Klaipėdos universitetas

In the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council and the Moscow Patriarchate invited Christian churches to develop closer ecumenical relationships, the first signs of ecumenism appeared in Lithuania. In 1965, the first ecumenical service was held in the Šilutė Lutheran Church, which was attended by representatives of four denominations. Such ecumenical relations soon became a common phenomenon in Soviet Lithuania. The article analyzes the origins of the ecumenical movement and its development in Lithuania, as well as the reaction of the Commissioner of the Council of Religious Affairs in Moscow for Lithuania to this new religious phenomenon.

In 1942 the Lithuanian Reformed Collegium resurrected the Lutheran ecumenical hymnal project which the Lutherans had dropped after the repatriation of 1941. The Lithuanian book appeared in an abridged version entitled: Evangelikų Giesmynas su Maldomis (Evangelical Hymnal with Prayers) later that year. By special permission of the Lutheran consistory, only the Kaunas Lutheran congregation used this hymnal. In 1943 the Lutheran pastors established their own hymnal commission to produce a suitable Lutheran hymnal, based on the Pagerintos giesmių knygos (Improved Books of Hymns), the official Lithuanian Lutheran hymnal at that time. The soviet occupation made it impossible to continue the project. The book was not popular in the Reformed Church, especially after the apostasy of Adomas Šernas. It was only in 1986 that it was made the official hymnal of the Lithuanian Reformed Church because copies of the old official hymnal were no longer available.

In the Late Medieval and Early Modern period, tile stoves not only heated premises, but also decorated the homes of those who could afford them. The scenes and figures depicted on the tiles changed according to the broader changes that took place in culture. Images relevant to the Protestants appeared on tiles in the course of the development of the Reformation in Europe, in addition to religious motifs representing Catholic values. But what can the information encoded in the decoration of private spaces tell us about the owners’ religious beliefs and moral values? The article explores the issue by examining the case of a stove made of tiles with ambiguous signs: some of them had a meaning in Catholic culture, others spread after the introduction of Lutheranism, and one tile portrayed an authority relevant to the Anabaptists. Archaeologists have found all these tiles in a closed site on a single plot, a house in a former suburb of Memel (Klaipėda), which itself (and hence the stove) dates back to the 17th century. Not only were contemporaneous tiles used to build the stove, but tiles with symbols from previous periods were also reused. The article provides an interpretation of the contradictory religious signs that appeared on a single stove built in a suburb of Memel.

The article is devoted to the history of Vilnius evangelics in the 20th Century. The Vilnius evangelics played a significant role on the Polish protestant map in the interwar period. For the Lutherans inhabiting the North-Eastern area of Poland, Vilnius was the capital of their diocese. In turn, the Calvinists had their own Vilnius Church. It steadily developed throughout the interwar period founding its branches in central Poland. The Vilnius Calvinists never forgot about the tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, keeping contact with the church in the Lithuanian Republic. The custom of Polish and Lithuanian Evangelics’ cooperation was returned to after regaining independence in 1989, which is exemplified by the cooperation of Lutheran Polish and Lithuanian churches.