Photo in exhibition:
Grandfather in 1972 in Šiugždai village, homestead
Grandmother 1972, homestead in Šiugždai
Hay mowers 1958 08 07 08 Šiugždai village Photo- Petras Makštutis
Dinner, Christmas Eve circa 1970. Šiugždai village, homestead, photo- Petras Makštutis
With grandchildren 1970 . Šiugždai village, photo- Petras Makštutis
My parents before their wedding in 1963 . Šiugždai village, homestead, photo- Petras Makštutis
Exhibition works:
The Mountain2014
GMO II 2014
Sound2014.
How long does it last2015
Source2015
Ring1998
Resistance 2015
Vacuum 2013
Panic switch 2014
Missing Horizon2015
The Old Trap2015
I dedicate this exhibition to the memory of my father, Vitas Makštutis.
About my grandparents.
Time asks questions: who am I, where am I from, where am I going. I try to hide from such uncomfortable questions in my childhood memories …
Once my parents took my brother and me to the countryside during the summer holidays and left us in the care of my grandparents.
Both parents of my father, Vytas Makshtutis (1937-2010), lived in the village of Šiugždai, Krokialaukis Valshch, Simnas County, Alytus District. My grandfather Teofilis Makštutis (1892-1980) had a homestead and a farm inherited from his father Andrius. Here, in the village of Šiugždai, the whole family lived in a single hut: both my grandparents and their 9 children until 1949. During the Second World War, his family, like many Lithuanian farming families at that time, was deported and exiled by the Soviet authorities. In 1945, the Soviets designated my grandfather’s farm as Buozhe and initially took away 10ha. out of the 30 ha of land he inherited. Grandfather was sentenced to prison twice by the government. In 1947, he refused to join the collective farm and was sentenced to imprisonment in Kaunas prison, working on the reconstruction of the Aleksotas Bridge. In 1949, after the collectivisation of the countryside, the entire farm with its buildings, livestock and land was confiscated by the government. Grandpa was sentenced for the second time in 1949 to 3 years for not paying the state the obligatory levies (he was a childless person, the family had 9 children). He was sent to Maciki, Šilutė district. Grandpa returned from prison in 1953.
In 1950 the family was first deported to the village of Čiurlioniai II, and in 1951 they were deported to Siberia (Tomsk region, P-Troitsky district, Zacharovkovo settlement). In Siberia, they worked in logging and only gave food to those who worked. After Stalin’s death, life in exile improved. It has to be said that not all the children were exiled to Siberia. The eldest daughter, Natalia, was sentenced in 1947 to 7.5 years’ imprisonment and 5 years’ exile for “connections with bandits”. Sons Albinas (1950) and Antanas (1955) served in the Soviet army. Six other children lived in exile with their grandmother: daughters Onutė, Monika, Janina, sons Vitas, Petras and Algis. After the exile in 1957, they returned to their homestead in Šiugždai and worked for the Soviet collective farm “Lenin’s Way” in Krokialaukis.
…My grandfather Teofilis was kind, calm, stubborn, and liked subtle humour. I remember, during the summer holidays, in the garden, I picked a still green apple. I tasted it, frowned and threw it over the fence. Suddenly, I heard my grandfather’s voice behind me: ” …so that’s what Adam did – he picked the apple and threw it…” It was only years later that I realised what Adam had done and what apple he had picked in the biblical garden.
My grandmother, Monika Mardosaitė (1902-1975), from the village of Verebiai in Krokialaukis municipality, moved (1927) to the farm of Teofilis Makshtutis in the village of Šiugždai. She raised 9 children, 4 sisters and 5 brothers, lived and worked on the farm.
From 1951 she was exiled with her 6 children. Ironically, in the same year, the Soviet government gave my grandmother an award – the Order of Glorious Motherhood, 1st degree.
One day, during a summer holiday in the countryside, my grandmother asked me to pick potatoes. She gave me a worn, wooden-handled “ugly” knife. The next day, deciding that my grandmother was in trouble because she didn’t have a good knife, I set to work in my grandfather’s woodshed, where there was a vice, a hammer and, most importantly, a hand-operated whetstone (a sharpener). In a couple of days, I made a “real” knife out of the blade of a wood saw. A wooden handle with a hand guard, a riveted long blade with a pointed curved end. I had seen one of these in movies about pirates or Indians. When I took my work to my grandmother, she was very excited, thanked me and complimented me. Then I never saw the knife again, and she must have been afraid that I would do something bad and hid it. Apparently, it wasn’t very good for peeling potatoes…
My grandfather, on his second return from prison, settled in his house in the village of Šiugždai. A year later, my grandmother and her children came back. Before the land reclamation, there were four people living there: both grandparents and two children, Algis and Monika. In 1970, when the land reclamation started, the family had to leave their home and moved to Daugirdi (Krokialaukis) where they bought a house and lived there until their death. My grandfather, who survived two world wars, collectivisation, imprisonment, land reclamation and the loss of my grandmother to pneumonia, died in Daugirdi in 1980 and was buried in the Krokialaukis cemetery. The family was rehabilitated in 1984.
I still remember the story I was often told about the holy painting that was shot by a striver.
In the summer of 1948, KGB Lieutenant Kapustin rode up to my grandfather’s house on a confiscated bicycle to visit him. He was the head of the district Stribs at the time and liked to go to rich farmers for a drink. My grandfather had just returned from prison. In the troupe were Grandpa, Grandma’s cousin Edvardas Mardosas and a neighbour Račkauskas Jonas, a legless invalid who played the accordion. The Strib pulled out a pistol and fired at Račkauskas Jonas, who was singing a Lithuanian folk song, but hit the picture of St Rosalia on the wall in front of him. He fired two shots, but Edwardas grabbed him by the arm, took the pistol away and beat him in anger. They broke the bicycle and locked the drunken Strib in the barn until the hangover broke in the morning.
These sacred paintings have lived with the homestead and are an integral part of the family history. Together they have accompanied us into exile and now faithfully protect our widely disturbed relatives from evil fate.
The memories, frozen as in a photograph, in a large wooden house, in a yard full of things different from those in the city, seem to be hanging somewhere far away like a huge bright cloud. My grandparents’ homestead in Šiugždai, which in my childhood seemed to me like a big separate world, a wooden fence separating it from the outside and from the unknown life, has disappeared thanks to Soviet land reclamation, leaving an empty field and photographs in the family album.
The passage of time carries away everything that cannot survive. In my grandparents’ history, I find what is timeless. Constant values such as wisdom, fortitude, an understanding of beauty and the order of the world pass through all lives and last forever.
