Salakas Church of Our Lady of Sorrows

This exceptional church, with a grey façade built of dressed stone, stands not far from Lake Luodis. Set on a hill, it impresses with its monumentality and its tall tower shooting up into the sky. The neo-Romantic Salakas Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, with neo-Gothic features, is 72 m high. Standing away from the centre, the church seems to watch life below from the side; on Sundays it calls people to services with the ringing strokes of its bell. Although the first Salakas church is mentioned in the early 15th century, over the centuries the house of God here was rebuilt several times because of fires and various unrest. The present church was completed in 1911, and services began on 14 August of that year. In 1914 an organ made in Königsberg was installed. Yet this church did not escape misfortune either – during the First World War, after the building work was finished, the Germans took the bells from the tower, and during the Second the upper part of the tower, the roof and the organ were badly damaged. In the post-war years the church was repaired just enough to function, and the tower was only fully rebuilt on the eve of the restoration of Lithuania's independence, in 1989. The church is neo-Romantic with neo-Gothic features, rectangular in plan, a basilica with a semicircular apse and a single tower. The spacious interior, made up of three naves, is crowned by massive arches supported by large columns, the naves are covered with cross vaults, and the church has three altars. In its own way the Salakas church also symbolises all the misfortunes the Lithuanian nation has suffered over the centuries. Burned, destroyed by occupiers and rebuilt again, the church burned down once more in 1905 in a fire that devastated the town. Just at that time the tsarist authorities had lifted the ban on renovating or building new Catholic churches, so the people of Salakas set out to build a church that would withstand all adversity. And indeed, the design they chose stands out from many other churches built in Lithuania at the time. The walls are 168 cm thick and made of three layers: dressed stones on the outside, an inner layer of ordinary fieldstones, and on the inside a row of bricks and plaster. This is why the church's walls are so extraordinarily thick, and with its monumentality it is more reminiscent of the cathedral of some medieval city than of the church of a small Aukštaitija town.