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Antanas
Stravinskas: INTRODUCTION
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- Ethnic folk culture has always been
and traditionally will remain a firm foundation of Lithuanian folk
art; it takes root even in ancient Europe, in the culture of
Indo-Europeans, Proto-Balts and Balts. This has been confirmed
again by the most recent ethnological, particularly by
mythological and archeological research into spiritual and
material culture of the Balts, to the sphere of which also belongs
a rich heritage of Lithuanian folk art.
- Old Lithuanian folk architecture,
its various small scale forms and particularly such a unique
constituent of folk art as crosses aroused interest as early as
the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth century. This interest has especially grown at
present with the resurrection of Lithuanian national consciousness
and culture, customs and traditions.
- Lithuania has retained quite a rich
heritage of roofed pillars, pillars and chapels above which suns
radiate in the form of crosses as their iron pinnacles. Great
numbers of those iron tops have been accumulated in the mute stock
of Lithuanian museums. Multitudes of them still soar above
churches, chapels, belfries and churchyard gates or remain upright
in cemeteries and in forsaken graveyards.
- The first crosses erected in various
places on various occasions were doubtlessly wooden but beginning
with the eighteenth century (and significantly earlier in towns)
iron tops of memorial monuments and crosses for places of worship
were forged. As P. Galaunė maintains, their prototypes could
have been embellishments of wooden crosses, as “pinnacles of
crosses shaped like suns also used to be wooden”. This would be
a logical issue of the development of the decoration of Lithuanian
wooden crosses.
- Thus iron tops crowning the monument
is an inseparable constituent of roofed pillars, pillars and
chapels. Therefore our album of “Lithuanian Folk Art” devoted
to iron tops of monuments is something like a sequel to two
already published books of “Small Scale Architecture” (1970,
1990) which reported upon roofed pillars, pillars, chapels and
crosses.
- The ingress of the Roman cross to
Lithuania was long and troublesome. It was accompanied by the
sword of the Cross and Sword-Bearers who brought much spiritual
and physical suffering to our nation; it came along with the crown
of the kings of Lithuania and Poland. The pagan Lithuanians long
resisted refusing the old faith relics of which survived in
various spheres of folk culture up to the beginning of the
twentieth century. It is known that necrocult was highly developed
in Lithuania; to commemorate the dead, tomb-pillars, ornamented
pillar-boards, roofed pillars, pillars and chapels in miniature
used to be erected. Since the time of Mindaugas (the middle of the
thirteenth century) and Jagiello (the fourteenth century) along
with these commemorative monuments the use of crosses gained
ground. Eventually and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries crosses became so widespread that the land and
particularly Žemaitija used to be called the fatherland of
crosses, chapels in miniature and chapels, the sacred land of
crosses or simply the cross marked Lithuania.
- Iron crosses is a constituent not
only of folk architecture but also of the history of Lithuanian
smithery. That is why its basic aspects deserve at least a cursory
glance.
- Lithuanian folk artistic smithery
has old traditions. It started in the second millennium B. C. with
the use of non-ferrous metals (later, of precious metals) in
decoration. However, the real smith's craft should be related to
the extraction and forging of iron in the middle of the first
millennium B. C. Wrought iron articles acquired a greater spread
in the Christian era. Beginning with the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries they came to be widely used in military equipment,
building construction, transport (for binding), as well as for the
construction and decoration of travel and dowry chests.
- When wrought iron began to be used
for decoration of memorial monuments or places of worship, the
guild smithery in towns played an important role. Like in other
countries, in Lithuania town smiths united into fraternities and
guilds which helped them develop their professional skill. Town
smiths also performed artistic work. This is testified not only by
exhibits preserved in the museums, but also by the crosses which
in the form of suns radiate in all their beauty and magnificence
above the churches of Vilnius, Kaunas and other Lithuanian towns.
