- Kazys Seselgis:
INTRODUCTION
-
- For many centuries monuments, such
as pillar-type crosses, roofed pillar-type crosses, ordinary
crosses and miniature chapels, played a significant part in
Lithuanian folk architecture. While farm buildings were built to
satisfy everyday needs, such as for example, storing goods,
monuments were
not
related to any material necessities and served exclusively the
spiritual needs of the people. Monuments used to be erected to
commemorate significant events and dates in the lives of families,
village communities and also in the political, social and cultural
life of the nation. There are monuments dedicated to honor the
fallen in the uprising of 1863, to commemorate the
proclamation of the independent Republic of Lithuania, and the
Year of Vytautas the Great, and also monuments marking significant
events in church life. But such monuments are not very numerous.
Most of the crosses were erected by individual families over the
graves of their relatives, at the places of accidents, on the
occasion of great blessings or misfortunes, at the birth of the
long-awaited heir, to mark good fortune on the farm or in personal
life, as the fulfillment
of a promise amongst other reasons.
- Once erected, a cross, a pillar-type
cross or a miniature chapel was regarded as a sacred thing: nobody
dared to inflict any damage to it or show disrespect by indiscreet
behavior near it. During the summer festivals (e. g. Whitsunday)
such monuments used to be decorated with wreaths, cemeteries and
individual monuments were visited by processions in
which the entire village population usually took part. The area
around them was constantly taken care of by planting flowers and
shrubs, by weeding the paths and by sprinkling them
with sand. This was supposed to strengthen the ties between the
living and the dead, a link
with the past, and was one of the ways of maintaining a balance
between the material world
and man's spiritual life. Some monuments, especially those in
Dzukija, acquired the fame
of possessing magic powers, and then people's contacts with them
took on quite a different
aspect. For example, as late as the seventies of the present
century brides still continued to
gird the stems of crosses with towels and aprons in the Zervynos
village, Varena District,
entreating God to bless them with an heir. The traditions of
deifying monuments and attributing great powers to them are very
old, for they seem to have come down to us from the
pagan times.
- Monuments used to be erected in
farmsteads, by the wayside, at crossroads, on river banks, in
cemeteries, churchyards, streets and squares of towns and villages
and other places visible from afar, related to some commemorable
event. Their distribution corresponded with the concentration of
farm houses: the largest clusters of monuments were to be found in
the old type villages and village cemeteries, while in the areas
where farmsteads were dispersed at considerable distances,
monuments were much sparser.
- Crosses, pillar-type crosses and
miniature chapels gave the village carpenters, sculptors and wood
carvers a better chance to display their capabilities than any
other objects of folk architecture. Here they could realize the
old creative traditions handed down to them by their predecessors,
and thus produce works of high artistic standards. In these
structures folk masters strove to express the joys and misfortunes
that befell the village people of their time, to embellish and
enoble their everyday life and surroundings. The craftsman always
worked in close collaboration with his patron, who was also a
simple farmer. The patron's wish to have one of these monuments
was usually the decisive factor which determined the content of
the monument and its form (a cross, a pillar-type cross, a roofed
pillar-type cross or a miniature chapel). The distribution of
these monuments in Lithuania depended a great deal upon the
patrons. But the master himself was usually free to carry out the
commission as he thought best and, in doing this, he relied both
on the traditions of his predecessors and his own artistic
creativity. Therefore the master alone, as a rule, was honored as
the one who gave expression to people's spiritual values. It would
be rather difficult to determine the exact part which the master
and the patron played in the development of memorial architecture
and its ethnographic features, but we should not underestimate the
part played by the latter. Whatever the world outlook of the
simple people of the distant past, whatever their attitude and
reaction to the relationship of the material and metaphysical
elements, whatever the means used to realize people's spiritual
aspirations, they all had a share in the content and forms of
memorial architecture.
- We can imagine the following
sequence in the creation of a memorial monument: the patron makes
his wishes plain to the craftsman. In giving his instructions, he
proceeds from his own understanding of the world and the artistic
conventions used throughout a long period of time to express
spiritual values. In addition to the factors indicated above, the
master is influenced also by the landscape and surroundings of the
future monument (a cemetery, a farmstead, a street, a roadside,
and so on), by the prevalent architectural styles, and the
compositional innovations discovered and utilized by other
masters. For
example, Baroque sculpture and ornamentation had a great influence
on the well-known master of crosses, Vincas Svirskis (around the
turn of the 20th century), while his own original compositions
served as models for other masters who worked in the same district
(e. g. Samuolis). But on the other hand, his monuments would not
have been admired, loved and honored so much by the simple folk if
he had used architectural forms outside the general artistic norms
which formed part of their everyday life. Inattention to the
values of national spiritual culture and folklore, disregard of
the accepted interpretation of the past and disrespect to the
native language are incompatible with any measure of sincerity
in the small-scale forms of architecture or the continuation and
use of centuries-old artistic traditions. This truth was only too
manifestly confirmed during, the first post-war years when,
through administrative measures, attempts were made to channel the
natural development of folk memorial architecture into a new
direction.
