Folk artist Stanislovas Gegeckas homestead in Pamažupiai

Folk artist Stanislovas Gegeckas was born in 1873, in Pasvalys county, Joniškėlis district, Pamažupiai village. He took a keen interest in crafting when being a child. Stanislovas learned to make furniture and later on, in his adulthood, he decided to leave for Warsaw, aftrewards, together with his sister to Saint Peterbourg where for 14 years he worked as a mouldmaker in a manufacture for decorative copper bells. After coming back to Lithuania, he married and lived at his in-laws' place. In 1920 his only son Petras was born. He lived in a small cottage which his in-laws inherited from their parents and which, as Petras Gegeckas says: "outside was recovered with cladding, its walls being of spruce logs and its foundation of oak logs and the construction itself stands on stones." S. Gegeckas refurbished the cottage, decorated it with wood carvings, set up a carpenter workshop inside and a shed in the yard where he kept pieces of wood cut by him as needed to dry and to avoid splitting. S. Gegeckas' craft work is highly original and individualist. It takes from traditional Lithuanian minor architecture, but also has a lot of different and totally uncharacteristic patterns, like the tendency for visual and verbal "narrative". S.Gegeckas stands out among other masters of 1940s with his sense for moderation, subtle taste and his ability to sensibly combine symbolic and decorative elements to outline architectural shapes of his monuments. Decorations never overload the main construction but help it to stand out.