Qualla: Pažaislis Monastery

Pažaislis Monastery: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanislovas01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Krzysztof Zygmunt Pac, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, did something strange before he died in 1684. He burned the bills. Every receipt, every account, every record of what it had cost him to build the monastery on the wooded peninsula above what is now the Kaunas Reservoir. "What I have given to God," he said, "let him alone know." Writers of the time put the cost at eight barrels of gold coins. The building Pac left behind, a hexagonal Baroque church with a concave facade and so much marble that no other church in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania can match it, still stands. So does the order he founded it for. The Camaldolese hermits are gone, but Catholic sisters returned in the 1990s and the place still functions, three and a half centuries on, as a working monastery.

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Stanislovas01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pažaislis Monastery: Mons Pacis, the Mountain of Peace

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanislovas01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pac bought the estate from the Oborski family in 1664 and named the hill Mons Pacis, Latin for Peace Mountain. The pun was deliberate, his own surname embedded in the new name. He brought in Italians to build it: the brothers Pietro and Carlo Puttini and Giovanni Battista Fredian...

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Stanislovas01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pažaislis Monastery: Napoleon's Horses, the Tsar's Closure

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then came two centuries of indignity. Napoleon's troops bivouacked in the complex during the 1812 invasion of Russia, and his cavalry stabled their horses inside the marble church, gouging the stonework. After Napoleon's defeat the building survived, but its troubles were not ove...

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Ymblanter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pažaislis Monastery: Archive, Asylum, Gallery, Convent Again

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanislovas01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Roman Catholic sisters of the Lithuanian convent of St. Casimir reclaimed the ruined monastery after 1920 and began rebuilding. World War II interrupted them. The Soviet authorities arrived after 1944 and put the buildings to a sequence of uses that read like a list of what one d...

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Stanislovas01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pažaislis Monastery: A Film Festival Recognition

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2021, during the Berlin International Film Festival, Pažaislis was named the best European Film location of 2020. The award acknowledged what the Camaldolese already knew in 1664: the place photographs. The concave facade catches morning light differently from any flat front. ...

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pažaislis Monastery: What the Bells Still Mark

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alma Pater, CC BY-SA 3.0. The monastery holds two bells from the seventeenth century, cast in the lifetime of the founder, dedicated to St. Romuald. It also has the oldest church clock tower in Lithuania, ticking through changes of regime that would have astonished the chancellor who burned his receipts. ...

Read more: Pažaislis Monastery on Qualla

Image: Alma Pater | CC BY-SA 3.0