Lithuanian culture: what a country keeps when its own language is banned

Why printing a Lithuanian book became a crime

The January Uprising failed in 1864, and the response reached the written language directly. Lithuanian parish schools had already been banned in 1862, which produced a network of clandestine ones. From 1864 Lithuanian could be set in print only in Cyrillic. Literature in the Latin alphabet was burned and forbidden from publication, and schools, churches, courts and newspapers faced heavy penalties for showing Latin text, with violators exiled to Siberia. Russian nationalist policy presented the prohibition as a restoration of what it held to be the Russian beginnings of Lithuania.

Resistance took the shape of a supply chain. Printing moved over the frontier into East Prussia, where Lithuanian was a language books could still be set in, and the finished sheets were carried back across the border by hand. Bishop Motiejus Valančius was among those who organised it. Roughly 2,500 titles appeared in the Lithuanian Latin alphabet between 1864 and 1904, most of them printed at Tilsit in the Kingdom of Prussia, and some arrived from Lithuanian emigrants in the United States.

The paper at the centre of it was Aušra, begun in 1883 by Jonas Basanavičius and printed at Ragnit in Prussia. Forty issues came out. It was illegal on arrival, and it argued the case that later became the state's own: that the Lithuanian speakers of the villages were the continuation of the medieval Grand Duchy. Vincas Kudirka, working the same ground, wrote a poem in 1898 that opens by addressing Lithuania as a fatherland and comparing it to health. That poem is Tautiška giesmė, the national anthem, written in an alphabet that was illegal at the time it was written in.

The ban ran until May 1904, lifted on the official pretext that the empire's minorities needed pacifying after the Russo-Japanese War. In 1905 Latin characters formally replaced the Cyrillic that had been imposed for four decades.

What the language kept when the state vanished

Lithuanian is an Indo-European language written in the Latin alphabet, and the reference literature holds that it has retained, with the fewest changes, most of the elements of Proto-Indo-European. It is thought to have separated from Latvian, its closest surviving relative, around the seventh century. Its two dialect groups are High Lithuanian, called Aukčtaitian in its own terms, and Low Lithuanian, called Samogitian.

That antiquity was an argument rather than a curiosity. Teodor Narbutt, writing in Polish between 1835 and 1841, set out the relationship between Lithuanian and Sanskrit, and revival activists used the closeness to Indo-European roots as evidence that the nation had standing. Simonas Daukantas had written a history of Lithuania in Lithuanian as early as 1822, though it went unpublished at the time. By the middle of the century the movement's ideology was defined in linguistic terms, with a nation understood as the sum of the speakers of a vernacular tongue.

The written standard was assembled under the ban and completed shortly after it. A largely standardised written language was in place by 1900, built on historical usage and Aukčtaitijan speech. The letters č, š and v were taken from the redesigned Czech orthography, specifically to avoid the Polish spellings for the same sounds, which was a decision about which orthographic family the language would sit in. Jonas Jablonskis published the grammar that was widely accepted in 1901.

The printed record starts earlier and starts religious. The first Lithuanian book was the Katekizmas of Martynas Mažvydas in 1547, and most Lithuanian writing was religious in character until the eighteenth century. Song books began to be published in the sixteenth century, which is the earliest sign of the material a national repertoire would later be built from.

How a carved cross became the country's signature

Cross-crafting is the making of crosses and altars together with their consecration and the rituals attached to them. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, having proclaimed it in 2001, with Latvia supporting the file. The crosses are cut from oak, stand between one and five metres high, and usually carry a small roof, floral or geometric decoration and sometimes a small statue. Once a priest has consecrated one it takes on a sacred significance that cannot be transferred away. They are set at roadsides, at village entrances, beside monuments and in cemeteries, and they collect offerings: food, rosaries, money, coloured scarves at a wedding, aprons asking for fertility. The craft is taught in no school and passes on through non-formal instruction.

