The renovated Darius and Girenas Stadium in Kaunas hosted its inaugural game on October 16 following a 43-million-euro renovation. Addresses by the city’s mayor as well as the head of the Lithuanian Football Federation were met with booing amid ongoing controversies.
At the opening ceremony, Kaunas Mayor Visvaldas Matijosaitis said: “The dream of Darius and Girenas has finally come true and Kaunas has the only football stadium in Lithuania”.
“Lithuania, by building this stadium in Kaunas, has won a great prize,” he said.
The mayor’s short address was accompanied by boos as well as applause, while the speech by Edgaras Stankevicius, secretary general of the Lithuanian Football Federation (LFF), was interrupted by heckling from football fans.
“This is a historic place, because this is where the first official Lithuanian football match took place a hundred years ago, in this city, Kaunas, not anywhere else. It is really great to have the opportunity to greet all of you from Kaunas,” he said.
“I believe that other cities will follow suit and we will have more than one and more than two stadiums of international category where our national team can play,” said Stankevicius.
In recent years, the Lithuanian Football Federation has been criticised for the national team’s poor sporting performance and the links of some of its officials to the criminal world.
Meanwhile Mayor Matijosaitis has attracted criticism for failing to remove his business – one of the country’s biggest food processing groups Viciunai – from the Russian market. The group has previously announced that it will sell the business, but last week the mayor said the process was going slower than he would like, with no indication when Viciunai was planning to sell its plant in Russia’s Kaliningrad.
Juozas Kriauciunas, the head of the stadium’s contractor Autokausta, handed over a symbolic key to Matijosaicis, and the stadium was consecrated by Kaunas Archbishop Metropolitan Kestutis Kevalas.
The event continued with the LFF Final match between Vilnius Zalgiris and Kaunas District Hegelmann and the award ceremony.
Musical performances and fireworks concluded the inauguration of the stadium.
Everyone who bought a ticket for the opening event could travel free on public transport, while the municipality encouraged people to leave their cars at home.
The final cost of the stadium’s renovation totaled around 43 million euros, around 10 million more than the original budget.
The reconstruction of the stadium was started in 2018 by the Turkish company Kayi Construction, but in January 2020, the municipality terminated the contract with the contractor because it did not meet its obligations. The company was also accused of exploiting migrant workers from Turkey, although the city did not quote it as a reason for ending the contract.
Subsequently, the project was taken over by Autokausta, a Kaunas construction and road building company.
After the reconstruction, the number of seats in the stadium increased from 9,500 to 15,000, and all the stands were covered with a roof.
The stadium will meet the requirements of the highest UEFA category 4.
It is equipped with a heated grass surface, which will extend its season by a month.
According to the municipality, the construction of the stadium required 11,000 cubic metres of monolithic reinforced concrete from the foundations, 3,500 cubic metres of prefabricated reinforced concrete products and about 1,500 tons of metal structures.
33 kilometres of heating pipes were laid under the grass.
During concerts, the stadium will be able to accommodate twice as many people, up to 30,000. (LRT/Business World Magazine)
