In collaboration with the audio theatre “Bilietų nėra”, a new audio tour is presented every year at “Sirenos” festival Club. This year we are telling a tale about Rietavas Manor Park. A place created by a person for a person, so that the person could admire nature and draw spiritual strength from it. The meditative qualities of the audio tour open a rich world of sensations, allowing us to establish an individual relationship with the space, encouraging us to notice details and heightening our senses. 

Rasa Kregždaitė

In a 1938 interview recorded in the Kaunas radio studio, which was unexpectedly discovered in the archives, a journalist interviews Bronislav Saponka, the gardener at the Oginskiai Rietavas residence. The man started this work in 1902, when the town was still under the rule of the last Duke of the dynasty, Bogdan Oginskis, and finished it in 1937, when not a single brick of the residence was left standing. Bronislav tells how he saw the palace in all its splendour, then witnessed the depression of the Duke, which led to the end of caring for the estate, the destruction of the palace during the First World War, and finally the government’s permission to demolish it. During all these events, Saponka continued to maintain the garden, conservatory, and greenhouses, and in the late 1940s he was personally involved in the rescue of the most valuable plants and their transfer to the Kaunas Botanical Garden.  

Composer Andrius Šiurys, historian Regina Šiurytė-Šimulienė (both from Rietavas), dramaturg Rimantas Ribačiauskas and producer Rasa Kregždaitė offer a docu-fictional audio experience based on an interview that does not exist in reality and fragments of archival documents. Walking along the paths of the Rietavas Manor Park, named after Oginskiai family, listeners are invited to immerse themselves in a musical journey about the passage of time, the complex relationship between man and nature, and the tendency to cherish and destroy it.