Its political weight came from prohibition. The cross became a marker of national and religious identity when the Lithuanian lands were incorporated into the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, and that role was reinforced under Soviet rule, when the crosses were officially banned. The Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai is where the arithmetic of the practice shows: the site was bulldozed in 1961, and thousands of Latin crosses were placed on it again.

Catholicism carried a large part of the anti-communist resistance, and several Catholic priests led movements inside it. The cost is on the record. Between 1944 and 1953 nearly 120,000 people, 5% of the population, were deported, and most Catholic priests were among them. The institution being defended was itself young by European standards: Lithuania proper was baptised in 1387 after Jogaila's own conversion and Samogitia from 1413, and the endowment of land and peasants that followed, together with exemption from state obligations, made the Church the most powerful institution in the country almost immediately.

Pilgrimage is still concentrated in Samogitia. The named sites are the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius, the Hill of Crosses, Žemaičiuų Kalvarija and Šiluva.

Where the pagan calendar still shows in law

Article 162 of the Labour Code lists the official holidays, and one entry carries two names. The 24th of June is St John's Day, and it is also the Day of Dew, the pre-Christian name, printed beside the Christian one in the statute of a country that has been Catholic since the fourteenth century.

The rest of that list is a compressed political history. Independence is marked twice, on 16 February for the act of 1918 and on 11 March for the restoration of 1990. Statehood Day falls on 6 July. Mother's Day is the first Sunday in May and Father's Day the first Sunday in June. Easter, Assumption, All Saints, All Souls and two days of Christmas complete it.

Elements of the pre-Christian religion survived in the countryside, and the archaeology gives the transition a date. The bodies of rulers were cremated up to the Christianisation, and descriptions of the cremation ceremonies of the grand dukes Algirdas and Kėstutis have come down; cremation burials fall away sharply once Western Christianity is established at the end of the fourteenth century. Užgavėnės before Lent and the Kaziuko mugė, the fair held for St Casimir, sit on the national festival list beside the song and dance celebration, the jazz festivals of Vilnius and Kaunas, the film festivals of both cities and the Klaipėda sea festival.

What singing together was permitted to mean

The first all-Lithuanian song festival was held at Kaunas in 1924, after Estonia had begun in 1869 and Latvia in 1873, and the Lithuanian celebration now runs every fourth year where the other two run every fifth. The events last several days and assemble as many as 40,000 singers and dancers, mostly from amateur choirs and dance groups directed by professional conductors, bandleaders and dance instructors, many of whom rehearse through the year in community centres. UNESCO inscribed the Baltic celebrations in 2008, having proclaimed them in 2003.

What makes the Lithuanian case specific is the sequence. Choirs were institutionalised in Estonia in the eighteenth century and the practice spread; once the Baltic states left the Russian Empire after the First World War the celebrations became a means of asserting cultural identity, and purpose-built venues were constructed for them. After the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War the celebrations adapted to the prevailing communist ideology, and that adaptation is the point: a mass gathering singing in Lithuanian stayed lawful when the printed and carved forms of the same identity did not. Since 1991 the three states have taken protective measures, and the threat named in the UNESCO file is rural exodus breaking up the local amateur groups.

How the sutartinės are actually sung

The older layer underneath the mass choir is sutartinės, inscribed in 2010. The name comes from sutarti, to be in concordance. They are polyphonic songs performed by women in the north-east, with melodies of two to five pitches and two distinct parts, a main text carrying meaning and a refrain that may run on nonce words. There are almost forty documented styles and ways of performing them: two singers in parallel seconds, three in strict canon staggering both phrases of the melody, or two pairs alternating, with the lead singer of each pair taking the text and the partner the refrain. The choreography is deliberately plain, a walk in a circle or a star with linked arms and stamped feet. Men sing none of it and play instrumental versions instead, on pan-pipes, horns, long wooden trumpets, fipple flutes and plucked zithers.

