“Lucernalis”, or “Lucernalia hora”, was the name used in the early Middle Ages in the Western Church for the evening service during which candles were lit.

The Northern Jerusalem

Vilnius is the city that once held “forty Catholic churches and numerous synagogues,” the city that, in the words of Czesław Miłosz when receiving the Nobel Prize in 1980, “was once called the Jerusalem of the North.”

For centuries, Vilnius has been a threshold city, standing at the crossroads of East and West, Catholic and Orthodox, Latin and Byzantine traditions. A place of passage—between histories, identities, and between forgotten and still-living traditions.

“Quite early, I began to perceive the architecture of Vilnius as a sign. It spoke of something and demanded something. It was a noble past in a strange and unreal present, a tradition in a world that had suddenly lost all tradition, a culture in an acultural world.”
— Tomas Venclova, from Vilnius as a Form of Spiritual Life (1978), a dialogue with Czesław Miłosz.

Reflection

“This music cannot be read without a teacher. One must learn everything by heart—both the words and the chant—because this music is the heart of the whole world (…). The liturgy is solemn worship.”
— Daphtara Afork, the oldest cantor in Lalibela, Ethiopia, in Le Silence des Anges (1999)

At Lucernalis, we believe that sacred music belongs to life itself—to the sacred spaces it once filled, to the voices and hands that still carry it today. This is why Lucernalis seeks to bridge historical performance and living tradition.

Scholars and performers, cantors and instrumentalists, bearers of oral tradition and those reconstructing lost repertoires gather here—not merely to perform, but to experience, to question, to participate.

 

Transmission

“Ecclesiastical chant leads us toward an encounter, a presence; toward the testimony of what our ancestors experienced through the liturgy, and what we ourselves must transmit to our contemporaries and descendants.”
— Marcel Pérès, “Que pourrait-être une herméneutique du chant ecclésiastique?” in Le chant liturgique aujourd’hui et la tradition grégorienne, 2016.

At Lucernalis, music is not just sound—it is a way of understanding who we are. We listen, we chant, we celebrate.

We seek not only beauty, but meaning.

Come to experience, not just to observe.

Come to chant, not just to listen.

Come to rediscover, not merely to remember.

 

See you in Vilnius!