- Memorial monuments were built of
stone, bricks, iron and, beginning with the 20's of the present
century, concrete. But the greatest number of them was made of
wood. All of them were topped with iron heads. Monuments, which
were made exclusively of iron or stone were rather rare; elaborate
iron crosses used to be fixed in natural field boulders specially
selected for the purpose or roughhewn stems of stone. As bricks,
stone and concrete were not easy to model, monuments made of these
materials were rather modest and laconic, conspicuous among the
trees or against the sky by the simple cross-like shape alone.
Wood and iron provided better possibilities for the masters to
demonstrate their talents, therefore wooden and iron monuments
displayed the greatest variety of forms. There were several kinds
of constructions typical of wooden monuments: a stem with a roof
(roofed pillar-type monuments), a stem with one or several
cross-pieces (crosses), a box with one of its sides open, topped
with a saddle, hipped, broach or, more rarely, conical broach roof
(miniature chapels). Alongside, there were monuments of mixed
construction: a combination of a tall vertical stem and a
miniature chapel (pillar-type crosses) or a cross and a miniature
chapel. According to the type of the construction it is customary
to distinguish five typological groups of wooden monuments: roofed
pillar-type crosses, pillar-type crosses, ordinary crosses,
miniature chapels and carved memorial boards - krikstai.
Each typological group had an infinite variety of forms - it has
been impossible to discover two absolutely identical monuments
even if they were created by one and the same master (here again
we can recall, for example, the works by Vincas Svirskis).
Typological variation is one of the outstanding features of
Lithuanian folk architecture.
- To satisfy the simple people's
insatiable desire for beauty, folk monuments used to be profusely
decorated with openwork, contour and relief carvings or turned
work ornaments. True, there were crosses, which had no decorative
elements whatever, except for the slight ornamentation of the
stem, but there were many more in which lavish decorations
smothered even the very sign of the cross. Wooden miniature
chapels were decorated, as a rule, quite moderately, pillar-type
and roofed crosses, on the contrary, used to be decorated rather
heavily. The decorative elements on the krikstai, which
used to be erected on graves in the coastal districts (the
Klaipeda region), made an inseparable part of their construction:
the board, which bore the inscription of the deceased person's
name, was first painted, then geometrical ornaments or stylized
plants and animals were cut out along the
edge. The motifs of decorative elements fall into three groups:
(1) geometrical abstract ornaments, (2) stylized birds and animals
(grass-snakes and, more rarely, horses), plants (daisies, potted
flowers, leaves of various shapes, blossoms and buds), heavenly
bodies (suns, moons, stars), and (3) Christian iconographic
symbols and ecclesiastical attributes (liturgical vessels,
monstrance’s, spears, ladders, etc.). The most popular of them
were open-work geometrical ornaments, then followed the stylized
plant ornaments and the sun and moon motifs, which were usually
masterfully inserted into the iron heads of the monuments.
- Through the arrangement of
decorative elements the artist strove to concentrate the viewer's
attention on the most important part of the monument. Thus, for
example, the most heavily decorated part of a cross was usually
the point of intersection of the stem and the cross-piece, for
this was the place where a model of the crucified Christ or a
little chapel with the figures of saints within used to be
attached. On a miniature chapel decorations were usually
concentrated around the edges of the open side, showing the
statuettes within.