Which instruments the old repertoire needs

The kanklės, a plucked zither whose string count and playing technique change from one part of the country to another, accompanies sutartinės, the round dances called rateliai, and waltzes, quadrilles and polkas. Skudučiai are panpipes played by a group, one pipe to a player. Beside them sit the ragai and dandytės, both wooden trumpets, the lumzdelis whistle, the birbynė with a sound close to a clarinet, a bass fiddle called the basetle, the tabalas struck like a gong, the sekminių ragelis bagpipe, and the pu̇slinė, a musical bow made from a pig's bladder filled with dried peas. The concertina, the accordion and the bandoneon arrived late in the nineteenth century and stayed.

What Lithuanians eat and when they eat it

The cooking follows a cool, moist northern climate: barley, potatoes, rye, beets, greens, berries and mushrooms are grown locally, and dairy is a speciality of the country. The result has a great deal in common with other Eastern European and Ashkenazi cooking, and what separates it is a set of layers left by particular arrivals. German traditions brought pork and potato dishes, among them kugelis, a potato pudding, vėdarai, potato sausages, and the baroque tree cake šakotis. Crimean Karaite cooking supplied kibinai and čeburekai. Torte Napoleon entered during Napoleon's passage through Lithuania in the nineteenth century.

The dishes a traditional menu is built on are cepelinai, also called didžkukuliai, large stuffed potato dumplings named for their zeppelin shape; šaltibarščiai, a cold beetroot soup; juoda duona, dark rye bread; balandėliai, stuffed cabbage rolls; bulviniai blynai, potato pancakes; and lašiniai, smoked fatback. Gira, a fermented drink made from rye bread, is the regional kvass.

The calendar sets the table as firmly as the season does. The Christmas Eve feast is twelve dishes, all of them meatless, served on a table laid over straw, with meat kept back for Christmas Day. Regional production is specific enough to name: Varėna in the southern forests holds the Grybuų šventė, a mushroom festival with picking contests, Stakliškės makes midus, a mead, and Biržai and Utena are known for their breweries.

Who the census counts as Lithuanian

The 2021 census recorded 2,378,000 people who identified as Lithuanians, 84.6% of the population, alongside 183,400 Poles at 6.5%, 141,100 Russians at 5%, 28,200 Belarusians at 1% and 14,200 Ukrainians at 0.5%. Language and religion are not held in the state registers, so those answers came from a survey run beside the register-based count: 56,000 people filled in the questionnaire themselves in 2021 and interviewers surveyed 115,000 more.

The distribution is what the national figure hides. In 2021 Lithuanians were 98.8% of Šilalė district and 12.6% of Šalčininkai district, 20.1% of Visaginas and 38.5% of Vilnius district; twenty years earlier those last three stood at 10.4, 15 and 22.4%, so the share has been rising in each. Poles were 76.3% of Šalčininkai and 46.8% of Vilnius district. Vilnius city was 70.4% Lithuanian in 2021 and Panevežys 97.4%.

On religion, 74.2% of the population placed itself in the Roman Catholic community in 2021, about 2,085,000 people, and 3.8%, some 105,600 people, in the Orthodox. A further 171,800 residents, 6.1%, claimed no faith, and 384,100, 13.7%, gave no answer. The municipal spread in the same year runs from 24.7% Roman Catholic in Visaginas, where 49.1% are Orthodox, up to 91.5% in districts such as Šilalė and Lazdijai.

Mother tongue tracks ethnicity closely and not completely. In 2021, 99.4% of Lithuanians, 91.8% of Russians and 78.7% of Poles named the language of their own ethnicity. The number of people reporting two mother tongues rose from 17,200 in 2011 to 49,100 in 2021, most often Lithuanian with Polish, Polish with Russian, or Lithuanian with Russian. A few respondents in 2021 reached for an older category still: 579 recorded themselves as Samogitians, 56 as Semigallians and 19 as Curonians.

Those older categories are the five ethnographic regions, which are the frame Lithuanian folk culture is still described in and are older than any administrative boundary drawn over them.

