Graveyards and Gravestones from Lithuania Minor, Volume One/ 365

/Graveyards and Gravestones from Lithuania Minor, Volume One/ 365

Graveyards and Gravestones from Lithuania Minor, Volume One

Summary

For hundreds of years Baltic tribes cherishing their own burial traditions dwelt on the south-east Baltic coast. From 1230 the areas watered by the Pregel and Nemunas (Me- mel) rivers came to be colonised by the Order of Swordbrethren and its heir, the Teutonic Order, which founded their own state here and baptised the local inhabitants. In this isolated territory old customs survived. It is said that in the fifteenth century people would still erect pagan memorials to their dead. These old traditions were comple- mented and replaced but slowly by Christian ones in Lithuania Minor (the old Baltic area which remained under the Teutonic Order's rule after the 1422 Treaty of Melno and later part of the German Reich until 1923). As late as the seventeenth century the local administration was still requiring that Christian cemeteries be built in accordance with western European models. People of Bait origin keeping to the old traditions in the villages of Lithuania Minor were in the majority and German culture spread only later. Processes of acculturation and assimilation in Lithuania Minor (in German Klein, or Preussische Litauen) and the constant settlement of new colonists from areas further west formed a special local cultural model in the region, which was dominated for a long time by Baltic tradition. As the area became increasingly modernised in the nineteenth century, economic and social reforms accelerated changes in traditional lifestyles. Until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an archaic model of cemetery building dominated the region's villages - the dead would be given wooden crosses and specially-shaped krikštai or carved wooden boards, which were connected with ancient customs and beliefs. After villages were reformed at the beginning of the nineteenth century more and more wealthier peasants came to imitate urban practices, which developed a form of German culture typical of north-western Europe. Large and highly decorative stone and metal grave monuments seen in urban and manor graveyards and other kinds of grave-goods became models for peasants to follow. More peasant gravestones were commissioned from artisans who were not local (local craftsmen made traditional wooden memorials). Such workshops became more and more common and they made cheaper imitations of decorative gravestones (especially from the end of the nineteenth century, when cement articles became more common). Town workshops produced items of very varied forms and types, some of which were more common, and some rarer. This reflects the personal views and fashions of the local 366 / Mažosios Lietuvos kapinės /

population and articles which reflected local people's mentality were ordered more frequ- ently. From the middle of the nineteenth century a more up-to-date model of village graveyard began to take root in Lithuania Minor as metal and stone, and later concrete memorials and other elements of funerary decoration such as metal family grave railings, concrete tomb edging, concrete or brick gates and cemetery wall posts came to prevail. Less wealthy peasants or country people of more traditional taste continued to erect wooden memorials. The consistent development of the region's culture under the influence of various political events, reorganisation, social processes and the like was halted finally when the Soviet occupation of eastern Prussia began at the end of 1944. Lithuania Minor was anne- xed by the Soviet Union, which regarded it as a "fascist" land of "alien culture". Almost all the local inhabitants who had not been evacuated by the Germans were liquidated or driven out in large-scale ethnic cleansing operations and new colonists from other parts of the Soviet Union were settled here. Local cultural heritage was destroyed massively on the instructions of the Soviet administration and the in initiative of the new colonists and around 80-90 percent of old graveyards were destroyed (including old gravestones, crosses and everything else which was smashed, looted and used as material for new buildings, and so forth). During decades of Soviet occupation study of issues connected with Lithuania Mi- nor and East Prussia as a whole were forbidden in effect. No official studies of the area's cultural heritage were carried out and there were no publications on this topic. Unofficial interest in the history of Lithuania Minor and East Prussia was frowned upon as being out of keeping with the ideals of the occupying regime, which in essence meant that the occu- pied territory was to be reorganised and traces of its past liquidated. M. Purvinas has been researching the heritage of his ancestral region since 1980 (at first unofficially). When Lithuania regained its independence in 1990-1991 it was possible to carry out extensive and systematic research into the cultural heritage of Lithuania Mi- nor, establishing principles for cataloguing the heritage of old graveyards. Later with the aid of his wife, M. Purvinienė he investigated several hundred old graveyards and recorded thousands of gravestones and other elements of funerary decoration from photographs, cemetery surveys (Abmessungeri) and descriptions. These data were made available to a wider audience in eighty publications. The old graveyards of Lithuania Minor have been studied by the present Authors with regard to their architectural, artistic and cultural value, recording all objects remaining on the ground, which represent the remains of the region's traditional material cultural heritage. Since the old graveyards have been destroyed to a large degree, all extant remains were recorded extensively and systematically to help reconstruct the forms of objects that have already perished. The layout of various remnants within the cemeteries was recorded and the planned layout of the graveyards was recreated. All inscriptions in Lithuanian and 'Graveyards and Gravestones from Lithuania Minor, Volume One/ 367

