height 65 m). Not only does it offer spectacular views of Vilnius, but it is also the starting point for the trails of the Karoliniškės Landscape Reserve, which are full of natural treasures. You can reach Žvėrynas along these trails. Plikakalnio escarpment is a state-protected geological monument.