Pažaislis Monastery

Interesting facts

The church frescoes include a cycle on Saint Bruno of Querfurt, the missionary whose martyrdom in 1009 occasioned the first written mention of Lithuania.

Other frescoes tell the stories of the Five Martyred Brothers, Saint Romuald and Saint Benedict, figures revered by the Camaldolese order.

Michelangelo Palloni painted more than a hundred frescoes in the church between about 1676 and 1685; only the dome was painted later.

A chalice set with more than a thousand gemstones, including some 400 diamonds, 300 rubies and 200 emeralds, was reportedly taken by the Orthodox monks.

According to tradition, building the ensemble cost eight barrels of gold coins.

The concave, twin-towered facade was one of the first of its kind anywhere in Europe.

The hermitage behind the church held thirteen small houses for the monks, most of them built in the 18th century.

Bishop Konstanty Kazimierz Brzostowski consecrated the church on 15 October 1712, nearly three decades after its founder's death.

The Pažaislis Music Festival, launched in 1996, now stages around thirty concerts over three summer months.

Why it is worth it

Pažaislis is Italian Baroque transplanted to the forests of Lithuania: a church with a curving, concave facade and twin towers, crowned by a hexagonal dome some 53 metres high, set within a walled monastic enclave on a wooded rise above the Kaunas Reservoir. It is the largest monastery complex in Lithuania and is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of mature Baroque in northern and eastern Europe.

The founder was Krzysztof Zygmunt Pac, Grand Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who bought the estate in 1664 and named the hill Mons Pacis, the Mountain of Peace, a play on his family name. He brought in monks of the Camaldolese order from the Bielany hermitage near Kraków and intended the church as his family's mausoleum, placing his own tomb humbly beneath the entrance porch. Italian artists created the ensemble. The architects were Giovanni Battista Frediani and the brothers Pietro and Carlo Puttini; the Lombard sculptor Giovanni Battista Merli modelled the stucco in the 1670s; the Florentine painter Michelangelo Palloni covered the interior with some 140 frescoes, and Giuseppe Rossi painted the dome. The hexagonal plan and concave front were new to Lithuania and echo Borromini's churches in Rome. Black and pink marble, cut in quarries near Kraków, was shipped in by land and water via Warsaw, Gdańsk and Königsberg, making the church the most marble-rich Baroque interior of the former Grand Duchy. Pac is said to have burned the construction accounts before his death in 1684, so that only God would know what he had given. The church was consecrated in 1712.

The complex is laid out symmetrically along an east-west axis, with guest house, outbuildings, the monastery and the hermits' cells grouped around the church and enclosed by a tiled masonry wall. Its later history mirrors the region's upheavals. Napoleon's troops plundered it in 1812; after the 1831 uprising the tsarist authorities expelled the Camaldolese and turned it into an Orthodox monastery, where Alexei Lvov, composer of the Russian imperial anthem, was buried. German forces used it as a military hospital during the First World War, and after 1920 the Sisters of Saint Casimir, arriving from Chicago, settled here. In Soviet times it housed an archive, a psychiatric hospital and a branch of the Čiurlionis art museum before the sisters returned. Since 1996 it has hosted the Pažaislis Music Festival.

Getting there

Pažaislis lies on the north-western shore of the Kaunas Reservoir, on the eastern edge of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania's second city. The nearest airport is Kaunas International (KUN), about 11 km away.

Pažaislis Monastery

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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