That is why we would not like to decline a presumption that urban
hammermen could have had a certain influence on smiths. This is
likely to be the case because some village and estate smiths had
acquired their experience in the guilds in towns. It cannot be
denied, however, that more and more free craftsmen (who had no
obligations either to estates or to urban communities) appeared in
Lithuanian villages, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. They often had an extraordinary talent and not
infrequently the artist's soul. They typically had a profound
sense of native environment and an inborn feeling for beauty and
harmony. They took upon themselves the noble task of fulfilling
the spiritual and aesthetic demands of the then country people:
alongside with farmwork, they skilfully adorned roofed pillars,
pillars and other monuments with wrought-iron tops in the form of
crosses.
- M. Brensztejn, a researcher into the
Žemaitija crosses and chapels, was one of the first to notice the
gifts of ordinary rural smiths. He pointed out that there
is so much vivid imagination, refinement and taste in the work of
these hammermen, i. e. in the iron tops of monuments, that it is
hard to believe that their source is an ordinary rural smithy,
whilst their authors are self-taught smiths.
- Indeed, it has been past the time
that these bright, resourceful personalities and their destinies
caught attention. Several smiths were mentioned by Č.
Kontrimas in his work, others were mentioned by J. Petrulis, J.
Mickevičius, B. Kviklys and Z. Žemaitytė. The author of
the present paper also managed to trace a few. They all lived and
worked in the second half of the nineteenth and in the early
twentieth century. They are but a few, that is why it has been
maintained that it is necessary at least to mention them here.
They are: Andrijauskas from the village of Gaigoliai (Kupiškis
dis.), Pranas Brazauskas from Skirsnemunė (Jurbarkas dis.),
Petras Buzas from Juodžiūnai (Kupiškis dis.), Jonas Dagys
from Punkiškiai (Kupiškis dis.), Karolis Freibergis and his son
Jonas from the former estate of Krašatinas (Pakruojis dis.),
stone-cutter and smith (?) Gailius-Gailevičius from Ukrinai
(Mažeikiai dis.), A. Gaučys and Gataveckas from Utena
apskritis (district), Antanas Gedvila from Ramygala
(Panevėžys dis.), P. Jankauskas from the environs of
Plungė, Kazlauskas from Medžiūnai, Antanas
Markevičius from the environs of Ramygala, Jonas Mikalauskas
from Telšiai (died in Chicago), Petrikas from the village of
Skroblė (Rietavas valsčius - a small rural district),
Povilas Ragauskas from Drūlėnai (Kupiškis dis.), Jonas
Ruibys from Rietavas (Plungė dis.), Antanas
Semenavičius-Semėnas from Dapšiai (Mažeikiai dis.),
and Juozapas Tilindis from the former estate of Antašavas
(Kupiškis apskritis - district). Perhaps a few more might be
discovered. Obviously the list is very short. Regretfully short.
But a multitude of Lithuanian hammermen of iron crosses (like
numerous masters of other branches of folk art) remain unnamed;
nevertheless these Lithuanian folk masters deserve great esteem
and attention.
- Like in most folk art, the
possibilities of smith's craft and the form of his work is
primarily determined by the material. It is iron in this case. To
forge the tops of monuments, Lithuanian smiths used flat, edged
and round iron sticks and tin (at present also copper) plates.
Iron used to be delivered from Riga, Karaliaučius, Warsaw and
other industrial and trade centres. It is true that up to the
second half of the nineteenth century it came in fairly small
amounts. That is why, with inconspicuous exceptions, it was used
sparingly but constructively and resourcefully in monument
forging.
- Iron used to be processed heated in
the furnace of an ordinary rural smithy. The plastic properties of
red-hot iron are virtually unlimited. It used to be not only
forged or beaten flat, but also stretched, split, twisted, bent,
cut and welded, while being cooled it used to be riveted. Like
tin, iron was occasionally treated in conditions of ordinary
metalwork. Smiths employed riveting and mounting of bent iron
bands. Quite frequently, especially at the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, manufactured spikes
used to be fitted and fixed in.
