Unveiled in September 1996, the monument to Gediminas (1275-1341), who famously founded Vilnius in 1323 and who was also Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1316 until his death, stands more or less on the spot where the howling iron wolf that inspired the moving of the country’s capital from Trakai allegedly appeared in his dream. Strangely, the aforementioned beast is represented in V. Kašuba’s creation not in metal as one would expect, but in stone.
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Taking pride of place outside the National Museum since July 6, 2003, the 750th anniversary of the crowning of the country’s one and only king in 1253, Mindaugas (1200-1263), who’s generally considered to be the founder of the Lithuanian state, was a bit of a character to say the least. Clumsy in his personal affairs and switching from paganism to Catholicism and back to paganism to suit his needs, Mindaugas was eventually assassinated by his nephew and served as little more than a footnote in Lithuanian history until he was resurrected by the national revival movement of the late 19th century. R. Midvikis’ granite likeness of the man sees him sitting on his sostas (throne), from which the Lithuanian language gets its word for capital, sostinė, literally ‘the place where the throne is’.
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Born into an impoverished Polish-speaking family with aristocratic roots and affectations, as a child the Lithuanian novelist Žemaitė (real name Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, 1845-1921) was forbidden to speak Lithuanian, at the time the language of the common people. Inquisitive and defiant, the young Žemaitė made friends with local serfs and was soon fluent in her mother tongue, the language in which she was eventually to write in. Self taught and unusually political for a woman at the time, Žemaitė’s sombre tales concentrate on issues surrounding the miseries of peasant life and family squabbles, all written in a vernacular style as spoken by rural Lithuanian-speakers of the time. Her statue, the work of the architect brothers Algimantas and Vytautas Nasvytis who are also responsible for the interior of the Neringa restaurant and the Seimas among other things, was unveiled somewhat strangely at the height of the Cold War in 1970.
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