Reverence and resistance in Lithuanian wayside shrines

ENAt the turn of the twentieth century, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), the symbolist painter and composer, wrote, "At dawn a herald ascends a low hill ... and sounding his golden trumpet abroad, invites laborers of the spirit to create a single huge flame of burning desire to honor our motherland Lithuania with art. ... National art is the primary manifestation of love." Čiurlionis set the roots of national art in the folk heritage, and his images of wayside shrines became the genesis of modernism in Lithuania. Čiurlionis, of course, is using "national art" in its archaic meaning, since it is now accepted that nationalism was a doctrine invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The implication of the kind of national art Čiurlionis refers to is that it is a correlate of certain cultural conditions that are deep and pervasive, and it is the source of the feeling of community, of what T. S. Eliot called "the roots that clutch." There was a rebirth and metamorphosis of the wayside shrine as national art in post-World War II Lithuania during the years of Soviet occupation, 1945-90.3 The wayside shrine tradition in Lithuania is ancient and a significant aspect of religious iconography. The dominant type of shrine consisted of a wide variety of chapels-miniature architecture, what Sir John Summerson calls aedicules, or little houses.".Typically combining pagan and Christian imagery, for centuries the density and ubiquity of the shrines gave them symbolic qualities representing Lithuanian religious and ethnic identity. During the Communist period, when Lithuania was a republic of the Soviet Union, the production of vernacular folk art, especially wayside shrines, was discouraged and at times officially forbidden. As an autochthonous religious art form with nationalistic overtones, the shrines contravened the pan-Soviet atheistic ideology. Under the pressure of such constraints the making of wayside shrines diminished greatly, and the artisans, or "godmakers" as they were called, ceased carving to the point that the tradition became all but extinct. [Extract, p. 249-250]

• Menotyra / Arts
• Etnologija / Ethnology