- Unusually variously beaten, bent and
sometimes twisted edged iron forms not only graceful, light and
delicate tracery shapes, but also retains a play of light and
shadow, has lively, rhythmically vibrating lines. The iron top of
the monument set in delicate tracery, its tortuous lines are
especially impressive against the blue of the sky. To acquire a
variety and rhythm in decoration, smiths occasionally managed to
cut out numerous perforations, rhythmically arranged cross-shaped
ornaments even in massive flat iron what would give to the solid
iron shape features of tender tracery and lightness. Thus a
variety of these metal articles and a multitude of ways of their
decoration were formed.
- As it has become evident from recent
research, some cross tops of monuments were chromium coated.
Besides, the crosses and miniature crosses of churches and
belfries differ from those on tops of roofed pillars, pillars and
of chapels in miniature not only in their decoration but also in
size. In general the size of crosses varies between a half and one
and a half metre.
- The illustrative material of the
album (about 700 illustrations) is divided into two very unequal
parts in fact: iron tops of monuments and iron tomb crosses. The
tops of monuments are grouped according to their decoration and
symbols: little decorated crosses and miniature crosses with one
or several cross pieces (the image of the tree of the world);
crosses decorated with Christian emblems; crosses weather-vanes;
crosses of geometrical patterns; crosses decorated with shapes of
celestial bodies (double and tracery discs of suns, clear shaped
moons and stars); finally, crosses decorated with elements of
fauna and flora. Iron tomb crosses come at the end of the album in
quite scanty illustrations.
- A different grouping of the
illustrations is also possible: it may be according to the place
where the monuments belonged and still are or according to the
application of the crosses. Such grouping, however, requires more
accurate data which is missing in many cases: numerous tops found
their way into the museums without the exact documentation. The
compilers of the album and the artist V. Armalas made an attempt
to represent the iron tops of monuments from Klaipėda region
and Žemaitija on the left-hand sheet, whilst those from
Aukštaitija, Dzūkija and Suvalkija on the right-hand sheet.
- In the album almost every group of
the tops of monuments is set apart by insertions of several
illustrations: they show ansembles of old Lithuanian architecture
- churches and belfries, chapels, chapels in miniature, pillars
and roofed pillars harmoniously grown into Lithuanian landscape.
All of these used to be decorated with artistically forged iron
tops.
- Like all Lithuanian folk art, iron
tops of places of worship and of various memorial monuments as
well as iron tomb crosses characteristically expose old
traditional ornaments and compositional harmony of decorative
elements when forged metal is joined with wood or stone.
- Among other branches of Lithuanian
folk art, iron tops of monuments are distinguished for the variety
of decorative elements and forms and particularly for the plastic
properties of forged iron, which are the flexibility of forms,
gracefulness of profiles and shapes, lightness and subtle tracery
design. Symmetry and frequently repeated decorative elements
create exceptional harmony and render the impression of musical
rhythm. This testifies to the great skill of Lithuanian smiths,
their artistic taste and ability to make use of the plastic
properties of iron. Lithuanian smiths managed to join harmoniously
ancient ornamental forms and Christian symbols of Western and
Eastern Europe into one whole.
- The album is compiled of photos
which have been taken in several years by a great lover of folk
art, photographer Mečislovas Sakalauskas. The photos have
been taken of the iron tops of monuments and the iron crosses
preserved in the Čiurlionis State Art Museum, the Lithuanian
Art Museum, in the Telšiai, Rokiškis and Ukmergė Museums of
Ethnography and in the Museum of the Čiurlionis Secondary Art
School in Vilnius, as well as of those monuments and iron crosses
which stand in various etnographic regions of Lithuania.
- We believe that the specimens
compiled in this album will stimulate further research into and
systematization of the above mentioned monuments and help apply
their subtle beauty in Lithuania today and in the future.
