Our Lady of Ostra Brama, miniature

The items that the people displaced from the areas attached to the USSR took with them to their new place were, first of all, the most necessary household and farm equipment. Additionally, the resettlers' luggage also included documents, family heirlooms, decorative elements, clothing, food, musical instruments and devotional items. Images of saints (often local ones), associated with home, were treated as a piece of the old world brought along. Hanging a holy picture taken from the family house on the wall of a new flat was a kind of gesture of belonging, a symbolic familiarisation with a place completely alien both geographically and culturally. The family of Aleksander and Maria Pisiuk, even though they were of the Mosaic faith, also took with them a representation of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn. A small image of Mary on the crescent moon, embossed in metal sheet and painted, was made as a likeness of the holy image in the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius. As one of the most recognisable symbols of their hometown, the object served as a kind of 'relic', though not in the strictly religious sense of the word. It was 'a piece of home', a memento of the native land.

Marta Frączkiewicz