M.K Petrauskas House

History of the house

In 1924, the brothers Mikas and Kipras Petrauskas concluded an agreement with the Kaunas City Board, rented a plot of land on Žalieji Hill and started to build a two-storey brick house according to the design by engineer Aleksandras Golovinskis. The structure and architecture of the building was adapted to the planned semicircular square at the intersection of Vydūnas and J. Janonio Streets. The house was completed in 1925. The six-apartment building was heated by a central heating boiler room in the basement. Behind the house there was a large yard, a garage, outbuildings, a large garden and a vegetable garden.

The composer Mikas Petrauskas and his son Adakris lived on the first floor, followed by his second wife Ona and their daughter Protele, while Adakris and his wife Salomeja Vilkaite moved into the attic. For a while, Elena Petrauskienė's mother Paulina Žalinkevičienė and her sister Eugenija lived in one of the apartments. The other apartments were rented out, and one of them was used by the first part-time educational institution in Lithuania, Kalbaneum (since 1938 - Savišvieta), founded by Vladas and Bronė Kateiva.

When the political situation in Lithuania changed in 1940, the Soviet government expropriated the Petrauskas' house, but they were given the right to use the two flats for free. The residents were moved into the other flats of the house. In 1970, a year after Petrauskas' death, the Petrauskas Memorial Museum was established in the house. It took seven years to open its doors to visitors, as it was necessary to evict the inhabitants of the house, to collect exhibits for future exhibitions, to restore the abandoned building and to adapt the living quarters to the needs of the museum.

In 2006, following polychrome studies of the interior and exterior, the Petrauskas Memorial Apartment was restored and the authentic elements of the building, such as the facade décor, the balconies, the staircase and the handrails, were restored. In 2023, the house of M. and K. Petrauskas, together with the natural-urban framework of Naujamiestis and Žaliakalnis and the architectural monuments standing there, was included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites