Valakų reformos paveldas Vidurio Lietuvoje ; Heritage of valakas land reform in central lithuania

Abstract

Valakas land reform was started in the Great Duchy of Lithuania in the middle of the 16th century and is mostly related to the changes in social and economic life. However, the reform not only changed the agrarian relationship between the estate and the village and the agronomy system, but also made complete changes in Lithuanian landscape. The rules of Valakas reform regulated the changes in Lithuanian landscape territory and settlement structures. Due to Valakas reform a three-field strip system, street strip villages with a new barton plan structure, a new building type (stockyard), the network of village streets and roads, the network of small estates, as well as new space forms of agro plantings were developed, town planning was changed, a rectangular plan system was applied for their reorganization. The research object of the present paper is the objects that developed in state lands of Upytė district under the influence of Valakas reform. The constituent parts of the research object are as follows: landscape that developed in Upytė district during the Valakas reform and its separate elements, such as replanned towns, formed street strip villages, the network of small estates. The object of the paper is analysed in several aspects: in the aspect of heritage research and in the aspect of heritage conservation. The aim of the paper is to localize the heritage of Valakas reform in state lands of Upytė district and to analyse the heritage situation in the view of heritage conservation as well as to provide a conservation outline. The present paper claims to be the first complex analysis of Valakas reform from identification and localization of Valakas heritage, to its accountancy, security. According to the inventory of Upytės district of the year 1554, the following landscape elements of state lands of Upytė district were formed: 357 villages and 2 towns. During the research 279 villages and 2 towns mentioned in Upytė district inventory were localized. After using the maps of the 19th-20th centuries for the analysis it was determined that 103 villages with the names defined in the inventory of the 16th century, no longer exist. During the field study inventory of 20 villages it was defined that the following elements of valakas landscape have remained up to the present: fragments of street villages, plan structure of barton buildings, fragments of street plantings, rectangular plan of town squares and street network, cultural layer of towns, fragmental network of small estates. The landscape which developed during the 16th century and its separate elements remained almost unchanged for even four centuries, i.e. until the first part of the 20th century. The structure of valakas landscape started disappearing at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, when grange reform and later kolkhoz reforms in the middle of the 20th century were started to be implemented. Although the typological notion of heritage is developing, in research projects and in the system of heritage conservation the term of Valakas reform does not exist in the way that terms of industry heritage, defence heritage or other groups of heritage which were determined by certain defence, social and political actions of the society, exist. The notion of this heritage group that has not been validated does not allow to understand the complex value of this heritage, as well as the necessity of its integral security Until present the heritage of Valakas reform has been saved by keeping the cultural value of separate element objects despite their primary complex whole. The Law of the Conservation of Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Lithuania is an attempt to fortify the complex or integral security of ethno cultural parts of towns and villages by providing them with the status of cultural reservation.