The Ogińskis’ Chapel in Vilnius has been renovated

The Department of Cultural Heritage of Lithuania informed that the chapel of Ogiński Princes, placed on a XIX-century cemetery, has been renovated.

“It is something symbolic in the fact that renovation work have begun last year, when the 250th birth anniversary of Michał Kleofas Ogiński was celebrated. This year we can see the results of work. The future renovation of other chapels on this cemetery is also worth considering”, said the department principal Diana Varnaitė.

Restoration works, financed from the national budget, amounted to 75, 000 €.

The chapel-mausoleum of the Ogińskis was built in 1876. Over the past decades it was abandoned and also damaged by a fire set by antisocial persons. Last year the chapel has been preserved.

The Ogińskis are a well known aristocratic family of Russian origin, named after the village Oginty, which was once placed in Żyżmorski county (now in Kaunas county); the family used a seal with their own coat of arms and it descended from princes of Kozielsk, according to some the branch of Smolensk, and to the other – of the Chernigov part of the Rurik dynasty.

The most famous representative of the Ogiński family is a composer Michał Kleofas Ogiński, an author of the polonaise in A-minor “Farewell to the Homeland”.

At the Cemetery of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are also graves of the honored Zawadzkis family, eg. Józef Zawadzki, the first Vilnius bookseller, publisher and printer, and Władysław Zawadzki, a professor of the Main Economics School in Warsaw and a pre-war minister of State Treasury. There is also a burial chapel of the Meysztowicz family. It was built by Aleksander Meysztowicz, a justice minister in the Second Polish Republic, for his wife.