Mementote Josephum Woronowicz... The Collection of Liturgical Vessels of the Šakyna Church

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Abstract

During a historical and ethnographic field trip organised by the Šiauliai Aušros Mu-seum in 1938, primary data about the brick Šakyna Church built in 1789–90 and the parish cemetery chapel built in 1801–02 and its builder, Dean Juozapas Antanas Varanavičius (1747–1813), were collected. Attention was drawn not only to the unique architecture of these buildings, which has no analogues in Lithuania, but also to the personality of Varanavičius himself, testified by the surviving local residents’ stories, portraits of this person, and inscriptions commemorating his merits in several parts of the church and on the chapel’s masonry. The article presents a previously unrecorded part of Varanavičius’s memorial objects – a collection of liturgical vessels and utensils of the Šakyna Church. This collection, which, according to the current data, consists of a monstrance, a ciborium, an altar cross, three chalices, and three patens, could be identified thanks to Varanavičius’s wish to memorialise himself – although not all the vessels remained in their original place of storage, all of them bear commemorative inscriptions indicating the donor and the time of acquisition. It has been noticed that the vessels donated by Varanavičius were not expensive – many of them are functional and scantily decorated; at least some of them were made in the workshop of the famous Žemaitijan artisan Kristijonas Juozapas Štapeleris. Most attention is paid to the inscriptions and their historical value: the significance of the shapes and inscriptions of the vessels currently and formerly held in the Šakyna Church for the reconstruction of the biography and character description of the Žemaitija clergyman is revealed.