Qualla: Vilnius Belarusian Museum

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rimantas Lazdynas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ivan Luckievič started collecting Belarusian antiques while still in school. By 1908 his collection - already including a Skaryna Bible, a Statute of Lithuania, several Slutsk belts, and bound issues of the underground newspaper Mużyckaja prauda - lived in the editorial offices of Naša Niva, the Belarusian-language paper he had helped found. He died in 1919, his lungs ruined by tuberculosis, before he could see the museum his collection would become. Two years later, in 1921, the Belarusian Scientific Society opened the Vilnius Belarusian Historic-Ethnographic Museum Named after Ivan Luckievič in four or five small chambers inside the Monastery of the Holy Trinity. It survived for 24 years before the Soviet state took it apart, piece by piece.

Image: Rimantas Lazdynas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: A Museum Built by Brothers

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poznaniak, CC BY-SA 2.5. Ivan's younger brother Anton Luckievič ran the new museum together with the engineer Liavon Dubeikauski. Their goal was specific and pointed: to gather the material and intangible culture of Belarusians, with particular emphasis on the centuries when Belarusians shaped the Grand ...

Image: Poznaniak | CC BY-SA 2.5

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: Caught Between Three Regimes

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alma Pater, Public domain. Vilnius's borders moved more often than its people did. In September 1939, after Soviet forces took the city, members of the museum committee - including Anton Luckievič - were arrested. The museum did not formally close, but it stopped functioning from October 1939 to July 1940....

Image: Alma Pater | Public domain

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: Liquidation by Committee

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Augustas Didžgalvis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Juozas Pertulis took over briefly. A liquidation committee formed, including the deputy Commissar of People's Education and the historian Albinas Daukša-Paškevičius from the Lithuanian Communist Party's Central Committee. The committee finished its work in June 1945 with a tidy b...

Image: Augustas Didžgalvis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: The Slow Return

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2001, the activist Siaržuk Vituška launched an initiative to restore the museum. The founding group - Halina Voitsik, Siaržuk and Liudevika Vituška, Siarhei Dubaviets, Tatiana Poklad - registered an NGO called the Ivan Lutskievitch Belarusian Museum in Lithuania. For two decad...

Image: Jerzy Strzelecki | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vilnius Belarusian Museum: What the Originals Did

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BigHead, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 15 October to 12 December 2021, the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk hosted an exhibition for the museum's centenary - displaying artifacts that had once belonged to Luckievič's collection and had been transferred to Belarus during the 1945 liquidation. The exhibitio...

Image: BigHead | CC BY-SA 4.0