The lands of present-day Lithuania have been inhabited since the end of the last Ice Age, some eleven thousand years ago, by hunters who followed the retreating ice. Over time the Baltic peoples settled there: a branch of the Indo-Europeans in their own right, distantly related to the Slavs and the Germanic peoples but distinct from both, who by the second millennium BC occupied a vast strip of the southern Baltic coast. Today's Lithuanians and Latvians descend from those tribes (Aukštaitians, Samogitians, Curonians, Sudovians, Selonians). Others, such as the Old Prussians, eventually disappeared altogether, assimilated or wiped out.
The great treasure of these shores was amber, the fossil resin the sea washes up on Baltic beaches. In antiquity it was traded across Europe along the famous “Amber Road”, which linked the north with the Roman Mediterranean. The Romans knew and prized this “Baltic gold”, and in the 1st century the historian Tacitus described the Aestii of these coasts gathering it. For millennia, amber was the product that put the Balts in touch with the civilised world to the south, without that contact changing their way of life very much.
The Lithuanians held on to their ancestral religion far longer than any other European people. They worshipped a pantheon of nature gods (Perkūnas, the god of thunder; Žemyna, the goddess of the earth) in sacred groves where an eternal fire burned, and kept those cults alive until the end of the 14th century. That loyalty to paganism, unheard of in Christian Europe, made them the target for two hundred years of the “Northern Crusades” that the German military orders launched against them, and it is one of the keys to understanding their entire medieval history.
In the early 13th century, pressure from the German military orders pushed the scattered Lithuanian tribes to unite in order to survive. The Teutonic Knights to the south and the Brothers of the Sword (later the Livonian Order) to the north were subjugating and baptising the neighbouring Baltic peoples by fire and sword. The man who achieved that unification was Mindaugas, a duke who around 1236 appears in the chronicles as leader of all the Lithuanians, and who imposed his authority over the other chieftains through force and alliances. The Lithuanian state, properly speaking, was born with him.
Mindaugas understood that, to stop the crusaders, he had to take away their excuse of fighting a pagan people. Around 1250 or 1251 he was baptised a Catholic, and in return he gained the protection of the papacy: in 1251, Innocent IV proclaimed the creation of a Kingdom of Lithuania. In the summer of 1253, Mindaugas and his wife Morta were crowned King and Queen of Lithuania, the only crowned monarch in the country's entire history. Modern historical research has dated the coronation to 6 July 1253, which today is Lithuania's national holiday, Statehood Day.
The kingdom, however, was short-lived. Mindaugas was murdered in 1263 in a plot by nobles, the country renounced Christianity and went back to paganism, and with that the title of kingdom was lost. But the state survived and took shape as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: since its rulers were no longer baptised, they could not be crowned kings and from then on bore the title of grand duke. Mindaugas's work endured: he had turned a handful of warring tribes into a state able to stand up to the crusading orders and to expand over the following two centuries.
Between the late 13th and the 15th centuries, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania carried out one of the most astonishing expansions of the European Middle Ages. While holding off the relentless crusades of the Teutonic Knights on its western front, the duchy spread east and south over the Slavic lands of the former Kievan Rus', weakened by the Mongol invasion. Grand Duke Gediminas (who ruled from 1316 to 1341), founder of the dynasty that would bear his name and of the city of Vilnius, and his sons Algirdas and Kęstutis pushed the borders out spectacularly, taking in what is now Belarus and a large part of Ukraine.
The high point came with Vytautas the Great (who reigned from 1392 to 1430), the most revered figure in Lithuanian history. Under his rule the Grand Duchy reached its greatest extent and became the largest state in Europe: it stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the shores of the Black Sea in the south, covering some eight hundred thousand square kilometres. It was an unusual power: a minority of Lithuanian nobles and warriors, still partly pagan, ruled over a vast majority of Slavic, Orthodox subjects, whose language and written culture (Ruthenian chancery language) the state itself adopted for its administration.
The great clash with the German orders was settled on 15 July 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald (Žalgiris, or Tannenberg), one of the largest battles of medieval Europe. The allied armies of Lithuania and Poland, led by Vytautas and his cousin King Jogaila, crushed the Teutonic Knights and broke the order's power in the Baltic for good. Grunwald is still a national symbol for Lithuanians and Poles alike: the moment when two peoples harassed for centuries by the German crusaders dealt them a defeat from which they never recovered.
Lithuania was the last pagan corner of Europe, and its conversion to Christianity came through politics, not faith. In 1385, Grand Duke Jogaila sealed the Union of Krewo with Poland. He would marry Jadwiga, the young Queen of Poland, and be crowned King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło. In return, he pledged to baptise Lithuania and bring it into Latin Christendom. So began the Jagiellonian dynasty, which would reign over both countries for almost two centuries, and so Lithuania's fate became bound to Poland's.
