Pazaislis Monastery and Church

Pazaislis was founded in 1667 by Grand Chancellor Kristupas Zygimantas Pacas as a Camaldolese monastery, employing Italian architects and painters to create the finest Baroque sacred complex in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Its history encompasses Camaldolese silence, Russian Orthodox occupation, Soviet neglect, and post-independence restoration.

Kristupas Zygimantas Pacas, Grand Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, conceived Pazaislis as his supreme act of devotion. A man of enormous political power and deep religious conviction, he determined to build a monastery that would rival the greatest sacred spaces in Italy, the country whose art and spirituality he most admired.

In 1661, before construction began, Pacas received a gift from Pope Alexander VII: the painting of the Mother of Fair Love. This Marian icon, given as a personal token of papal favor, became the spiritual seed around which the monastery would grow.

Construction began in 1667. Pacas brought Pietro Puttini from Italy to design the complex and Michelangelo Palloni from Florence to paint the frescoes. The church was blessed in 1674, its facade towers completed by 1681, and the full complex finished around 1712, decades after Pacas's death in 1684. He was buried in the monastery, his final home in the house he had built for God.

The Camaldolese monks who inhabited Pazaislis practiced an extreme form of contemplative life. Their rule required perpetual silence, solitary cells, and ascetic disciplines including sleeping in coffins with bricks as pillows. For 164 years, until the Russian authorities suppressed them in 1831, these monks filled the extraordinary Baroque spaces with nothing but prayer.