Rudziszki (Rūdiškės) is a town located in Vilnius County within the administrative borders of Lithuania, until 1945 located on Polish soil, in Vilnius Voivodeship. There is a railway station with a train station, built on the line of the former Warsaw-Petersburg Railway, completed and put into service in December 1862.

With the construction of the railway line, Rudziszki entered a stage of intensive development. According to the 1866 census, barely 30 people lived here, including seven Jews. At the turn of the century the village became the centre of the community - a sawmill operated here, fairs were held, trade was thriving and a school was opened in 1896. A wooden railway station and a number of buildings in its complex were built, including the historic water tower, which still exists today.

Unfortunately, due to its location, Rudziszki was in the area of battles from the November and January uprisings, as well as both wars, which resulted in the destruction of railway lines and facilities. It is worth noting that until the outbreak of the First World War, the railway network was geared to the strategic and economic objectives of the partitioning states. The former head of the road department of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, J. Eberhardt, in an article published in the Railway Engineer of 1 November 1928, wrote: "At the outbreak of the war, there were a total of 15 .900 kilom. of normal-gauge railways (gauge 1,435 and 1,529 m) in the lands now belonging to the Polish State. Of this, in the Austrian partition there were 4,400 km, in an area of 79 .000 km2, in the German partition -- 5 .000 km in an area of 48 .000 km2, and in the Russian partition -- 6,400 km in an area of 262 .000 km2. "The density of the railway network was thus uneven - the highest in the Prussian partition, the lowest in the Russian partition. Also, the facilities built during the Partitions, even if they survived, no longer fulfilled their role. Of the 910 railway station buildings that existed before the war within the later Warsaw, Vilnius, Stanislawow, Radom and Lwow directorates, as many as 574 (63%) were destroyed. Feliks Lubierzyński, in his article " Odbudowa dworców kolejowych na Kresach " ( Reconstruction of Railway Stations in the Eastern Borderlands ) published in the journal "Naokoło Świata" (Around the World) in 1927, mentions 41 stations within the Vilnius Directorate alone that were rebuilt or newly constructed between 1921 and 1927, including the station in Rudziszki.

The reconstruction of destroyed facilities, as well as the expansion and reconstruction of the network (including the connection of lines lying within different partitions) became one of the most pressing needs of the reborn Republic. Station buildings acquired propaganda significance - they were to be a showpiece of the city, region and country, so according to the Ministry of Communications: "In drawing up the designs, attention was paid to giving the new railway buildings a homely appearance. With their form and architectural solutions, they were to emphasise the Polish character of the locality in which they were being erected, which was extremely important in the Eastern Borderlands, characterised by the least developed railway infrastructure and most severely damaged by the war. Lubierzyński put this role in 1927 as follows:

"For passing [...] Polish citizens and foreigners alike, this style and character of the newly rebuilt railway stations is at the same time a visible sign and symbol that Poland Reborn, also through its art, establishes with this country the old cultural connection, broken by a century of slavery, and extends its authority over it".

As we read in a publication published in 1928 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Polish State Railways, the new stations were to have "a familiar appearance and proper surroundings, all the more so as these buildings were erected in various parts of the country along the 2,000 kilometres of railway lines, and were to be a visible sign of the Polish spirit to all passing foreigners and compatriots, and in many cases could serve as models for the latter in the construction of their homes".

The years 1918-1925 marked the so-called railway station style in architecture, resulting from the search for a style that best reflected the Polish spirit. Tadeusz Maria Rostworowski, an architect associated with the Vilnius directorate, justified the legitimacy of referring to the form of a manor house in railway construction in the following way in one of his lectures:

"A railway station is, after all, nothing more than a prosperous hospitable civic manor house. The same spacious vestibule - waiting room, hall - dining room, office - dispatching office, guest rooms, etc. If to this we add a few cheerful manor houses with porches on pillars, warehouses, storerooms, covered with tiled roofs with eaves - if we put a water tower on the watchtower, like the guild towers of Krakow or Vilnius, we will give the whole place the expression of a returning past tradition".

Michał Pszczółkowski, Ph.D., professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and at the University of Zielona Góra, author of a two-volume work on public utility architecture in the Second Polish Republic, referred to this model as "Vilnius". This is because it was on the territory of the then Vilnius directorate that the largest number of railway buildings were constructed, inspired by the forms and architectural solutions of native baroque and classicist manor houses, with broken or mansard roofs, with entrance porticoes crowned with neo-baroque gables. It is worth referring to the description of the Type 4c station presented by Stefan Szolcman, a Polish engineer and organiser of the railways in the Second Polish Republic, who served as Chief Railway Inspector in the years 1924-1926 and was a member of the State Railway Board from 1926. In an article published in the pages of "Inżynier Kolejowy" (No. 11 for 1928), entitled " Plans for the development of the Polish railway network ", he discusses a railway station described as 4c, characterised by a compact body with a broken roof, with a two-storey entrance risalit with a roof projection and a triangular gable on the front (from the side of the tracks) and a semicircular gable with tracery on the side of the city. This was the type of station building in Rudziszki. Unfortunately, we do not know who the author of the project was, but we can assume that it may have been one of the architects of the Vilnius directorate at the time - Hipolit Hryncewicz (1876-1933) or Tadeusz Maria Rostworowski (1860-1928). The head of the building department at the time was the architect Henryk Genello (1872-1948), who may also have been the author of the design for the railway station in Rudziszki. Lubierzyński's article reads:

"to the architects of the Vilnius Railway Directorate, Messrs Tadeusz Rostworowski and Hipolit Hryniewicz [....It is worth adding that the architecture of the railway station in Vilnius was designed in the Polish style, and that the Polish manor house style, born in the wooden building industry and tentatively further developed in the brick building industry shortly before the war, found such a perfect expression and the widest possible application in railway construction".

It is worth adding that railway station architecture between the wars also had an impact on the revival of the building industry in the national spirit (especially in the area of utility construction). "How often one sees," we read in a later report on the development of railway building, dating from 1934, "especially in the provinces, how more than one countryman, when building a residence, borrows a design from railway building, which is sometimes for many of them the only model to follow." This influence was already noticed at the end of the 1920s, as Lubierzyński emphasised, writing:

"And insofar as these railway stations are built in the Polish style, then - as, by the way, we often have the opportunity to notice - usually other newly constructed private buildings are also erected in this style, and in the end perhaps the whole of Poland, through its architecture, which is already, in a way, such an outstanding, external expression of the culture and tastes of the nation, will establish its proper type and character, which will be immediately visible to all."

Most of the buildings and railway stations built in the former eastern provinces in the 1920s still bear traces of the trend towards the architecture and culture of the reborn Republic. They were meant to be a showpiece within its framework, a gateway to Polish cities and towns, a testimony to the Polish state recovering from the devastation of the war. In the interwar period Rudziszki developed dynamically, the town was even visited and its appearance appreciated by Stanisław Wojciechowski - the second President of the Republic of Poland in 1922-1926 - who was on his way to Vilnius. The town developed thanks to the railway, sawmill and trade, in which the Jewish community had a large share. Unfortunately, with the war it lost what it had managed to develop in that short time. The sawmill was closed down, many Jews fell victim to crime, the Polish inhabitants were displaced and the railway ceased to perform its representative function with the loss of its belonging to the Polish state. Today, surrounded by beautiful nature, picturesquely situated Rudziszki is one of the many villages with Polish heritage in the Vilnius region.

Location: Rudziszki, 21176 Trakai district, Lithuania