Vilnius city municipalities The historical memory commission will propose to the council to rename the Salomeja Nėries high school St. On behalf of Catherine. It is also proposed to the capital city council to change the name of Sofijas Kovalevskaja school to Vilnius Capital High School.
12 members of the commission approved the name change of S. Nėris gymnasium, and 10 members of S. Kovalevskajos.
In total, S. The community of Nėris high school submitted four variants of the school's name - Media, Old Town, St. The names of Kotryna and Medijų-Senamiestis gymnasiums, while the new name of S. Kovalevskaja gymnasium was proposed by the institution itself.
According to the chairperson of the commission, Kamilė Šeraitė-Gogelienė, the decision of the commission on the renaming of gymnasiums will still have to be approved by the municipality's Education Affairs Committee, and then the issue will be considered by the capital's municipal council.
"If the committee has time to consider, the issue will be in the council on February 28, if not - in the first meeting of March," said the chairwoman of the commission.
The Vice-Mayor of Vilnius, "libertarian" Arūnas Šileris, who participated in the meeting, welcomed the decision of the Historical Memory Commission to change the name of the gymnasium named after S. Nėries.
"After many years of uncertainty and push and pull while trying to change the name of the school, I can be happy that there is only one step left before the new name - approval by the city council," A. Šilleris announced on his personal Facebook account on Wednesday.
ELTA reminds that discussions regarding the name change of the Salomeja Nėries School in Vilnius have been going on for some time in the public space. The school's management had previously spoken about the intention to change the name of the educational institution.
In mid-February, Salomeja Nėries and Sofijas Kovalevskaja high schools applied to the Vilnius city municipality, requesting to change their names.
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.
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)
