Soviet Occupation & Underground Catholic Practice

1919 - 1939

For two decades between the wars, this region was part of Poland's Wilno Voivodeship — a period that consolidated Polish-language institutions and Catholic parish life but also saw the coexistence of Jewish and Catholic calendars in the same market towns. The 1931 census recorded 59.7% Polish, 22.7% Belarusian, 8.5% Jewish, and 5.2% Lithuanian in the voivodeship. In Eišiškės, Jews constituted 28.84% of the population (687 people) by 1921, though their share had declined from a peak of 80% in 1820; the town maintained separate Polish and Lithuanian high schools. The market square in Eišiškės operated on a rhythm shaped by both the Catholic liturgical calendar and the Jewish commercial calendar — Shabbat, market days, and High Holidays structured the week alongside Sunday Mass and patronal feasts. Dieveniškės was 75% Jewish in the 1897 census and still had a significant Jewish community with two synagogues. Nemenčinė's parish school (founded 1777) continued under Polish administration. The parish churches — now operating freely in Polish — celebrated Corpus Christi processions, May devotions, and patronal feasts as public, visible expressions of community identity. But the tutejszy population still spoke prostaya mova at home, and the gap between standard Polish liturgical language and local vernacular remained. This was the last era before the destruction of the Jewish communities and the Soviet suppression of public Catholic practice erased two of the three calendars that had structured town life.

1989 - 2003

The collapse of the Soviet Union opened a contested space for Polish minority identity. The Association of Poles in Lithuania (ZPL) was established in April 1989, and the short-lived Polish National Territorial Region was declared at a congress in Eišiškės on October 6, 1990 — an expression of community self-determination that the Lithuanian government dissolved as incompatible with state sovereignty on September 4, 1991, after the failed Soviet coup. The episode was heavily influenced by Soviet KGB operatives who encouraged ethnic subdivisions to destabilize Lithuanian secession, and the movement was divided between moderates (ZPL leader Jan Sienkiewicz) and radicals seeking Soviet protection. On January 29, 1991, the Lithuanian government granted rights to native-language schooling and official use, and a 1994 treaty with Poland pledged minority-rights protection. The Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (AWPL) was founded on August 28, 1994, by Jan Sienkiewicz, and began its trajectory toward governing Šalčininkai and Vilnius District municipalities. The Mickiewicz monument in Šalčininkai's main square — created by Bronius Vyšniauskas and unveiled in December 1998 for the poet's 200th birthday — signaled the public reassertion of Polish cultural identity. A memorial stone at Sodų g. 5, unveiled in 2004, marked the spot where Mickiewicz watched Vėlinės (All Souls' Day) rituals in 1821, inscribed in both Polish and Lithuanian. Parish churches that had maintained Polish devotions through the Soviet period now celebrated openly: Rudamina's church offered bilingual services, Turgeliai held Mass exclusively in Polish, and the Tabariškės Sunday Mass at 1 p.m. continued in Polish (pamaldos lenkų kalba). Polish-language schools expanded rapidly, from 11,400 students in 1990 to over 22,300 by 2001.

1864 - 1918

The January Uprising of 1863 triggered the Russian Empire's most aggressive assault on Catholic and Polish identity in the Vilnius region. Churches were forcibly converted to Orthodox worship: Rudamina's predecessor church was consecrated as an Orthodox church of the Transfiguration in 1866, after 603 Catholics were registered as Orthodox. A new brick Orthodox church was built there in 1876. The Tabariškės Carmelite monastery had already been closed in 1832, but the parish church survived — and it is in this period that the parish became the sole institutional vessel for Polish-language continuity. When Polish schools were banned and public use of Polish restricted, the church remained the only place where the community could hear and speak Polish in a liturgical setting. After the 1905 Edict of Toleration, Catholic communities could build new churches: the current wooden church at Rudamina was constructed between 1907 and 1909, replacing the lost one. Dieveniškės saw Lithuanian-language sermons introduced from 1886 and 1897–1898, revealing that the parish's linguistic identity was not monolithic — the same community could hear both Polish and Lithuanian from the pulpit. The Jašiūnai Manor, after Baliński's death and the 1863 suppression, lost its position as a cultural centre; its valuable library was transported to Poland or lost during the wars. The festival calendar survived — but it was now carried exclusively by the parish, without the parallel patronage of the noble estate.

From 2004

Since Lithuania's EU accession on May 1, 2004, the Polish-speaking community has operated within a European framework of minority rights while maintaining the parish-based ritual continuity that carried it through Russification and Soviet suppression. AWPL-ZChR governs Šalčininkai District Municipality (21/25 seats) and holds significant power in Vilnius District, shaping public festival representation through municipal cultural centres and school programs. The Rudamina Cultural Centre hosts annual Joninės (St. John's Day) celebrations in Rudamina Park — on June 23, the programme features bonfires, a fern-flower hunt, laser shows, and performers including Czerwone Gitary, revealing a blend of Lithuanian Rasos and Polish noc świętojańska elements. The University of Białystok opened a branch in Vilnius in 2007, extending Polish-language higher education. A 2022 law finally allowed ethnic minorities to use the full Latin alphabet (q, w, x) in legal names — by August 2023, 203 people of Polish descent had changed their names. Parish churches remain the anchor of the festival calendar: Turgeliai holds Mass exclusively in Polish, Tabariškės at 1 p.m. on Sundays, Dieveniškės and Rudamina offer bilingual services, and Corpus Christi processions (Boże Ciało) walk through the streets of these towns each year. The Poškonys ethno-cultural reserve preserves Lithuanian folk traditions as a minority-within-a-minority, creating a layered calendar where the same feast day may be celebrated in different languages with different ritual emphases within the same district. The Dieveniškės appendix — still isolated by its geography — may preserve ritual practices lost elsewhere, though this remains unconfirmed by ethnographic fieldwork. The greatest gap in understanding this region's living culture is the absence of documented prostaya mova (simple speech) in ritual contexts: many community members' grandparents spoke this vernacular rather than standard Polish, and it may have shaped folk prayers, processional chants, and home devotions in ways invisible to both Polish and Lithuanian researchers.