Kaunas City Heritage Monuments in the Soviet Era: photographs by a local lore ethnographer Aleksandr

To commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of ethnographer and photographer Aleksandras Pleskačiauskas we present a virtual exhibition of his photographs.

A. Pleskačiauskas was born on 6 June 1921 in Vilnius but less than a year later his parents moved to Kaunas with the then little Aleksandras. Deportations to Siberia in the post-war years affected the family of the future ethnographer and photographer, yet, Kaunas became an integral part of A. Pleskačiauskas’ life and hobbies. After returning from exile, he chose to live here and related his whole life’s occupation to construction and building organization. However, after A. Pleskačiauskas retired in 1981, he discovered an absorbing passion – photography. The man’s biography drawn up by Kaunas County Public Library tells that out of his great love for Kaunas, A. Pleskačiauskas devoted much of his time photographing its historical, decaying buildings, modern architecture, also loved to travel around Lithuania and take photographs of churches in various towns, collected different material about the Kaunas history in libraries, conducted tours, made reports. The passion for books that had developed in his youth accompanied the ethnographer throughout his life: he read literature in Lithuanian, Russian and Polish, had a plentiful library, was interested in history, arts, philosophy, culture, classical fiction. |Differently from other professional or amateur photographers who took photos of Lithuanian cities and buildings during the Soviet era A. Pleskačiauskas is known to have archived the photographs very carefully by making descriptions of them. In many cases he used to render extremely detailed accounts, delving into the historical facts of the city, streets, buildings. A. Pleskačiauskas gummed the photos on to thicker sheets of paper or in albums and wrote down the characteristics of the captured objects next to the photo in his excellent calligraphic handwriting. Thus, the ethnographer and photographer had accumulated a considerable archive of both single photographs and thematic albums with photographs.

A. Pleskačiauskas was 67 when he died, nevertheless, he had accumulated a large archive of images of the Soviet-era Kaunas and various other parts of Lithuania. Part of the collection of his photographs and albums is stored in Kaunas County Public Library. M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art preserves 300 photographs, pasted on thick paper, with handwritten entries. In this virtual exhibition you will get acquainted with a part of the museum’s collection – images and architectural monuments of the Soviet era Kaunas, a city that was very much important to A. Pleskačiauskas.

Prepared by Aidas Kulbokas