- The statuettes on the monument were
very important, for they expressed its main idea. The chapel, for
example, was very often regarded only as a temporary home for the
patron saints, which gave them shelter from rain, snow or the
wind. In this respect, miniature chapels occupied a unique place
amongst small-scale folk architecture. To a farmer only the
statues within the chapel seemed to be sacred, so that in troubled
times he would save only the saints by bringing them home and
leave the chapel to its own fate. It could be the reason why
outwardly miniature chapels reminded so much of barns, porches or
miniature shrines, i. e. constructions designed to give temporary
or permanent shelter to people. Thus, the miniature chapel was, in
fact, just a home for the deified statues. The place for the
miniature chapel to be installed in was selected and the
statuettes were arranged inside so that
they should not resemble a display of stationary exhibits but
remind of living beings looking through the window of the chapel
at the everyday life of the farmer's family, at the carts passing
by on the road and the corn fields stretching far and wide. The
windows of the chapel and the glass door were usually adorned with
embroidered or lace curtains and paper flowers. The idea was to
express love and respect for the humanized gods, and create as
much comfort for them as possible. As a rule, miniature chapels
contained more than one statue, and they used to be arranged in
scenes from Christ's and the saints'
lives. Statuettes are important on pillar-type and roofed
pillar-type crosses as well, but on these monuments their
emotional impact is usually suppressed by numerous other
decorative elements. Here the statuettes lose much of their
independent function as the central pieces of the monument and
serve mostly as mere decorations.
- The semantic and artistic value of
the statuettes attached to crosses is even less. The greater
number of these monuments have a model of the crucified Christ
attached at the intersection of the stem and the crosspiece. Its
artistic value depended mostly on the master's ability to handle
the same canonized form in any original way.
- In the second half of the 19th
century, when iron could be afforded by middle-class farmers, iron
heads, most often referred to as little suns, became an
inalienable part of every miniature chapel, pillar-type cross and
roofed pillar-type cross. Very soon iron head forgers managed to
attain really high artistic standards. The unity of the wooden and
iron parts of the monument was usually ensured by choosing the
right scale and the proper proportions in the arrangement of the
stylized ornamental motifs.
- Small-scale folk monuments usually
harmonized quite well with the farm buildings, which was due both
to their wellchosen dimensions and similar decorative elements. In
ornamentation and composition there was little difference between
the monuments and the dwelling houses. We find the same kind of
decorations in the trimmings of gables, windows and porches, as
well as on household utensils, such as laundry beetles, spinning
wheels, distaffs, and furniture - towel hangers, cupboards, dowry
chests, chairs, benches, etc.
The unity of the artistic forms used in the exterior and the
interior of farmhouses and farmyards was ensured by the continuity
of the efforts of many generations. It has become a tradition in
Lithuanian folk architecture, which is the best reflection of the
spiritual needs of its creators.
- This publication in the series of Lithuanian
Folk Art is devoted to miniature chapels and crosses. It
should be viewed as the second volume of Small-scale
Architecture, published in 1970 and devoted to pillar-type and
roofed pillar-type crosses.
- Miniature chapels used to be built
of bricks, field boulders or wood. The forms of those built of
brick are rather simple, without any traces of having been
influenced by the prevalent architectural styles. Most of them are
rectangular or, more rarely, round. On one or several sides,
depending on the visibility of the chapel, there are niches for
statuettes.
Every miniature chapel is topped with an iron head, which may be
quite simple or, on the contrary, rather elaborate. Brick chapels
are usually plastered; when a miniature chapel is built of
boulders, the binding seams are nicely molded. Brick and stone
chapels, just like other monuments, used to be erected at
crossroads, by the wayside or, more rarely, in farmyards or over
graves. Very often they were built to adorn the entrance to
churchyards and cemeteries. Commissions for brick chapels used to
come from village communities, parishes or the local rich. Simple
peasants favored wood, which was a cheaper and more traditional
building material. Although brick chapels are to be found all over
Lithuania,
their number is much less than that of the wooden monuments.
- Wooden miniature chapels were
usually built on the ground or fixed up in the trees or onto
walls. Those on the ground were either rectangular, round or
cross-like, with columns or without at the facade, covered with
roofs of different configuration (saddle, hipped, broach or
conical broach roofs). They also differed from each other in the
degree of openness (open at the facade, on three or all the four
sides), in the number of stores (one- or two-storied
constructions) and the foundation (made of unbound boulders, brick
or stone masonry, or just a wood log frame). Outwardly, wooden
chapels were rather laconic,
with sparing decorative elements, the ornamentation of the iron
heads being the only focal point. This was quite in keeping with
the general tendency, observed in the folk architecture of the
Lowlands where wooden miniature chapels were the most frequent.
This tendency was to seek beauty not so much through an abundance
of decorative elements, which was so characteristic of folk
architecture in the Highlands, as through the overall harmony of
their constituent parts, their admirable proportions and their
unity with the natural environment. In this architectural context,
the laconic forms of the wooden chapels blended very well with the
whole architecture of farmsteads.
- Chapels, hoisted in trees, developed
in a different direction: as they occurred in every ethnic region
of Lithuania, their architectural patterns matched the local
architectural traditions. Accordingly, their forms were more
varied than those of the chapels built on the ground: they ranged
from simple box-like carcasses with saddle roofs to very posh
structures immitating Baroque or neo-Gothic constructions.
