Many names, one floor

The hotel opened in 1897. The dance floor first turned in 1939. Since then the sign over the door has changed again and again. The floor has stayed where it is.

A French name on Laisvės alėja

  1. 1897

    Isakas Pikeris, who bought the corner plot five years earlier, has the architect Nikolajus Andrejevas rebuild the old brick house and add a wing along what is now Vasario 16-osios gatvė. The hotel that opens here takes a fashionable French name: Versalis, Versailles. The balcony railings are cast a few streets away, at the Minerva works.

  2. 1904

    After a bankruptcy and a spell in the hands of the Vilnius Land Bank, the hotel is bought by Dominykas Venckauskas. It has 19 rooms. His family will keep it until the Soviet state takes it from them.

  3. 1908

    In March the restaurant opens on the ground floor, in six rooms. A newspaper notice promises a first-class kitchen that cooks in the Polish, Russian, Lithuanian and French manner.

  4. 1920

    Kaunas is now the provisional capital. The government takes over the hotel as a club for foreign guests.

  5. 1924

    The cabaret years begin: ballet numbers, an American acrobatic troupe, dancers from Germany and Czechoslovakia. A granddaughter of two shareholders later remembered it as the only evening cabaret in the city. Tango is believed to have been danced in Lithuania for the first time in this house.

  6. 1925

    The entrance from Laisvės alėja is rebuilt with moulded lions' heads, a curved canopy and glazed doors. The hotel now has 40 rooms.

  7. 1931

    Ten months of building work under the architect E. Frykas bring central heating and running water. The newspaper Dienos naujienos calls Versalis the most modern restaurant with a dance floor in Lithuania. Danielius Dolskis sings here. On New Year's Eve a glass of champagne costs 10 litai and the doors stay open until five in the morning.

  8. 1934

    Antanas Šabaniauskas sings romances with the house orchestra. He is at the start of his career.

  9. 1935

    The satirical paper Kuntaplis complains that a boiled egg at Versalis costs one litas, more than a whole hen at the market.

  10. 1937

    Edvardas Venckauskas, who has inherited the house from his father, has a revolving stage built for the orchestra. One account dates it to 1935.

  11. 1938

    The bar prints its own drinks card: cocktails from 3 to 6 litai, krupnikas at 2.50. The card promises “the most modern, most beautiful dance hall in Lithuania”, the best kitchen and normal prices. The writer Henrikas Baltrušaitis describes a room lined in black velvet, kept by a bartender called Kiki.

On the dark walls and ceiling, butterflies and flowers gleam here and there.

Henrikas Baltrušaitis on the bar at Versalis, in the weekly Sekmadienis, 27 November 1938

The floor

  1. 1939

    The engineer Jokūbas Udalovas builds a large revolving dance floor into the middle of the hall, with a new bar beside it. There is no other in Lithuania. Max Borstein's band plays from the stage while the floor carries the dancers round. A photograph from that year shows a round floor, its boards laid like rays about a chequered centre.

  2. 1940

    The Soviet authorities nationalise the hotel and the restaurant.

  3. 1941

    Under German occupation the restaurant is renamed Viktorija.

  4. 1948

    The hotel becomes the Nemunas. The address moves with the times: Stalino prospektas 64 until 1962, then Laisvės alėja 88.

Found again

  1. 1960s

    The hall is now Jaunimo kavinė, the Youth Café. Regulars shorten it to Jaunimkė. When they find out what the place was called before the war, they start calling it Versalis again. The authorities do not like it.

  2. c. 1974

    After a short refit the café reopens as Vakaras, Evening. The round floor beside the stage, forgotten since the 1930s, is put back to work and switched on whenever the band starts to play. A glass of good wine costs 76 kopecks. The music officially stops at 23:30. A few roubles to the musicians keep it going.

The pleasure is great only as long as you are more or less sober.

Romualdas Matelis, on dancing on the moving floor of Vakaras in the 1970s

After independence

  1. 1990

    The hotel and the restaurant are privatised, and the old name returns to the door.

  2. 2005

    The building is entered in the Register of Cultural Heritage. Four years earlier the architectural historian Nijolė Lukšionytė-Tolvaišienė had written that no other hotel of the Tsarist period survives in Kaunas with its exterior, plan and interiors.

  3. 2013

    A decade of nightclubs begins in the hall: Chaosas, then Drama, then Rocknrollas. Each refit leaves the round floor in place. By now it is protected as part of the heritage.

  4. 2024

    The last club closes. Reconstruction of the whole corner begins, to a design by A keturi architektai.

  5. Now

    The hall is being restored as a restaurant. The floor will turn again. Request a table

Sources

Accounts of Versalis disagree on several dates. Where they do, this page follows the archival chronology published in Kauno diena and says so.