Innovators and Vilkpėdė: what are the interesting things in these “uninteresting” areas of the capital? | Did you know?

Newcomers

In the 19th century, during the industrial revolution, factories were established in Vilnius. Workers in large factories had to stay close to the workplace.

Behind the Vilnius train tracks, in the eastern part of the city, a settlement began to develop, which the locals initially christened. The new World (lit. in the New World). Hence the name of the newcomers.

This Vilnius district has been distinguished by the abundance of ethnic groups since the 19th century. Gudians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Roma built houses here.

The Pomeranian community was here too, a product of the East Slavic people, the assimilation of Russians, Sami, Karelians, and other natives from the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions who were drawn to Europe.

The churches also bear witness to the cultural diversity in Naujininkai. At the intersection of Gudų and Lenkų streets, in 1898. Built in the neo-Byzantine style of St. Alexander Nevsky Church, which housed the Monastery of Mary Magdalene between the wars, and a hard-to-repair girls’ colony was established during the it was soviet.

In 1838, with funds from the merchant Tikhon Zaitsev, a church of Blessed Euphrosinia was built on the Orthodox cemetery on Liepkalnio Street, which was destroyed by the army of Tsarist Russia during the First World War.

At the intersection of Naujininkai and Tyzenhaus streets, around 1825, the only Old Believers’ cemetery in Vilnius began to expand, which was built by the city authorities in the 19th century. handed over to the elders at the end.

Next to them is St. The Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God, the only one in Lithuania and one of the few in the world, belongs to the Old Believers of Pomerania.

O XX a. At the beginning of the 19th century, a joint Karaite and Tatar cemetery was established on present-day Žirnių Street.

The skies of the newcomers weren’t always ripped apart by factory smokestacks alone. The Tyzenhaus family was active in this part of the city. At his expense, the now-abandoned St. An eye clinic was opened at Rock Hospital.

At the initiative of Count Pšezdzeckis, the cultural life of the innovators was enriched by the Vilnius Society of Friends of Science, which operated on Tyzenhaus street in 1907-1913.

A little further, on the outskirts of the capital, Salininkai, belonging to the Naujininkai elder, has a past no less interesting. Already in the XIX century. in the middle of the old Prussian and Russian military maps these districts are called baptized Soleniki. The current Lithuanian equivalent appeared only in the interwar period.

A mansion belonging to the Treasury of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was established in a humid area in the 16th century. According to calculations made between the wars, the territory of the mansion covered more than 200 ha of land (197 decimal places).

In the 17th century, the mansion belonged to the Goreckis family. One lived there from 1830 to 1831. Antonas Goreckis, the organizer of the uprising and close friend of the poet Adam Mickevičius, and his son, the artist Tadas Goreckis, who married A. Mickevičius’s daughter, Maria.

19th century in the second half, the mansion belonged to the famous Wroblewski family, but with the outbreak of World War II, the mansion was occupied by Nazi Germany, and after Soviet reoccupation it was completely destroyed.

There are surviving objects that testify to the ruined mansion: the mansion’s barn was built in 1785 and the Kelmija (Old Salininkai) cemetery, where the remains of the Goreckis and Wrublevskis family members are buried.

During the Soviet era, an artesian well was introduced in Salininkai and the swamps were drained. The construction of apartment buildings began and the families of the workers moved to the immediate vicinity of the largest recovery company in Lithuania operating in the district.

Werewolf

This industrial district looks like a big wrong labyrinth of factories, bases and shopping centers, but its importance is very important for the history of Vilnius and Lithuania.

Since the beginning of Vilnius, Vilkpėdė was on the outskirts of the capital, the western gate of the city. In 1390, the Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila handed over this territory to the Bishop of Vilnius and the nearby Paneriai mansion to the Vilnius chapters, until finally in the 16th century Vilkpėdė fell into the hands of the Jesuits.

Obviously, the name of the district comes from the words wolf and foot, but how it came about is more interesting. Local historians have discovered from 18th century documents that these wooded areas were once dominated by wolves constantly trampling the land.

There is another version. According to legend, the wolf that traveled here turned into a demon and left his footprints on the stone.

Archaeologists and historians have confirmed that such a stone existed in Vilkpedė, it was only destroyed in the middle of the 20th century. During the Khrushchev rule, an article was published in the LSSR press about the found parts of the stone, but many historians doubt the reliability of this source.

And in the Middle Ages, Vilkpėdė was an industrial district. In 1529, a brick factory was established here, producing raw materials for churches and other buildings. Many agricultural buildings developed around it, until finally the half-empty area became a village.

The district received serious attention only in the 19th century, when the Petersburg-Warsaw railway line was built through Vilkpėdė, which became a major victory for the logistics of the whole of Vilnius.

The construction of the rails generated a demand for labor. As the population grew, the district expanded.

There is a hospital in a special place in Vilkpėdė, which opened in 1912. Vilkpedės st. On the 3rd, next to the hospital building, a plaque commemorating Boris Efros, a doctor and surgeon, was discovered. It was in this Vilnius hospital in 1958 that a famous surgeon performed the first heart surgery in Lithuania.

During World War II, Wehrmacht military units were stationed here. While retreating, the Soviets severely shelled Vilkpėdė.

During the reconstruction of the district, the Soviet authorities set out to modernize it. The most striking example of this is the Vilnius Thermal Power Plant. Construction began in 1948, and when it started operating in 1951, it is the first power station built in Lithuania after the war and is still the largest in the entire city of Vilnius, supplying electricity and heat to the capital.

Vilkpėdė district also played an important state and economic role in 1990, when the Lithuanian government decided to add Eigulių str. 4 The Lithuanian Mint was established.

A couple of years later, the mint put the first litas into circulation and is still responsible for the minting of Lithuanian euros, cents, commemorative coins and medals.

History is everywhere. It covers all areas of life, places, objects, infuses them with life and allows everything to be seen with different eyes. As we walk the sidewalks of our apartment yards, we rarely stop and wonder “where did all this come from?”

History cultivates an inner curiosity that allows us to discover curiosities even in everyday things. Therefore, even the gray area, staring into eyes tired of pandemic monotony, can glow in the most varied colors.

The author of the text Žygimantas Koncevičius is a student at the Faculty of History at Vilnius University, doing a 15-minute internship.