Syłgudyszki, less commonly Sołdaciszki (Lithuanian: Saldutiškis), is a small town in Aukštaitija in the Republic of Lithuania, situated between Uciana (Lithuanian: Utena) and Nowe Święciany (Lithuanian: Švenčionėliai). It is closely associated with the Witkiewicz family: above all with Stanisław (1851–1915), painter, writer and creator of the Zakopane style in architecture, and his son Stanisław Ignacy (1885 – 1939), known as Witkacy, a painter, playwright and philosopher.

Jałowiecki Palace at Syłgudyszki

From the late eighteenth century, Syłgudyszki belonged to the princely Pieriejasławski-Jałowiecki family, of the Bożeniec coat of arms. A prominent landmark is the Jałowiecki Palace, which at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was owned by Bolesław (1846 – 1918) and his wife Aniela (1854 – 1918), sister of Stanisław Witkiewicz. The young Witkacy visited her four times during summer holidays between 1900 and 1903, “drinking in Lithuania”, painting landscapes from nature and taking photographs. From Syłgudyszki, he travelled with his aunt to St Petersburg to visit the Hermitage; on another occasion, he went to the Baltic port of Lipawa (Liepāja) in Latvia. These summer stays in the picturesque setting of forests and lakes, and the journeys made then, had a marked influence on Witkacy’s formation as an artist. As his father observed, despite his youth he was already becoming a mature painter.

The palace stands on a local prominence at the edge of the village. The initial, more modest structure was probably erected in 1828; although extended over subsequent decades, it retained much of its original character. The estate remained in the Jałowiecki family until 1921. Its last host was Bolesław’s son, Mieczysław (1876–1962), a graduate of Riga Polytechnic, marshal of the nobility of the Święciany district, agronomist, polyglot and diplomat, who after the First World War served as the first delegate of the Polish government in Gdańsk. Later the palace housed a school and, for a time, a religious house. By then, its furnishings had gone: the last owner had taken them abroad.

The palace is a brick, basemented structure with a single-storey central block and, today, two-storey side wings. It is set within a former landscape park, reduced in area yet still a little over two hectares. The south-facing central façade bears an ornamental portal containing the Jałowiecki coat of arms; the veranda on the east wing has not survived. The building is now sheet-metal roofed, though the central part was once tiled. In 2007, a new owner undertook a comprehensive renovation, including interior works that revealed earlier wall paintings beneath later plaster and paint layers.

In May 2013, two letters dated 21 August 1919, handwritten in Polish on field stationery of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment of the Legions, were discovered concealed beneath the floor. At that time, an international delimitation commission was stationed in the palace. Syłgudyszki then lay on the demarcation line established in the aftermath of Polish-Lithuanian hostilities, and it ultimately fell within the Lithuanian state.

Cemetery at Syłgudyszki

Another important trace of the Witkiewicz family is the small manor cemetery on a hill outside the town, with the Jałowiecki family tomb. On a metal – probably zinc – slab set on a massive plinth surmounted by a tall iron cross, the parents of the creator of the Zakopane style are commemorated symbolically: Ignacy Witkiewicz (1814 or 1817–1868), a November insurgent buried in Tobolsk in Siberia, and Elwira née Szemiot (1822–1895), whose grave is in present-day Minsk, now in Belarus.

Railway Station in the Zakopane Style

Syłgudyszki also preserves a trace of Stanisław Witkiewicz’s effort to promote the Zakopane style across the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He held that the folk architecture and ornament of Podhale contained elements of an authentic Polish art capable of grounding a broadly national architecture that might unite lands divided by partition. In 1899, the Jałowiecki family built the railway station at Syłgudyszki to Witkiewicz’s design for a local 750-mm narrow-gauge economic line linking Postawy (Паставы, now in Belarus), via Nowe Święciany(Lithuanian: Novo-Svičany), to Poniewież (Lithuanian: Panevėžys). Constructed with local labour and two carpenters brought specially from Zakopane, the undertaking was recalled by Witkiewicz in a letter of August 1899: “Only the highlanders from Lithuania, who had built the railway station there, had returned.”

The station was a two-storey log structure sheathed externally with boarding. A spacious attic, lit by a run of windows, lay beneath a slender shingled roof with “pazdury” (vertical wooden decorations) set along the ridges. Deep, modelled gables articulated the façades, and tall brick chimneys rose above the roofline. Numerous decorative elements reflected Podhale provenance: carved wooden stars formed a horizontal frieze across the lower ground-floor level; studded arches appeared over windows and entrance doors; and open-work fretwork ran beneath the first-floor windows. These were complemented by pegged window frames and chamfered gables.

The station suffered severe damage during the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War; later rebuilding largely effaced its original character. Only on one side are vestiges visible: the eaves-brackets supporting the roof retain modest mouldings. Today the former station serves as a single-storey dwelling. The narrow-gauge line has also vanished; a decaying brick water-tower for steam locomotives – the “samovars” – is its principal relic. A standard-gauge railway now follows the former course.

Today the Witkiewicz name is all but forgotten in Syłgudyszki.