The ideas of the Enlightenment were preached by many representatives of the Republic's elite, but few put them into practice. Paweł Ksawery Brzostowski was one of the latter. It was thanks to him that a small self-governing republic was established.

Pawłów vel Pawłowo, a village near Turgiel (in the historical Vilnius district), also called Merecz (hence the Lithuanian name of the settlement: Merkinė) after the flowing Mereczanka river, was once the centre of a landed estate with a manor house and a village. The once important Vilnius-Jashinė-Turgėlės-Ošmiai road ran through Pavlovė, which was surrounded by open fields. This place is mentioned by Michał Baliński and Tymoteusz Lipiński in the third volume of "Starożytna Polski pod względem historycznym, geograficzne i statystycznym" (Warsaw 1846).

Pawłowo - an estate in the Meretz estate
. In 1767, the Meretsk estate, which comprised over three thousand hectares (one third of which were woods), was purchased from Hippolyt Korsak, the stolnik of Novogrudok, by the canon of Vilnius, priest Pawel Ksawery Brzostowski (1739-1827), a publicist, great writer of Lithuania (1762), and later great referendary of Lithuania (1774), who named the estate Pawlowo after himself. In 1769, he granted personal freedom to the peasants on his estate, divided the land among them and replaced serfdom duties with rent for its redemption. This was the beginning of the Pavlovian Republic.

The Pavlovian Commonwealth - the beginning of the existence
. It was a practical realisation in the Lithuanian province of the Enlightenment ideals advocated by many representatives of the Republic's elite during the reign of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski. However, only a few were willing to put them into practice, among them Father Paweł Ksawery Brzostowski. This quasi-state existed between 1767 and 1794, and was a complete administrative novelty in its day.

The autonomous Pavlovian Commonwealth had its own coat of arms, flag, coin, board of trustees, treasury, army, self-help fund, elementary school, medical, chapel. Fr Brzostowski was the president for life. The rules of this republic were set by a progressive constitution of 1769, octrouled (imposed) by Fr Brzostowski, but later approved by the people of the country.

The activity of the self-government (Sejm) was based on the normatives drafted by Duke Pavel Ksawery Brzostowski, published in print in 1771 as "Ustawy stosujące się do dobrego porządku i obowiązki osiadłych ludzi w dobrach Pawłowa czyli Mereczu" ["Laws applying to good order and duties of settled people in the good of Pavlov or Merecz"]. The Great Sejm formally approved the Pavlovian Republic and its constitution on 4 April 1791 (even before the adoption of the Constitution of 3 May).

The Pavlovsk Republic - further fate
The Pawlowski Republic gained considerable publicity in the Polish-Lithuanian monarchy, where the so-called peasant question was one of the most important and hotly debated social problems. The experiment at the Pawlowo estate aroused the interest and appreciation of enlightened magnates, as well as of King Stanislaus Augustus, who honoured its president with the Order of the White Eagle during his visit to the republic.

The end of the Pawlowski Republic, which had existed for just over a quarter of a century, came in the summer of 1794, during military operations during the Kosciuszko Uprising. In the absence of Father Brzostowski, the armed inhabitants of the republic took up arms against Russian troops, during which they showed heroism and sacrifice. As a result of the pacification, carried out by Moscow troops, Pavlovo was destroyed and the population of the republic was dispersed.

After the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prince Pawel Ksawery Brzostowski sold the estate to the Grand Marshal of the Crown, a bargainer, Frederick Joseph Moszyński. In 1795 or 1796, he emigrated to Dresden in Saxony, then to Italy. At this time he also attempted to preserve for posterity the knowledge of the existence of the Pavlovian Republic. He tried to commission a series of paintings depicting the history of Pavlov from Franciszek Smuglewicz (1745-1807). In 1795, the 'Approval of the Act to the Peasants of Pawłów' was painted (possibly the first oil painting of the planned cycle; nowadays in the collection of the King John III Palace Museum in Wilanów), but we have no knowledge whether there were further paintings. It is possible that Smuglewicz's sketches were used to some extent by Carlo Antonini (c. 1740-after 1821), an Italian draughtsman, copperplate engraver and architect active in Rome. His print (in etching), 'Le Paysan de Pavlov dans le Palatinat de Vilna' (1797) is an idealised vision of the fieldwork of the inhabitants of the Pavlovian Republic.

In 1800, Fr Brzostowski returned to Lithuania from war-torn Italy. He settled initially in Turgeli. He later became pastor of the parish of Rukojėna near Vilnius, where he died in 1827 and was buried in the local parish church. The tombstone of the founder of the Pavlovian Republic was destroyed by the Russian occupiers and the church was turned into an Orthodox church.

From the information contained in the 'Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and Other Slavic Countries' (vol. VII, 1886), it is known that the Pavlovsk estate was acquired from Marshal Moszyński by Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier, a French royalist, political émigré, director of the Academy of Arts and Imperial Libraries in St Petersburg, at that time an aide to Tsarina Catherine II. In the 19th century. Pavlovo was owned by the Kobylinskis, later by the Wagners.

The buildings of the Republic of Pavlovo
. In April 1919, the headquarters of Polish units participating in the "Vilnius expedition", which brought the liberation of the town from the Bolsheviks, were stationed in Pawłowo. The owner of the estate at that time was Witold Wagner.

During the German occupation, from the turn of 1943/1944, the surrounding area was the place of activity of the 3rd Wileńska Brigade of the Home Army, commanded by Lieutenant Gracjan Frog "Szczerbiec". On 4 May 1944, a clash took place in Pawlowo between soldiers of the brigade and a company of the Lithuanian Territorial Defence Corps (Lietuvos vietinė rinktinė). The fighting took place in the ruins of the manor house and estate. They ended with the victory of the AK troops. Under Soviet occupation, the Pavlov manor buildings fell into more and more ruin with each passing year.

Pawłów today
It is worth visiting Pavlov today (about 50 km from Vilnius) to see the still visible remains of the Pavlovsk Republic, an original social and economic experiment of the declining decades of the First Republic. Nowadays, they are protected as a permanent ruin and are under conservation care.

There is a Polish-language secondary school named after Pavel Ksawery Brzostowski in nearby Turgiels, which has a museum dedicated to the founder of the Pavlovsk Commonwealth.