Previously St. Vilnius Salomejas Nėries Gymnasium, which refused to be renamed after Kotryna, will propose to give the school the name of Vytis. This issue will be discussed at the meeting of the Historical Memory Commission of the capital municipality on Wednesday.
"This issue will be discussed at Wednesday's meeting, the school principal will join and present the option offered by the school. I can say that the proposed option is Vytis Gymnasium. We don't know the reasons for this yet, we hope to hear it during the commission's meeting", commission chairman Kamilė Šeraitė-Gogelienė told Eltai.
ELTA reminds that in the middle of February, the communities of Salomėja Nėria and Sofija Kovalevskaja gymnasiums in the capital applied to the Vilnius city municipality themselves, requesting to change their names. The latter was given the name of Vilnius "Sostinės" gymnasium. At that time, the community of Salomejas Nėries high school stated right before the meeting that they did not want to change the name of the institution to St. Catherine's name.
The decommunization law entered into force in Lithuania on May 1 last year. It is applied in any form to persons, symbols, information that are immortalized or depicted, promoting totalitarian, authoritarian regimes and their ideologies.
The law adopted by the Seimas in December 2022 also provides for the removal of symbols of totalitarianism and authoritarianism from public spaces - monuments, other memorial objects, names of streets, squares and other public objects.
Recently, the De-Sovietization Commission has made recommendations to more than one municipality to change the streets named after S. Nėries. Also, in response to the commission's conclusions regarding the poet's work and biography, schools named after S. Nėries in Vilnius and Vilkaviški initiated the process of changing their names.
The Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Center (LGGRTC) and municipal institutions are expected to recognize public objects as propagating totalitarian, authoritarian regimes and their ideologies.
Viktorija Smirnovaitė (ELTA)
