Sculpture Park in Klaipėda Memorial site

In Klaipėda city between K. Donelaičio, Liepų, Trilapio and S. Daukantas streets.

The Sculpture Park in Klaipėda is a multi-layered witness to the city's and the world's history. A cemetery, a park, a memorial, an art space - all this and more fits into this one space.

In 1944–1945, the Soviet occupiers reestablished themselves in Lithuania, and the city of Klaipėda was left without its old inhabitants. The once new, but now old city cemetery was abandoned, devastated and destroyed. Finally, it was abolished, and in 1977. the Sculpture Park was established in its place. Works of art began to be built. It is said that even during the years of Soviet censorship, “art strategies far removed from the canons of socialist realism were formed and implemented here: abstraction, surrealism, minimalism, localized art”.

Today, this park is called the Open-Air Gallery of Lithuanian Mature Modernist Sculpture. It exhibits 116 works created during the Soviet era (1977–1989). However, along with works of art and relics of old cemeteries, other layers and monuments also coexist here:

• A fortification device reminiscent of the Napoleonic Wars – a defensive chancel (1812);
• memorial to the 1923 Klaipėda Uprising (1925);
• memorial to the Soviet Union soldiers of World War II (1949–1980; part of the memorial was dismantled in 2022 after the start of the Russian war against Ukraine);
• a memorial stone for the old residents of the Klaipėda region – the Memelenders (1992).

Memorials also honor the French prisoners of war who died in the Franco-Prussian War, the soldiers of the German Empire in World War I, the soldiers of Independent Lithuania, and the Belgian, Polish, and French prisoners of war in World War II.

Since 2005, the Sculpture Park exposition has been maintained by the Museum of the History of Lithuania Minor.