In 2022, one of the oldest and most affected by the challenges of time was selected from the collection of publications (books, textbooks, pedagogical and methodological literature) stored by the Lithuanian Museum of the History of Education.
After receiving project funding from the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the restorer has reached and will be resurrected for a new life in the nineteenth century by the summer of this year. Books published in Vilnius and Tilžė, which were the most in demand in the environment of the Lithuanian luminaries of that time, as well as prayer books, catechisms (collections of descriptions of church hymns, prayers and rites with pictures), and other examples of literature of religious content – a total of ten exceptional exhibits of the Lithuanian Museum of the History of Education.
Among the exhibits being restored are publications published during the period of the rule of Tsarist Russia. With the change of regimes, due to their popularity, publications of a religious nature were among the first to be adapted to Russification. After the ban on printing in Latin characters in 1864–1904, the use of the Russian alphabet and Cyrillic in Lithuania became an exceptional phenomenon in the history of the Lithuanian printed word. Prayer prayers were the first to be chosen for the religious Russification of the Lithuanian nation. Religious Lithuanian texts are transcribed in the Russian alphabet (Lithuanian text in Russian Cyrillic, so–called “graždankos“).
Publications submitted for restoration and possibly counterfactual publications (e.g.: “A Short Catechism according to the Appendix of Priest Pilakauskas‘ Lay Down with Useful Ones“) were published in circumvention of the laws in force, specifically incorrectly indicating the date and place of publication.
The publications to be restored from the museum’s collections will be presented in the museum’s exposition, in living history lessons, and digitized images of the exhibits will be represented in the online space.
Project implementation period: 2022 1 February – 30 June 2022
The project “Restoration of the Collections of Rare Publications from the Lithuanian Museum of the History of Education” is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture Foundation.
