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Pilaitė Windmill

Not rated yetVilnius

In Pilaitė stands a 16-metre-high smock-type windmill (with a rotating cap) – its upper part can be turned to face the most favourable wind direction. The mill has a strip foundation of concrete masonry with stones. The walls and cap are timber-framed. The walls of the ground floor are clad with vertical rows of board-and-batten boards. Those of the other floors are clad with horizontal rows of overlapping double-sawn boards, covered with shingles. The cap roof is shingled over battens, while its sides, front and back are clad with vertical rows of boards. The mill has four storeys, 16 m in total. On the ground floor the body has vertical walls; on the other floors it is an octagon in the form of a tapering pyramid. The ground floor is 10.5 m in diameter, the top 4.4 m. When the mill was built, there was a wide opening to the annexes in the north-west and west façades of the ground floor, and a door in the south-east façade. Every ground-floor wall except the western one had a window, and the northern wall had two. In the northern corner of the north-east façade there was a chimney for a heating stove. On the first floor, the north-west and south-east façades had doors onto a gallery walkway about two metres wide, with railings, fixed on diagonal braces. The north, south and probably north-west façades had skylights. On the second floor the skylights were in the north-west and south-east façades, and on the third floor in the west and south-east façades. Their position and number were changed when the mill was converted from wind to electric power in Liepalotai and when it was re-erected in Pilaitė. The mill was built in Liepalotai in 1923 by Petras Žasetis, with money he had earned in the USA. In 1961 the mill was converted to an electric motor. After independence was restored, the mill in Liepalotai was left to its fate, but the archaeologist Zenonas Baubonis, travelling around Lithuania, decided to save it from total ruin and in 2003 dismantled it and moved it to Vilnius. The mill is now used for events, exhibitions and parties, and as a venue for bread-baking educational programmes.

SettingOutdoors and indoors

Getting there

Piliakalnio g., VilniusVilnius City MunicipalityDirections

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