The Franciscan Church, or the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Franciscan Abbey in Vilnius to give it its full title, dates from the middle of the 14th century. Currently a beguiling building site of crumbling Gothic and Baroque magnificence, work continues both inside and out to restore it to its original beauty. Amidst the hastily assembled wooden seating, piles of bricks and scaffolding towers, work is slowly moving forwards.
Franciscan Church
Website
www.pranciskonai.ltAmenities
City centre location
Comments
Robert Evans
My wife and I spent a week in Vilnius about two weeks before Lithuania and a host of other countries joined the EU. I find in my travels a significan fraction of a country's history is somwhow tied closely to the churches. I, therefore, spend an inordinate amount of my tourist time in and around a city's churches. Saint Anne's is beautiful. Walking out of Saint Anne's, I was taken aback by a church that essentially took me to New Mexico and Arizona. The Franciscan Church next to Saint Anne's caught me totally off guard. Yes, it is in somewhat poor repair and, by its very nature, stark, so different from the preponderance of ornate churches throughout Europe. I sat for several hours looking at the rough hewn crucifix and the modest carvings, and remembered the number of times I served mass in churches so similar, in the poorest counties of northern New Mexico. To stumble upon a Franciscan church so far from "home" was at once interesting and very naustalgic.