Our Lady of Šiluva (Our Lady of the Pine Woods), Šiluva

Siluva's story begins with a fifteenth-century nobleman who built a church and brought an icon from Rome, passes through the devastation of the Reformation, pivots on the 1608 apparition and the recovery of buried church documents, and continues through Soviet persecution into the present day. The Chapel of the Apparition, designed by Antanas Vivulskis and completed in 1924, now stands as one of Lithuania's most distinctive sacred buildings.

In 1457, Petras Gedgaudas, a nobleman in the service of Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, built a church at Siluva and brought a Marian icon from Rome to grace its altar. For roughly seventy years, the church served as a center of Catholic worship in the region.

The Reformation changed everything. Between the 1530s and 1560s, the population of the Siluva area converted to Calvinism. The Catholic church was seized, its altar stripped, its sacred objects scattered. The last Catholic priest, Father John Holubka, foresaw what was coming. Before he died, he sealed the church's most important documents and treasures in an iron chest and buried it in the earth near the church, enlisting a local boy to help him.

For decades, the buried chest lay forgotten. Then, on an evening in 1608, shepherd children tending their flocks saw a young woman of extraordinary beauty standing on a rock, holding a child, weeping. The local Calvinist minister came to investigate. The weeping woman told him that her Son had once been worshipped on this ground, and now it was plowed and sown.

The boy who had helped Father Holubka bury the chest was now an elderly, blind man. He remembered what he had done decades earlier, and he led people to the spot. When the iron chest was unearthed and opened, revealing the church documents and sacred objects, the old man's sight returned. The documents proved Catholic ownership of the church property, and through a prolonged legal process that concluded in 1622, Catholicism was restored to Siluva.