House of Signatories

Brief information

The Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania was signed not in a palace or in a specially built state hall, but in an apartment on the third floor of a rental house. This immediately changes the scale of the place: an important political decision is connected with an ordinary city building on Pilies Street, where owners had previously changed and where a workshop, a shop, and a tavern had operated.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the house combined public and private life. Strahl's coffeehouse operated on the ground floor, while apartments were rented out above; one of them was leased by the Lithuanian Society for the Relief of War Sufferers. This very room became the meeting place of the Taryba on February 16, 1918. That is why the museum here is important not only for its exhibition: the building itself shows how political history entered an ordinary urban layout.

What to notice first

It is worth comparing the facade with the house's inner meaning. After the reconstruction of the late 19th century, the building acquired Neo-Renaissance forms and an altered plan. On the main facade facing Pilies Street, the second floor is marked by niches with sculptures of agriculture and fishing, while higher up, on the third floor, there are oval niches with male busts. The decoration speaks the language of urban representation, but the key event is connected not with the facade, but with the apartment upstairs.

In the signing room, what matters is not only the documents, but also the way memory is verified. It displays photographs of the members of the Taryba, the text of the Act published in the newspaper Lietuvos aidas, and the only surviving photograph of the room from that time. In the hall, this sequence is complemented by the painting Signatories: it was created for the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and returned to Lithuania almost seven decades later. The house can be read as a place where the event was preserved through an interior, a newspaper publication, a photograph, and an image that returned late.