Grutas Park

Grutas Park ('Stalin World') - darkometer rating : 5 (weirdness factor 10!) - Grutas Park (or 'Gruto parkas' in Lithuanian), located in south-west Lithuania , is the world's most famous/infamous socialist sculpture park. But it's more than that – a peculiar mix of a collection of socialist realist sculptures/statues (and yes, several Stalins are included), a complex of communism -era-themed museums, a children's playground and a mini-zoo plus a mock gulag -style landscaped park. Pretty unique in that combination. It's sometimes referred to in the press as 'Stalin World', but that's not its official designation, mind you! > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: at the end of the Cold War with the break-up of the Eastern Bloc and the disbanding of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, these countries were still left with the visible socialist legacy of all those statues and other sculptures that had been put up in most towns and cities. These socialist realist celebrations of the working classes or the Big Shot heroes such as Lenin , Marx & Engels , plus heads of the local leadership of course, were all suddenly sort-of redundant. What to do with them now, was the question. In most places the solution was rather radical: get rid of them. So too in post- Soviet Lithuania . The statues of the former biggies just disappeared, they were taken away and destroyed, or sometimes simply moved out of general view, e.g. into the suburbs (cf. Budapest 's Memento Park or the relocated Lenin-Marx-Engels triad in Chisenau, Moldova – see Transnistria ).