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About this suburb, which once functioned as the current bus station and St. In the immediate vicinity of St. Stephen’s Church, a frequent Vilnius resident has heard. However, hardly anyone knows that San Pedro was once bustling in this place. Stephen’s Market?
But especially from the beginning….
S t. Part of Stephen’s field was connected to the old town and the Rūdininkai gate by St. The Steponas street route, which has been mentioned since the 16th century. starting. The road route stretched between sandy hills and for this reason probably the area was not very suitable for intensive accommodation. Until the 19th century. The suburbs of the second half were dominated by wooden houses built along the road. The urbanization processes were greatly accelerated with the arrival of the St. Petersburg – Warsaw railway line in 1862. During the assimilation of this part of the city, the axes of the current Railway, Mindaugas, Algirdas, Švitrigailos, Kaunas and Šopeno streets were formed. Little by little St. Stephen Trail lost its importance and became a street of local importance, the authenticity of which was seriously violated in 1974. A bus station was built. Standing in this place in the nineteenth century. The buildings of the second half were demolished and St. The old Stepono Street axis cuts into the side access of the bus station, forming a high masonry and concrete wall with stairs. S t. The territory of Stephen’s Church has become a place for the production and storage of building materials.
As a result of such drastic urbanization processes, this part of the city is still stigmatized by inertia. Citizens often associate the station district with an unsafe, abandoned and dangerous environment and increased criminal activity. Perhaps due to such meager socio-cultural changes and the slowdown in sustainable development in this part of the city, there is a serious lack of data from various studies. However, in recent years, with the intensification of pre-design and housing construction works around the station, new and hitherto unknown data are emerging that help reconstruct the development stages of this area.
2020 – 2021 During the archaeological investigation (researcher V. Veževičienė) we did not look like a garage and warehouse neighborhood, between Punsko and Panerių st. Several finds were revealed, clearly confirming that a different activity once took place here. At a shallow depth, parts of the building that once stood here were discovered: the remains of a concrete base with the remaining fragments of ceramic tile, stone floors with a gutter, steps, and chimneys / ducts.
Discover the 19th century. II p. – XX a. Findings like: coins, ammo nozzles, etc. show that at that time there was intense anthropogenic activity in the neighborhood. Probably the most unexpected find of the Soviet period is a gasoline column tank from the 1960s.
An analysis of various historical and iconographic sources, plans of the ancient city, revealed that in this place, around the 19th century. In the 1990s, a plaza or market was formed. In most of the 20th century. In the city plans of the first half, this place is identified as a market named after Ryn Stefanski, “St. Stephans Markt, Rynek Stefanski, Rynek, Stephen’s Market.
What was traded in this market? This question has not yet been answered. There are suspicions that in this place, or somewhere in its vicinity in the nineteenth century. There was a cattle market in the second half, but this assumption has yet to be tested and substantiated.
Most of the above-mentioned plans are schematic, so they do not show the buildings that were in the area. More informative is the 1938 In plan, marks two large wooden buildings. A more accurate image was helped to recreate the 1943 aerial photograph taken during war raids showing 3 pavilions. Later, in 1944, the aerial photograph shows the buildings on the plot destroyed during the bombing. To find out in which of them the foundations were found, the plan matching method was used and it turned out that the foundations of one of them, the western pavilion, were found in the investigated plot.
This commercial pavilion was kept for a short time. It was built on the eve of the Second World War, 1937-1939. Destroyed in 1944. during air raids, when the area of the train station was heavily bombed (by the way, a powerful aviation bomb from WWII was unexpectedly detected in the spring of 2020, during construction works, a a few hundred meters from this site, closer to the railway). Therefore, the demolished pavilion was not rebuilt later. The other two pavilions continue to be replaced by warehouses, workshops, etc. Renovated from the Soviet era.
Archaeological research will continue in the spring. More research is planned on the underlying cultural strata, which should certainly contribute to a broader reconstruction of St. Stephen’s suburban history.
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