Grūžiai Manor

It is difficult to know when this manor was founded as all historical sources constantly used to intermingle the same names of four estates. The first mention is in 1586. It is estimated that Mr. D. Marcinkevičius, mentioned in 1642, was the mansion’s estate owner. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, during the period of wars and plagues, the mansion and the surrounding villages experienced turbulent times. After the plague of 1710, many neighbours died and those who remained alive fled from the mansions, stealing and grabbing the property of empty houses. Mr. Petras Būtėnas writes that the mansion of Grūžiai was founded after the former village Nebuvėliai was devastated, on the place of the farm Grūžiai. The documents show that the mansion belonged to Counts Tyszkiewicz in 1801. They never lived here and rented the mansion. The manor possessed many of the surrounding villages, 330 tithes of arable land and 178 tithes of forest. About 1892, the countess M. Tiškevičiūtė inherited the manor, but she never settled in Grūžiai and her representative Mr. Parčevskis controlled the manor. The approaching of the First World War forced the owners to sell the estate to the baron Bystramas, who owned a big central area in Grūžiai, but an engineer Juozapas Skripka persuaded to sell that land in parcels to the local residents. At the request of local residents, the Countess M. Tiškevičiūtė left 9.25 tithes of land and the mansion with some buildings to the future Church of St. Virgin Mary, which was built in 1924. There was an elementary school in the building of hired servants of the manor from 1921 to 1933. In 1929, the farmers Kazimieras Požėla and Jonas Dulevičius with their families, the teachers Mr. Bronislovas Petrulis and Miss Valerija Misiūnaitė lived in the mansion. The stable was made of clay and belonged for the kolkhoz (a collective farm) "Vienybė" for a long time, other buildings were: a store, a post office or houses for living, but they do not exist anymore. The manor’s central building is preserved, but in poor condition, unattended. There lived teachers and school staff families, there was a school’s dormitory for many years. Officially, the building belongs to the Grūžiai Church.