The Kaunas City Council on Tuesday approved an initiative to erect a monument to former Lithuanian President Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas, with the exact location to be decided later.
The motion was passed in a vote of 25 to seven with seven abstentions.
Saulius Rimas, head of the municipality’s cultural heritage division, said that a competition will be held to select the monument’s design. Participating artists will propose specific locations, which will be evaluated by a municipal commission.
There has been some discussion about placing the monument in the courtyard of the Historical Presidential Palace in Kaunas, but this idea has faced criticism from some politicians and cultural figures.
Rimas told BNS that this would be hardly possible legally “because the municipality is neither the owner or the user” of the courtyard.
The Historical Presidential Palace with its courtyard is a division of the National M.K. Ciurlionis Museum of Art, which is owned by the Culture Ministry.
According to Rimas, the cost of the project will be known after the competition.
The idea of erecting a monument to Brazauskas was put forward by Kaunas Mayor Visvaldas Matijosaitis, who said that 15 years after the former president’s death, his memory has not been properly honored.
“We will try to do this in Kaunas,” the mayor said in an earlier statement.
He suggested the monument could be placed in the courtyard of the Historical Presidential Palace.
Brazauskas, a signatory of Lithuania’s 1990 Independence Act, served as speaker of the Lithuanian parliament from 1992 to 1933, as president from 1993 to 1998 and as prime minister from 2001 to 2006.
During the Soviet era, Brazauskas headed the Lithuanian branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for some time. He was elected leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party after it split from the Soviet Communist Party under his leadership in 1988. He later became chairman of the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party, which merged with the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in 2001.
The former president passed away on June 26, 2010, after a serious illness.
Source: BNS
(Reproduction of BNS information in mass media and other websites without written consent of BNS is prohibited.)