Grūtas Park
Coordinates: 54 ° 1 ' N , 24 ° 5' E
The Grutas Park ( Grūtas parkas ) is a sculpture park in the village Grutas , in the municipality of Druskininkai , near the spa town of Druskininkai , in the south of Lithuania . It was built by the Lithuanian entrepreneur and “mushroom king” Viliumas Malinauskas and opened on April 1, 2001. In 2001 the founder received the Ig Nobel Prize , a satirical award. The park has now developed into a tourist magnet.
Objects and offers
The park is an open-air museum , designed in a typical pine forest of the southern Lithuanian region of Dzūkija . Dozens of sculptures from the time of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, removed from their original locations in the city centers, found a new permanent location here. In a conscious propaganda statues atypical chosen environment, the people who are represented by the statues, and introduced the acts for which they were responsible with trilingual information panels ( Lithuanian , English , Russian ), the Genocide Museum in Vilnius provided support . This historical contextualization countered accusations that this was a trivialization or even glorification of the totalitarian system.
In a souvenir shop with special glasses with Stalin , Lenin , Khrushchev and Marx's likeness hang pictures of young communists , October revolutionaries and working class women and men. There is also a restaurant there with waitresses in pioneer shirts and other Soviet pseudo-nostalgic attributes. A petting zoo has been set up for children .
At the entrance to the site there is a replica of a cattle wagon as it was used to transport the deportees . The park takes up other aspects of the camps , such as barbed wire and watchtowers, from which military music from the 1960s is played.
literature
- Georges Hausemeier: Greetings from Father Stalin: The history park of Grutas in Lithuania , in: FAZ February 25, 2010, page R 4.
