Vilnius invites you to get to know the history of your city and quickly discover the graves of relatives or famous people using the digital grave register. The system that allows you to explore more than three dozen cemeteries in the capital, including the cemeteries of the ancients, Orthodox, Karaites and Tatars, is a way to tell the multicultural history of Lithuania and help preserve it.
"Many people of different nations and cultures have always lived together in Vilnius, and with this project we aim to record and preserve the historical memory. The current composition of the Lithuanian population has changed significantly, the tombstones of the old residents are disappearing, the inscriptions on them are fading, so it is very important for us to inventory the cemeteries while we can still identify that information", Rūta Klevėnė, Director of SĮ "Vilniaus Planas" tells about the importance of the project.
2019 metres. Vilnius city municipalities after the administration together with the company "Vilniaus planas" started to inventory and digitize the city cemeteries, a public environment visible to the public and intended only for cemetery administrators was prepared, which allows administrators to coordinate more quickly with the city municipality and the cultural heritage department regarding requests and permits for burials. One of the functions that make work easier is the search for the grave of the deceased according to the person who looks after it or other information.
Digitization of cemeteries begins with the identification of cemeteries by drones - high-resolution and accurate orthophoto photographs of cemeteries are taken, and specialists digitize cemeteries with the help of the obtained data. Later, tombstones and burial logs are photographed, the received records are digitized and entered into a database, then the process of linking information begins. According to experts, digitization of cemeteries requires a considerable amount of time, but at the same time allows to touch the cultural history of the region, to abandon paper journals and speeds up the work of the administration. Information about burials in Vilnius city cemeteries used to be stored in paper journals kept by companies managing the cemeteries, so information about it was not very easily accessible.
"Specialists had a difficult and demanding job - the names of the dead in centuries-old journals were Russified, Lithuanianized or otherwise adapted to that period in different periods, so when entering the data into the system, they had to evaluate the names recorded in the journals and carved on the tombstone, which were often radically different," he says. project manager Justinas Jasiūnas.
When inventorying the cemetery, the main and primary source was the entry in the cemetery logs, indicating the official information about the deceased. During digitization, specialists encountered a common problem that many surnames were written in Cyrillic in the Soviet era, and now, during transliteration, the surnames were translated in Latin letters. During this process, inconsistencies were noticed - the names of the persons entered on the tombstone and in the journal were different. When inconsistencies were found in the data of the deceased, both versions were made public - the name and surname of the deceased given in the cemetery log, and the original, engraved on the tombstone.
The public is encouraged to report any errors or inconsistencies found by using the tool in the system or by e-mail. by post [email protected]. They are also requested to contact us if they notice that the grave of their loved one is not identified in the digital grave system. Specialists carefully review the requests received from residents and, after evaluating them, fulfill the requests of the public.
The material was prepared according to the order of Vilnius city municipality. Content is paid for.
