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On Monday, there were discussions on social media about what is mystical “good morality”: what we can and cannot do in Lukiškės Square, but this time I am not talking about it. The square was in the center of public attention 3 years ago, when the competition for the monument in this space was not won by the Vytis monument, but by the “Freedom Hill” created by the artist Andrius Labašauskas. Since then, Lukiškės Square has become a polarizing field for society, and last week that polarization reached its peak. What does this say about Vilnius and our relationship with the city?
The city is built on emptiness, before the interwar imagination that Vilnius is ours, although those U.S A long time ago I was no longer living in the city. Many historians noted that even before the first occupation, Lithuanians did not know how to behave in Vilnius, and their arbitrariness was often not very discreet with the local population. Inter-Lithuanian Lithuanians hoped that upon entering Vilnius, people would find them with open arms as liberators, but this was not the case, and the main reason for this was radicalism and the inability to react sensitively to the needs of local people.
The kind of debate sparked by the beach at Lukiškės Square only illustrates that the central government’s attitude towards the city has been preserved for at least 80 years.
The situation in Lukiškės Square is somewhat reminiscent of this episode. Fierce supporters of the Vytis monument even use the same rhetoric that many used a hundred years ago when speaking of Vilnius in general: “We will not calm down without XXX” (write it yourself). In this way, the company expresses its ambitions, which in a way lag behind the real reality of the capital. Yesterday’s solid Seimas decision on “good morale” only compares these plots.
After World War II, the ancient inhabitants of Vilnius were almost gone: a huge silent void opened in its place, which was filled with Lithuanians from other cities or towns and settlers from other parts of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 20th century, the capital has undergone a series of transformations in terms of population, and the colonization of Vilnius, which began in the 1950s, is in fact still ongoing. Even today, many people living in Vilnius move here from other Lithuanian cities or towns.
This does not mean that the new Vilnius does not exist or has not been formed, it is and its representatives seek their relationship with the city and try to build it, but the debate on the beach at Lukiškės Square only illustrates that the central government has.
The focus of the story is preserved in a similar way, although its central figures and the plots used have changed today. If in the interwar period the center of the grand narrative was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before the Union of Lublin or, as Professor Alfredas Bumblauskas aptly put it, pagan Atlantis, then today we can see that it is displaced by the history of resistance of the lithuanian nation.
Is this bad No, probably not necessarily, but solving the problem of the commemorative status of Lukiškės Square in the Seimas showed how we sometimes superficially evaluate such resistance. Here I am speaking, of course, of the participants in the uprising of 1863-1864, who became one of the arguments for changing that unfortunate state of the plaza. The fact that we do not care much about the rebels today has been revealed by his own state funeral, which became a manifestation of the people of Belarus and a kind of manifesto against authoritarianism. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but during observation of the ceremony, the Lithuanian flags raised were almost invisible, probably often and after the funeral they forgot to visit the chapel or remember the rebels.
It seems that the rebel execution episode in the Seimas was selectively chosen, due to the weight of resistance, to pursue its own objectives. It is obvious that for many who voted for “good morale” in Lukiškės Square, the uprising in itself does not say much. The rebellious slogan “For ours and your freedom” testifies to the possibility of agreeing with others, of feeling unity with others, in the end respecting different opinions and respecting each other in general, while the Seimas did not show any Respect for others.
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