Dalia Jonyaite & Jonas Drungilas: How to transmit place memory from generation to generation

Often Lithuanian towns and cities are like palimpsests in the sense that historical events, changing governments, regimes and invaders have destroyed and ruined the majority of the material cultural heritage; like the scribes who tried to shave the old Lithuania off and rewrite it anew, almost with every generation. Thus research in cultural, social, historical and ethnological topography of concrete space is becoming more and more significant, whereas not only scientists are investigating expressions of local culture, but they are also enormously important and interesting to local people and communities. When seen through the perspective of both inherent and regional culture, new questions are being reconsidered every time anew: What does a place mean for the people living there? How is the place memory being transmitted from generation to generation?

The past history of Lazdijai, a small town in Southern Lithuania, and its surroundings are much enlightened by five documents – parchments, luckily saved by the parsons of local church, although severely damaged and hardly legible: the Grand Duke of Lithuania and the King of Poland Sigismund Vasa privilege, granting of Magdeburg rights to Lazdijai, issued in the year 1597 and the confirming documents issued by other kings (Wladislaw Vasa 1636, Michael Korybut Wisnioviecki 1669, Augustus II 1718, Augustus III 1744). They were found in 1913 in the church archives by a Lazdijai priest and historian Jonas Reitelaitis, whereas the historian Jonas Gutauskas published them in the first book of a new publication “Mūsų senovė” (Eng. “Our Foretime”) in the year 1921. The publication describes the manuscripts’ physical state, which was already critical at the time, thus it presupposes that they were kept in critical conditions as well. Through the care of these intellectuals the documents were transferred to the museum of a local school after World War I. However they were returned to the Lazdijai church in World War II and thus survived. They were transferred to the Alytus (centre of the county) Regional Museum in 1961, in the time of Nikita Khrushchev’s detotalitarisation.

The guardians of the museum collection were worried about the extremely poor state of the manuscripts and only in the year 2005, after talking to the restorers, implementing the project of evaluating the state of Lithuanian museum collections, did they resolve to hand the objects to the Lithuanian Art Museum’s Pranas Gudynas Centre for Restoration.

Certainly, the tasks for restoration were not easy: we have faced very severe damages of material surface and structure, great deformations, remains of previous restorations, problems with reading the text, dilemmas of preservation and display.

The effort invested in the restoration work has really paid dividends, as the Alytus Museum organised a temporal exhibition, in compliance with educational programmes for school children. The manuscripts of the five kings were presented together with pictures and descriptions of their restoration process. In addition the Alytus and Lazdijai museums had an opportunity of making facsimiles of the privileges for their expositions. Last, but not least, the restored parchments are easier to study for specialists, who can also use the infrared photographs made by the restoration specialists.