- Wooden crosses, with one or, more
rarely, with two or three cross-pieces, were the most frequent
forms of memorial architecture in the Lithuanian countryside. They
were constructed in different compositional and decorative
patterns, which included sculpture and various interpretations of
chapel and altar motifs. The latter were used as decorative
elements at the intersection of the stem and the crosspiece and
served as repositories for statuettes. There were several
variations of decorative elements used on crosses: carvings on the
stem and the cross-piece, open-work ornaments fixed on the stem,
open-work ornamentation of the intersection of the stem and the
cross-piece, decorative chapels or altars attached to the main
construction, iconographic symbols placed on the sides. Quite
frequently several ways of ornamentation were used together on one
and the same monument.
- Every ethnic region had its own
traditions in the use of decorative and compositional patterns.
For example, in Eastern Highlands the stem and the cross-piece
were very frequently adorned with open-work cuttings. In Dzukija,
crosspieces were often supported by spears, which minimized the
visual significance of the sign of the cross in the overall
composition of the monument. In the Lowlands crosses were less
numerous and decorative elements were used on them rather
sparingly.
- To a large extent, the style of the
crosses in every ethnic region was determined by individual
masters of outstanding talent who worked there. At the turn of the
20th century one of such masters was Vincas Svirskis, who lived
and worked in the districts of Kedainiai and Panevezys. Every
single cross made by him was a prominent specimen among the
traditional crosses turned out by the other, less gifted, masters
of these districts. Although the influence of church Baroque
sculpture on Svirskis' crosses was unmistakable, they cannot be
said to have been just mere immitations. On the contrary, they
were creative interpretations of the decorous Baroque forms
blended with the compositional conventions of Lithuanian folk
sculpture. Discarding the usual technique of mounting a cross from
separate architectural parts and decorative elements, Svirskis
took to carving crosses from a solid piece of a tree trunk, most
often an oak. He also attached a good deal of importance to the
place where the monument was to be erected and its visibility. He
sought that his monuments should be equally impressive when viewed
from every point of observation.
If the monument was well visible on all the four sides, the master
took care to decorate evenly all the four facades; if it was
visible on two sides, two facades were decorated; if it was
visible only from the front, it was the front that carried all the
decorations. In this respect Svirskis broke away from the
prevailing Highlands' tradition of erecting crosses where
they could be viewed only from the front and, accordingly, of
concentrating all the attention
on their facades. He preferred to adapt the composition of his
crosses to where they were
going to stand, and that was his new original method, his
trademark so to say. This folk
artist built about 200 crosses, each one of them peculiar for its
shape, sculptures, bas-reliefs and arrangement.
- In Svirkis' monuments the cross, as
the main iconographic symbol of Christianity, which had always
been the focus point in all the traditional cross compositions,
gave way to masterly highreliefs depicting scenes from the life of
Christ and the saints, and to the sculptures of popular saints,
such as St John the Baptist, St Isidore, St Florian and others.
The outward appearance of his statues, their robes and typical
postures resembled simple farmers in the Lithuanian countryside.
This made them very dear to the hearts of the common people.
The monumental quality of Svirskis' crosses was achieved mostly
through the expressive figures of the saints and their elaborate
groupings.
- The outstanding talent of this folk
artist and his original artistic conceptions could not escape the
attention of his contemporaries. But his followers, alas, failed
to achieve the artistic heights of their teacher. The original
monumental style, created by Vincas Svirskis, did not receive
subsequently any appreciable development, most probably because it
differed too much from the standard forms of folk architecture and
represented a leap in the Lithuanian creative traditions rather
than their gradual development.
- Wood is not a very durable material;
it decays rather quickly, especially when in contact with the
soil. In several decades after the erection wooden crosses had to
be repaired: their stem had to be shortened by sawing off the
decayed lower part. Thus, the proportions of such a cross-changed.
The greater number of the 19th century crosses, shown in the
photographs of the present publication, have already lost their
original height.
- Folk monuments of the kind
represented in this publication also served the purposes of visual
information about the local people's spiritual culture, their
aesthetic views and understanding of beauty. Rather a short time
ago miniature chapels, crosses, pillar-type and roofed pillar-type
crosses constituted an inseparable part of Lithuanian
landscape.
Not only did they bear witness to the high standards of folk
artistic traditions and the talent of individual masters, but they
also shaped and beautified the rural scenes around them.
