Memory over – In Lithuania, a new issue of Kultūros barai moves from AI aesthetics to the city’s contested past, arguing that memory—whether held by citizens, letter-writers, or families—outlasts the forces that try to erase it.
By the time the debate turns into action. the details matter: which building gets saved. which streets get renamed. and what a person remembers when an ideology tries to rewrite the city—and the mind. The current issue of Kultūros barai (Lithuania) pulls those threads together. ranging from legacies of occupation and exile to contemporary art. poetry. urban history. and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence.
AI isn’t treated here as a distant technological trend. Evalina Biliunaite, who designed the issue’s striking cover, asks what happens when art meets fast-moving machines. Her take is unexpectedly grounded in psychology: as AI advances. the real question is how to make sure art and thought don’t lose their way. Biliunaite argues that AI does not impoverish thought so much as amplify what is already there—“superficiality or depth. carelessness or precision. the desire to impress or genuine intellectual discipline.”.
Prompting, in her view, is not a replacement for artistic creation, but one stage within it. “Every genuine creative act begins in the human mind” and technology only helps realize the vision already formed there.
That insistence on what humans hold onto—what they carry inside—echoes through the issue’s urban stories. where memory becomes a form of resistance. Vergilijus Čepaitis recounts a struggle in Vilnius against the erasure of urban heritage during the twilight years of Soviet Lithuania. At the time, the USSR was sliding toward bankruptcy and perestroika’s first steps were underway. In Moscow, heritage protection was proclaimed with great fanfare, but in Vilnius the reality looked different.
Čepaitis draws on three letters from his own papers to show how quickly the official language of openness could collapse under pressure. The first letter decries “the mutilation of the unique urban ensemble on Tilto Street. ” demands that those responsible be punished. and calls for the building to be restored. Soon. letters from Vilnius residents defending the Old Town flooded newspaper offices. forcing authorities—however briefly—to honor the much-touted principles of openness and heritage.
Fresh protests against further demolitions were met not with dialogue but with excavators. Despair followed. “The ‘Dobužinskis House’ had been saved. ” Čepaitis writes. “but the overall attitude toward cultural heritage remained unchanged.” Even so. something had shifted. As citizens fought for every scrap—or brick—of their urban heritage. the wider movement for national revival began to gather momentum. “In Lithuania. nobody spoke of protecting Soviet culture … for Lithuanians had begun fighting for the right to be themselves. for their national identity.”.
Čepaitis argues that once independent Lithuania arrived, the struggle did not vanish. It changed. Lithuania is no longer ruled by a faceless occupying power. but heritage now faces different pressures—from institutional buck-passing to the sway of private capital. His point lands with urgency: more than ever, citizens have to expose injustice and hold those in power accountable.
That same clash between what regimes try to impose and what communities manage to remember runs deeper in Martynas Purvinas’s wide historical sweep of Lithuania’s urban landscape. He situates Lithuanian cities at the crossroads of East and West. a position reflected in the “urban DNA.” “For a long time. the territory of present-day Lithuania occupied a middle ground between East and West and never became the centre of an independent urban civilisation of its own.”.
Purvinas moves quickly through epochs that reshaped cities and the communities that sustained them: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. independence. twentieth-century occupations. and the Soviet post-war period. His tone often turns wistful as he imagines what urban culture might have become had successive occupations. partitions. and forced migrations not disrupted it.
Early 1941 carries the weight of irreversible change. The repatriation of people of German descent from Lithuania to Germany began in that year. and on 14 June the first mass Soviet deportations to Siberia began. “Entire urban communities disappeared.” Yet, Purvinas places memory against ideology and refuses to let ideology have the final word. The Soviet authorities could nationalize buildings. rename streets. and attempt to remake cities in their own image. but they could not entirely stamp out the nation’s heritage. “Long-time urban residents remembered Smetona-era shops filled with every kind of product: the occupiers could not succeed in erasing the traces of the life that had existed before.”.
Memory, in this issue, is never only private. It becomes a method of survival.
Dalia Vabalienė brings that method into the body of family history. In her personal essay. she offers “fragments” of post-war Lithuania. weaving together her mother’s recollections. excerpts from letters. official documents. and her own memories to reconstruct her father’s “path of suffering.” Her father was one of the organizers of the June Uprising of 1941. He was also a member of the military staff of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF). Vabalienė writes that he was arrested, deported, tortured, and ultimately executed by the NKVD when she was still a baby.
Determined to find out what happened to him after his arrest. Vabalienė set about compiling her own “archive.” The list is specific—addresses. letters. photographs. testimonies from relatives and fellow prisoners. and historians’ accounts. The essay closes with a warning against nostalgia for the Soviet past, delivered through an old joke. A centenarian. asked under which government life in Lithuania had been best. replies: “Under the Tsar. my child. under the Tsar. I was young then, and the girls were pretty…”.
Long before any ideology arrives with plans to rename streets or remake minds. the issue insists. there is already a human memory at work—sometimes in the language of letters flooding newspaper offices. sometimes in what shops and daily life leave behind. sometimes in a daughter’s painstaking archive of absence. When the machinery of power stops moving. the question that remains is simple and hard: what will people choose to remember. and what will they fight to keep?.
Kultūros barai Lithuania culture AI and art urban heritage Vilnius Tilto Street Dobužinskis House Lithuanian Activist Front June Uprising 1941 NKVD memory and identity