At the festival of renovated cultural spaces “16”, 4,000 visitors attended

On the last weekend of August, the Ministry of Culture organized the cultural spaces festival “16”, inviting the public to visit cultural institutions that have been renovated or newly established over the past year. This event also symbolically marked the end of an especially intense renovation phase across Lithuania.

Sixteen cultural institutions participated in the festival, offering free tours, educational programs, or simply the opportunity to visit cultural spaces independently, attracting nearly 4,000 people. As registration was halfway through, most spots were already filled, but some spaces could still be visited by waiting in line.

“Such a large interest demonstrates the intensity of the cultural pulse across Lithuania. It’s pleasing that many visitors attended not only cultural institutions in the country’s major cities,” says Minister of Culture Simonas Kairys. “Although the festival has ended, the phase of renovating cultural spaces is far from over. Some institutions could not participate due to objective reasons, such as the LVSO hall, the Contemporary Art Center, and the Žemaičių Museum ‘Alka.’ So even after the festival, we still have several returns to newly renovated cultural spaces to look forward to.”

More than 1,500 people visited four divisions of the National Museum of Lithuania – the Signatories’ House, the House of Histories, and the Jon Šliūpas Museum. The “Stasys Museum” in Panevėžys received as many as 1,348 visitors, and the Žemaičių Bishopric Museum in Varniai attracted about 350 people. Other festival-participating cultural spaces were also actively visited, including the Klaipėda State Music Theatre, the Lithuanian Jewish Culture and Identity Museum, the Kaunas County Public Library (Ąžuolynas Library), the Trakai History Museum, and the Lithuanian Theatre, Music, and Cinema Museum, which organized tours through the “Muzeoteka.”

Participants of the festival “16” also learned about the activities of the National Museum of Fine Arts branches – the Pranas Gudynas Restoration Center and the Radvilų Palace Art Museum. They also took tours of the Sapiega Palace, the Lithuanian Audio-Visual Library, and the exhibition building of the Kaunas Ninth Fort Museum Memorial Complex.

As part of the “16” cultural spaces festival, a discussion titled “The Cultural Renaissance of Regions: Utopia or Reality?” was held at the newly opened “Stasys Museum” in Panevėžys this summer.

Photo by Paulius Židonis.