- A passer-by could not help noticing
the aesthetic impact of the monuments on their surroundings simply
because they occurred in great numbers, and the variety of themes,
depicted in them, their artistic forms and arrangement were just
inexhaustible.
- In 1938, Prof. Ignas Koncius, who
was an enthusiastic recorder of folk small-scale architecture,
drew up a list of such monuments which were found at the time by
the wayside in the Lowlands. According to this list, there were
3100 monuments west of the
Jurbarkas-Erzvilkas-Uzventis-Tryskiai-Lauzuva line (the Klaipeda
region excluded). That means that there were 1.3 miniature chapels
or some other kind of monuments to every single kilometer. If we
add to this number the monuments, which stood at some distance
from the roads, in farmsteads and village cemeteries, their
general number would amount to 6
or 7 thousand, or 0.4 item to every square kilometer. These
impressive numbers could not help leaping into the eye and could
not fail to produce a considerable effect on the rural scene.
- Only a miserable fraction of this
priceless wealth of folk architecture has survived to the present
day. In the ethnic area explored by prof. Ignas Koncius mere
0.35-0.5 per cent of the former monuments have been preserved. A
little more monuments have remained in farmsteads, churchyards and
cemeteries, for there they have been looked after by their owners
and patrons.
- There were two causes responsible
for this drastic decrease in the number of folk monuments: natural
causes (wood is a fairly short-lived building material) and, which
is much more important, the ideological policy in Lithuania after
World War II. A large number of memorial items were purposefully
destroyed even as late as the 70's. The construction of new
monuments was officially frowned upon, so that in order to avoid
trouble, people simply stopped building them. Whatever new
monuments appeared in more remote places, at some distance from
big roads, they were rather modest, and even poor, from the
artistic point of view. In an attempt to save the old wayside
crosses and chapels, people used to
transfer them to farmsteads, but this was done only in case their
patrons had been individual farmers and they continued to reside
in their old homes. Crosses and chapels erected at the sponsorship
of village communities were usually, left to their own fate.
- Before the war, decayed wooden
monuments were usually repaired or replaced by new ones so that
their total number remained approximately the same all over
Lithuania. When building new crosses, chapels and other monuments,
folk masters strove to keep to the traditional artistic forms, for
the main principle in folk art were the continuity of its forms,
which guaranteed the endurance in the general appearance of the
architectural monuments and the rural scene. After the war this
natural continuity was broken and the country scene lost one of
its most important and characteristic anthropogenetic elements.
The builders of the new rural settlements and recreational
complexes lost the natural source which enabled them to achieve
and perpetuate in the new constructions the traditional folk art
forms which blended so well with their natural surroundings. Now
we can judge about what we used to
have and what we have lost only from the scanty remains, but
mostly we judge about that from the photographs of memorial
architectural objects amasses in the stocks of our museums. We
have inherited the most valuable collections of photographs of the
pre-war crosses and chapels from the ethnographer Balys Buracas,
prof. Ignas Koncius, and the artist Adomas Varnas. After World War
II folk architecture has mostly been investigated by the
Ethnographic department of the Historical Institute of the Academy
of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR. Every year Lithuanian museums
(Ciurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas; Lithuanian State Art Museum;
Lithuanian Historical and Ethnographic Museum) do a lot of field
work registering and producing pictorial evidence of the objects
of folk memorial architecture. A good deal is done in this respetc
by professional photographers and laymen.
- The material contained in this book
is arranged according to the typological peculiarities of the
monuments. The indication of the location of the object, which is
represented in the photograph, enables the reader to form some
idea about the regional distribution of certain types of
monuments.
- The preparation of this art book was
started in 1968 by the late prof. Klemensas Cerbi lenas, an
indefatigable collector of the evidence of Lithuanian folk
architecture in museun and private collections, by Decent Feliksas
Bielinskis, an invaluable consultant on the selection of material
for this publication, and by Kazys Seselgis. It is a shame the
book we not published then. Now when the primitive attitude to the
content and forms of folk art and architecture has changed, the
publication of this book has become possible at last. Alas, the
final selection and arrangement of the material has inevitably
been done by the only survivor of the original group of three.
- The book is meant for artists,
architects, art critics and the public at large, interestec in the
heritage of Lithuanian folk culture and its development. It is our
hope that it will contribute to the proper understanding of
the enormous wealth created by the talentec hands of simple
village people, and will engender a wish to seek ways for its
better preservation so that it might serve as an inexhaustible
source in the creative efforts to perpetuate and enrich Lithuanian
national culture.
