Keidaners from Australia, England, Israel, USA.

Former synagogue welcomed Keidaners to participate in the seminar ‘Historical Transformations of Places for Prayer’, with a talk by a historian and Kėdainiai regional museum director, Rimantas Žirgulis, and a presentation by the artist and current Rupert resident, Erdem Taşdelen.

Historian Rimantas Žirgulis briefly presented Kėdainiai as a city of reformation and a ‘city of six confessions’ in the 17th century. He underlined and discussed the transformations of the many places for prayer in the city. At the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th, the catholic church was taken over by the evangelical reformists. By the end of 18th century, the first evangelical reformed church entered into decline. During the second part of the 19th century, the governor of the city, Count E. Totleben built a minaret for the decoration of the city park, and toward the end of the century the first orthodox church was moved to the cemetery where it became the precinct’s chapel. During the Soviet era, the evangelical lutheran, evangelical reformed, the catholic St. Joseph churches as well as three synagogues were closed and nationalised. They were transformed, respectively, into a leather warehouse, grain warehouse, sports school, electrical hardware factory and Rajkoop union warehouse. The Catholic St. George church and orthodox Transfiguration of Christ churches were the only ones left open. Later, along with various other places for player, their initial function was restored or became centres of culture and education.

Erdem Taşdelen, Rupert’s June resident began developing a video and sound installation project titled A Minaret for the General’s Wife. In this informal presentation he outlined his interest in taking up the Kėdainiai Minaret as a metaphor for the cultural experience of being out of place in this work-in-progress, and trace a brief history of the evolution of laiklik—a conception of secularism adopted from the French laïcité—in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.