SOVIETINĖ RITUALINĖ ARCHITEKTŪRA - SANTUOKŲ IR LAIDOTUVIŲ RŪMAI LIETUVOJE.

The secular Soviet state was well known for its elaborate 'socialist rites' instituted for life's milestones, from birth through marriage to death. Actions traditionally carried out in a sacral space were rather quickly assigned to 'consumer services', and were replaced by the civil registration of the newborn child, a secular wedding and funeral rites. Administrators of the new rituals insisted that these ceremonies were neither derived from religious rites nor were they intended to replace them. The challenge, therefore, was to create secular spaces with their own dramaturgy, designed to offer appropriate settings for weddings and funerals while avoiding any kind of religious presence. On a mass scale, most of the initiation rituals in the Soviet Union date only from the 1960s. This explains why special purpose-designed types of buildings only began to spread in many Soviet republics from the 1970s onwards. Soviet Lithuania in this context plays the role of an experimental place since the first purpose-built Wedding Palace in Vilnius (1968-1974, architect Gediminas Baravykas) and the Funeral Palace in Vilnius (1968-1975, architect Česlovas Mazūras) served as prototypes of functional type, modern aesthetics and symbols for the entire Soviet Union. The main idea of the paper is based on the fact that the new secular Soviet rituals were actually based on traditional rituals stripped of their religious content. It seems that tradition (in a very broad sense) influenced the new architectural spaces created to practice new secular socialist rituals. Therefore, from the social point of view these buildings are seen as substitutes for sacral spaces -a wedding palace substitutes for a church and a funeral palace is an interpretation of a cemetery chapel. From the architectural point of view they represent late Soviet mannerism in architecture as a certain simulacra filled with surplus meanings and decorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]