German were recorded along with trademarks left by craftsmen who worked on the memorials and so on. A series of monographs has begun to be published devoted to recording and sum- marising the material that has been collected. In the first volume of this series readers will find a general survey of the development of cemeteries and gravestones in Lithuania Minor along with data collected from three different sites. The description of these different sites has allowed the Authors to illustrate local differences alongside characteristics common to the region as a whole. These sites are in the Klaipėda District (formerly Memelland) in what is now the Republic of Lithuania. The area around Smalininkai (formerly Schmalleningkeri) was chosen as a site which lay for a long time (more than 500 years) on the state and cultural border of Li- thuania and Prussia; nearby was the important Nemunas river waterway. The water-, and land routes linked this area with nearby Tilsit (now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad District), the former unofficial capital of Lithuania Minor and largest town of the region, an industrial and artisan centre. Twenty one cemeteries were examined in this area between 2001 and 2003, where 1,184 objects and remnants of objects were recorded. The specific character of local graveyard heritage was established, viz. the small number of wooden artefacts, the predominance of concrete items made by craftsmen from Tilsit or local artisans, cast metal crosses brought in from Tilsit or more distant towns; some of the artefacts such as beaten metal crosses and family tomb railings were made by local blacksmiths, who created their own versions of'imported' objects. The area around Lauksargiai (in German, Laugszargen) was selected as a place near the former long-lived state and cultural border of Lithuania and Prussia near the interna- tional route linking Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) with Tilsit and Riga. Between 1998 and 2001 33 old cemeteries were studied in this area and 1,381 objects or remnants of objects were recorded there. Specific local cemetery heritage was established, viz. the small number of wooden artefacts, the predominance of concrete items made by craftsmen from Tilsit or local artisans, and cast metal crosses, special beaten metal crosses made by local smiths and other metal wares; there were also objects with of rare decoration or construction. The area around Rusnė (in German, Russ) was selected as a specific site in the Nemunas Delta, a largely boggy place subject to flooding and inhabited previously by fishermen and haymakers. Archaic traditions and the people of Baltic origin who preser- ved them survived for a long time in this extreme and out-of-the-way environment. The influence of urban culture was smaller there and traditional aspects dominated. Eleven old cemeteries were studied there in 1999-2000 and 1,222 items or remnants thereof were recorded, enabling the establishment of the specific nature of local funerary heritage, viz. the large number of wooden artefacts (as late as 1944 local craftsmen were making traditional wooden boards (krikštai) and crosses; various metal items made by local blacksmiths; cast metal crosses made in Klaipėda, Tilsit or other towns, town-manufactured stone artefacts; the differentiation of graves reflects the specific character of the local people. For example, the graves poor colonists who lived on the edges of the marshland were typified by cheaper -ЭОо / Mažosios Lietuvos kapinės /

and simpler wooden artefacts; in the tombs of people from the wealthier church village of Rusnė, a trading and shipping centre, there were many fancy gravestones; ethno-cultural features were clearer in this area and archaic customs survived longer in the isolated fis- hing village of Šyša (German: Schiess), where many traditional wooden artefacts were produced. Systematic research of old cemetery heritage and the extensive measurement of many objects has established the characteristics of different types of objects, allowing us to classify them by size, shape and so forth. The assortment of artefacts has been tabularised to show the quantity of various types of artefacts and their variations and which of them were rarer or more popular in the past. The examination of local characteristics has allowed us to highlight the areas of influence of given workshops and local craftsmen. Research into the old cemeteries around Lauksargiai and Rusnė was funded by the Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation; that near Smalininkai was sponsored by the Lithuania Minor Foundation. The publication of this book was financed by the Research Council of Lithuania as part of its National Lithuanian Studies Development Programme 2009-2015.