Antanas and Jonas Juskos Ethnic Culture Museum

Address
2 Kauno mazoji St, LT-54228, Vilkija, Kaunas region.
Tel. +370-37-556400.
E-mail: ajjekm@gmail.com

Opening times
Tuesday to Saturday 8.00–17.00.

Additional services
Reservation of excursions to the Museum;
Reservation of excursions by historical-mythological routes of the Vilkija environs;
Organizing of a lecture cycle and lessons on history, mythology, folklore and other for pupils from schools of the Kaunas region.

Museum’s collections
The collection of the Museum is composed of the following:
The A. and J. Juska archives;
The collections on history of folklore;
The collections on history of this land;
The collections reflecting the history of the Museum’s building;
The collections of ethnic household articles and folk art works from the environs:
The library.

Exposition

A. and J. Juska life and works;

People of the Vilkija land and their domestic life

Exhibitions
The Museum arranges exhibitions of folk and professional paintings, sculpture, ethnographic works, modern textiles and drawings.

Cultural, educational activity
Organizing of folklore concerts;
Organizing of calendar festivities;
Organizing of get-togethers;
Organizing of meetings with the collectives of foreign folklore;
Realization of educational programs:
1) Organizing of ethnographic camps for junior pupils (7-9 camps annually);
2) Activities of the Ethnographic Center. This Center was established in 1994 to make the junior pupils love the environment surrounding them. During the studies the history, ethnography, nature of this land is being explored.

Other news about the Museum
The founder of the Museum is the Kaunas District Municipality.
The manager of the Museum is Arunas Snieckus.
The future vision of the Museum is to develop a “live” house-museum with the following features:

Joy of exhibit touching (no glass partitions);

A club for hikers-ethnographers;

Camps of pupils for field studies and life in the premises of the Museum;

A library of historic-ethnographic-folk art publications accessible for anyone;

Celebration of all calendar festivities and their popularization in this way;

Concerts and exhibitions popularizing folk traditions;

Seminars for teachers and pupils;

Grounds for playing of folk games and a park of sculpture.

Antanas Juska
Juska (1819-1880), lexicographer and folklorist born in Daujotai, county of Kaunas.
Graduating from the Vilnius Theological Seminary, he was ordained in 1843, and served as curate and pastor in several parishes, the longest in Veliuona and Alsedziai.
Although he never formally studied philology or ethnology, he nevertheless distinguished himself in both fields.
Rev. Juska was the author of a dictionary of the Lithuanian language, published by the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg. Three fascicles of the work entitled Litovskii slovar’ were published posthumously in 1897, 1904 and 1922. The work comprises some 70 000 words, including many which did not appear in previously published dictionaries. He gathered words from the living language spoken in these districts where he lived, especially Veliuona and Vilkija. To illustrate usage he included whole phrases.
Initially the work of preparing the dictionary for publication was undertaken by his brother Jonas Juska and later by a number of other philologists, Jagic, Fortunatov, Vytautas Juska (the son of Jonas Juska), Jablonskis, Buga and Slapelis.
The editors checked the text and changed some details, but the text remained basically unaltered. Since written Standard Lithuanian in Lithuania Major was not yet stabilized at that time, the dictionary’s accentuation, phonology, and morphology were based on the dialect of the author’s birthplace, but with some admixture of the other dialects. The dictionary is especially valuable for its inclusion of unfamiliar words and their forms and for its inclusion of expressions from popular speech.
Rev. Juska also wrote three unpublished dictionaries, Polish-Lithuanian, Latvian-Lithuanian-Polish, and Lithuanian-Polish.
Another important work by Juska was a collection of Lithuanian songs. He wrote down about 7 000 folk songs, some 5 000 of them from the district of Veliuona. The first collection of 33 songs and their Russian translation was published under the name of Litovskie narodnye pesni (Lithuanian Folk songs) in St. Petersburg in 1867.
The songs collected by Rev. Juska are remarkable for variety of themes and for his novel method of writing down and classifying the songs. He was the first Lithuanian to record the names of the singers, giving their social conditions and the occasion on which each song was sung. He wrote down the songs in dialect, without changes or omissions, and he classified some of the songs according to contents. These anthologies are especially valuable in the study of Lithuanian folklore.

Jonas Juska
J. Juska (1815-1886), educator and linguist was born in Zarenai, county of Telsiai.
In 1844 he graduated from the University of Kharkov, where he studied classical languages and later taught them at several gymnasiums (high schools) in Russia.
From 1858-1863 he served as an inspector of the Russian Cadet Corps. His request to be given a teaching position in Lithuania was denied by the governor-general of Vilnius because his brother, Rev. Antanas Juska, stood accused of having had connections with the insurrection of 1863. While employed in the school system Juska applied himself to the study of problems of teaching, producing a number of essays that earned the praise of officials in the ministry of education. The remainder of his time was devoted to research in the Lithuanian language.
J. Juska evinced interest in the scientific study of Lithuanian since 1852, having made the acquaintance of the Russian academician. I. Sreznevsky and later that of the Polish linguist J. Baudouin de Courtenay, professor at the University of Kazan’ from 1875-1883. In that same city Juska taught at school from 1875-1886.
Juska came into additional contact with problems of Lithuanian linguistics when he collaborated with his brother in publishing a collection of Lithuanian folk songs and a dictionary of the Lithuanian language.
After his brother’s death in 1880, the Russian Academy of Science entrusted Juska with preparation of the final draft for publication after taking account of comments by the Russian linguist A. Potebnia. He put much effort into the execution of this task.

Photos by Danute Mukiene