VILNIUS - Offended by the demolition of a monument commemorating Polish soldiers in Lithuania, Poland has asked the Foreign Ministry to re-erect the statue in Varena.
The Polish Embassy passed an official note to the ministry on Aug. 20 requesting that they either replace or build a new memorial to Polish soldiers killed in the Lithuanian-Polish battles that followed World War I.
The monument was located next to the Saint Michael Archangel Church in Varena and pulled down a week ago as part of a reconstruction project.
Erected during the interwar period, the four-meter high column overlooked the graves of 18 Polish troops and one Lithuanian soldier killed in the battles of 1919, 1920 and 1923.
"The condition of the column was rather bad. So we decided to tear it down," said Valentinas Virvicius, a priest at St. Michael the Archangel Church. "Anyway, this is not a monument. A park and monument will be erected in this place to honor Pope John Paul II."
The Varena municipality gave clearance to tear down the monument. After the concrete obelisk was disassembled, city officials moved it to a local cemetery, where the graves of Polish soldiers were previously relocated in 1995.
Polish diplomats expressed outrage over Virvicius' comment that the monument is "just a piece of concrete."
Stanislaw Cygnarowski, Poland's consul general, went to Varena himself to speak with the priest.
"I was shocked by the behaviour of the priest. It seems to me that the incident has rejuvenated him. He continues to declare that the monument held no historical value. I forbade him to move the pedestal, which still remains. But it seems that the priest did not understand," Cygnarowski told Rzeczpospolita, a leading Polish publication.
Varena Mayor Vidas Mikalauskas blamed the incident on the incompetence of municipality architects. It was they who permitted the demolition to go ahead, he said.
The mayor asserted that the memorial would be re-erected in the cemetery where it currently resides 's alongside the Polish graves that it originally shadowed over.
During a recent trip to Poland, Parliamentary Deputy Chairman Ceslovas Jursenas apologized for the incident at a Lithuanian-Polish Parliamentary Assembly meeting.
Jursenas told journalists that he would visit the Varena church himself to further investigate the incident, reiterating that the obelisk would be put up again.
Meanwhile, the Lithuanian Center Party issued a public statement urging the Foreign Ministry to reject "ill-mannered and ungrounded pretensions by the Foreign Ministry of Poland to Lithuania regarding the demolition of the rundown column next to Varena church."
"Warsaw's attempt to regulate the issue seems ridiculous to a sane mind," said party leader Romualdas Ozolas. "According to usual practice, diplomatic notes should be used to tackle somewhat different problems. But, since the Polish Foreign Ministry allowed such a step, Lithuania, in our opinion, should identify [the step] as impudent to show that this is Lithuanian land, where things are managed according to Lithuanian law and decision-making, not Poland's," said Ozolas.
