On Vilniaus street, in front of the building of the charity society with winged lions, the house is now a luxurious business center, and its entrance is guarded by four bearded metal gnomes with the inscriptions "Rock 1897". Two at the corners of the gate on Vilniaus Street, and the other two - behind the glass doors in the inner courtyard. All of them have been restored, information or 1897. the dates on them indicate the date of the reconstruction of the house, or mark the year of production of the brake guards themselves is not exact. Dwarfs are a decorative form of device for protecting the corners of a house so that its vehicle - a carriage, a carriage or a car - does not crash. The gnomes are just decorative elements of the building. "Monuments Compendium" describes the corner building of Vilnius/Islandija streets, where it is mentioned that the Corinthian capitals are embedded with fantastical heads, the entrance is decorated with metal figures of dwarfs.
20th-0,5th centuries Vilnius residents installed gatekeepers in order to avoid the stay of uninvited guests - the nobles, whom they were obliged to accommodate. Some similar and some slightly different dwarfs were also found in Warsaw, Łódź and elsewhere, of which 1 were counted. It is not clear exactly who made these dwarfs, in which foundry they were cast. It is believed that the Vilnius dwarfs could have been cast in the Jonava foundry or in the machine factory of S. Weigt (Lodz). It is estimated that there are as many as sixteen places on the streets of Vilnius where they can be seen gatekeepers. They are quite uniform: round columns of XNUMX-XNUMX m height dominate, placed on both sides of the gate, usually close to the corners or embedded in the walls. Some of them are completely smooth, others with grooves, their tops are usually beveled or rounded.
There is a house on the corner of Vilnius and Islandija streets. in 1764 the first brick building built on this site has not survived to this day. 1857th century avg. two-story building, from 1897 belonged to K. Jelenski, in historiographical sources it is called Solomono Minkovskis, because from 1899-1993 owned by S. Minkovski, who reconstructed the house and it became a three-story building with a four-story courtyard. Some sources indicate that the construction was led by the architect Konstantinas Koroyedovs. In popular literature, the house is called simply the house of the swindler Epštein, because after Lithuania regained its independence, Canadian citizen Regina Epštein-Paul claimed the rights to this building. in XNUMX R. Epštein-Paul sold the house to a businessman from Georgia, Valerijas Gelašviis. The building was bought from him by its current owners, businessmen brothers from Russia Sergey and Nikolai Sarkozyv.
Information prepared by: VilniusGO.lt
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