Travels and dissatisfaction that the beloved Vilnius is still not sufficiently explored and described - this is how city researcher Darius Pocevičius explains the reasons that prompted him to write a book about the historical relics of our country's capital, left over from Soviet times, and about life in Vilnius at that time. The author says that the Soviet period in Vilnius was motley, contrasting and extremely controversial.
Looking at the views of Vilnius during the Soviet era, some parts of the city seem almost unchanged, while others have sunk into oblivion a long time ago. The capital, which was emptied during the war, grew five times in terms of population from 1944 to 1990 and became home to almost 600 people. people.
By turning the surrounding villages into multi-apartment micro-districts, Vilnius increased in area almost 30 times. In addition, Lithuanians became the majority of the population in the multilingual city for the first time in its hundred-year history. D. Pocevičius put this information and many forgotten historical relics and interesting stories into a book.
D. Pocevičius starts his story from the gate to the present-day Bernardina Gardens, then called the Youth Garden or park. The gate was erected in 1948 and became the most famous work of its author, Ivan Medvedev, a graduate of the Kaliningrad Academy of Arts at the time. And after entering the Youth Garden through the gates, you could find a dozen buildings for recreation and entertainment that have not survived to this day.
"I counted there were even 15 of them - starting with the Summer variety show, summer cinema "Vasara", green theater. Before that was the famous dance pavilion. Everyone called him "Saraj". There was a summer cafe, "Rotonda" type, two fountains, three elephants, a boy with a catfish... In other words, there were many objects that could be walked among," says D. Pocevičius.
The next stop is in the depths of the Bernardina Gardens, where the oldest building in the park stands, dating from the beginning of the XNUMXth century. Today, it houses the Lithuanian National Cultural Center, and during the Soviet era, a branch of the Riga vinyl record factory "Melodija" operated here.
A very interesting and forgotten object is the building called "Amerikanke" or "Amerikonke". He got such a name when the Soviet authorities decided to invite emigrants who had previously fled the country to return to Lithuania and promised them mountains of gold - from work to free, high-quality housing. It was this building, actually built for officials, that became the home of emigrants tempted by promises. It's true, as they said, people of Lithuanian origin who lived in South America did not return to "die in the Motherland", so the language most often heard in the courtyards was Spanish, and the building was called "Amerikanke" or "Americonke". About one and a half thousand people returned to Lithuania from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