The census also records an absence. Lithuania held close to 250,000 Jews in 1941 after an influx from German-controlled Poland, and by 1944 the majority had been murdered, deported or sent to concentration camps, with the proportion of Lithuanian Jews killed usually given as 90% or more. Vilnius University founded a Yiddish Institute in 2001 to hold the language and the East European Jewish culture attached to it in study.

Where the art and the museums sit

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, who lived from 1875 to 1911, worked as composer and painter at once, and his symphonic poems Jūra, the sea, and Miške, in the forest, were the first full-length orchestral works by a Lithuanian musician. Asteroid 2420, discovered in 1975, carries his name. He was involved with the Vilnius Drawing School, founded in 1866, which shaped fine-art teaching in the country; a cultural route through the places he lived, from Varėna and Druskininkai to Plungė, Rietavas and Palanga, opened in 2019.

Folk art itself is ceramics, leatherwork, wood carving and textiles, recognised by its colouring and by geometric or floral patterning.

The museums are organised around specific materials. The Lithuanian Art Museum was founded in 1933, and its Palanga branch is an amber museum displaying 28,000 pieces, of which some 15,000 hold inclusions of insects, spiders or plants and 4,500 have been worked into objects and jewellery. The open-air museum at Rumšiškės, between Kaunas and Vilnius, lays out farmsteads standing for all five ethnographic regions. Grūtas Park holds Soviet-era statuary, Lenin and Stalin included. There is a museum of ancient beekeeping, and a museum of ethnocosmology at Molėtai beside the observatory.

The dated institutions run back a long way. Vilnius University was founded in 1579, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library in 1919 with documents reaching to the fifteenth century, the National Opera and Ballet in 1920, and the Kaunas Conservatory in 1933 by the composer Juozas Gruodis. The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre traces itself to a music school opened in Kaunas in 1919 and took its present name in 2004. The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences dates from 1941.

Theatre carries a directing tradition with international reach. Eimuntas Nekrošius worked through his company Meno Fortas and staged Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet; Oskaras Koršunovas staged Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream; Rimas Tuminas founded the Vilnius Little Theatre. In literature, Vincas Krėvė-Mickievičius built novels and plays out of folk songs and legends after independence in 1918. Soviet occupation stifled the work of many writers and playwrights, and after the second occupation in 1944 a large number of artists emigrated and founded galleries and schools in Europe and North America.

What the country plays and watches

Lithuania first appeared at the Olympic Games at the 1924 Winter Games in Chamonix. After the Second World War its athletes competed for the Soviet team, and the country returned under its own flag at Barcelona in 1992. Discus has produced the golds: Romas Ubartas in 1992 and Virgilijus Alekna in 2000 and 2004, with Alekna named a UNESCO Champion for Sport in 2007. Eighty Olympic and non-Olympic sports federations exist, and the Department of Physical Education and Sports was founded on 1 October 1932.

Basketball is the game with the export record. Arvydas Sabonis, Šarūnas Marčiulionis, Žydrūnas Ilgauskas and Linas Kleiza all played in the National Basketball Association, and the national basketball, football and rugby union teams all compete internationally. Winter pastimes are cross-country skiing, ice skating, ice hockey and ice fishing on the Curonian Lagoon; cycling and canoeing take over in summer.

The first television channel in Lithuanian was introduced in 1957. There are now eight main channels, twenty-four regional ones and two broadcasting in other languages with Lithuanian translation, with Lithuanian National Radio and Television as the state broadcaster. Media censorship was abolished in 1989, and by the early twenty-first century every newspaper was privately owned, among them Lietuvos Rytas, Kurier Wileński in Polish and Lietuvos Aidas; ELTA, the wire service, stayed in state hands. Broadcasting runs in Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian, with some radio in Yiddish.

In the 1980s the rock bands Foje, Antis and Bix marked out a domestic scene that had not existed in that form before. Velnio Nuotaka, drawn from folk tales, is the film classic that keeps circulating, and Kino Pavasaris in Vilnius and the Kaunas International Film Festival run every year.