The official Christianisation took place in 1387, when Jogaila returned to Vilnius. He had the sacred fire put out, the idols torn down and the holy groves cut, and he organised the mass baptism of the population and founded the bishopric of Vilnius. The region of Samogitia (Žemaitija) in the west, the last stronghold of pagan resistance and the most isolated part of the country, was not baptised until 1413-1417, making it the last land in Europe to embrace Christianity. More than a thousand years behind the rest of the continent, European paganism finally died out in the Lithuanian forests.
At first the union with Poland was a personal union, two states sharing the same ruler, which left Lithuania its own administration, army, laws and nobility. Throughout the 15th century the Grand Duchy remained a huge entity with a character of its own, and Vytautas the Great even aimed for an independent royal crown, which death prevented him from wearing in 1430. But the weight of Poland, more populous, more urban and culturally Latin, kept growing, and over time the Lithuanian nobility became Polonised in language and customs, a process that would shape the centuries that followed.
In 1569 the personal union became a full political union. Pressed by the growing threat of Ivan the Terrible's Russia and in need of Polish support, the Lithuanian nobility accepted the Union of Lublin. It merged Poland and Lithuania into a single state: the Rzeczpospolita, the “Republic of the Two Nations” or Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a shared elected king, a shared parliament (the Sejm) and a single foreign policy. The Grand Duchy still kept its own army, treasury, laws (the famous Statutes of Lithuania) and borders. In the deal, however, Lithuania handed its vast Ukrainian lands in the south over to the Polish Crown.
Within the Commonwealth, Lithuania was the junior partner but kept its identity. Its capital, Vilnius, enjoyed a golden age: in 1579 Vilnius University was founded, the oldest in all of north-eastern Europe. It was run by the Jesuits, who made the city a major centre of the Counter-Reformation and of baroque culture. Vilnius became a cosmopolitan, multi-faith city where Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants and a huge, thriving Jewish community lived side by side, along with Karaites and Muslim Tatars descended from settlers brought in by Vytautas.
Like the whole Polish-Lithuanian “nobles' democracy”, the Commonwealth was an unusual state, and in the long run one doomed by its own institutions. Power lay with the numerous nobility, who elected the king and could paralyse parliament with the liberum veto, the right of a single deputy to cancel every decision. The devastating wars of the 17th century, above all the Russian and Swedish invasions known as the “Deluge”, laid waste to Lithuania, emptied the country and brought Vilnius to its knees. By the 18th century, the whole Republic was a paralysed giant at the mercy of its powerful neighbours.
In the last third of the 18th century, the three neighbouring absolute monarchies (Russia, Prussia and Austria) carved up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in three successive partitions (1772, 1793 and 1795). In the Third Partition of 1795, the one that wiped the state off the map of Europe for good, virtually all Lithuanian territory, Vilnius included, was annexed by the Russian Empire. Lithuania, once one of the largest states on the continent, ceased to exist as a political entity and was reduced to a few western provinces of the tsars' empire for more than a century.
Like the Poles, the Lithuanians did not give up. They took part in the great armed uprisings against Russian rule: the insurrection of 1830-1831 and above all that of 1863-1864, which was especially fierce in Lithuania. Both were harshly crushed, followed by executions, mass deportations to Siberia and land confiscations. The Russian governor Mikhail Muravyov, nicknamed “the Hangman” for the repression he led after 1863, set out to Russify the region from the roots up and erase its Catholic character and its ties to Poland.
The most aggressive tool of that Russification was the ban on the language. Between 1864 and 1904, the Russian authorities banned printing books in Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet, forcing the use of Cyrillic in an attempt to assimilate the people culturally. The response was one of the most remarkable chapters in the nation's history: the knygnešiai or “book smugglers”, who for forty years secretly brought millions of Lithuanian books and newspapers in from East Prussia, keeping the language and identity alive in the face of the empire. That network of cultural smuggling kept the nation alive in its darkest hour.
In the late 19th century, while the language was banned and the country held down, a Lithuanian national revival movement flourished. A new generation of intellectuals from peasant backgrounds (the country had lost much of its old nobility, which had become Polonised or Russified) began to champion Lithuanian as a language of culture and to build a modern national consciousness. Underground newspapers such as Aušra (“The Dawn”), founded in 1883, and Varpas (“The Bell”), edited by the doctor and patriot Vincas Kudirka, who wrote the words of the national anthem, spread that idea of nationhood despite the censors. By the time Russia finally lifted the press ban in 1904, the movement was unstoppable.
The First World War turned the whole map of Eastern Europe upside down. Lithuania was occupied by Germany in 1915, and the simultaneous collapse of the Russian and German empires in 1917-1918 opened a historic window. On 16 February 1918, the Council of Lithuania, meeting in Vilnius and chaired by Jonas Basanavičius, regarded as the “patriarch of the nation”, proclaimed the Act of Independence, restoring a sovereign, independent Lithuanian state. That date is today the country's main national holiday.
Independence had to be defended on the battlefield against three enemies at once: the Bolshevik Red Army, German and volunteer troops who refused to leave, and a reborn Poland. The conflict with Poland was especially bitter: in October 1920, Polish troops under General Żeligowski seized Vilnius, Lithuania's historic capital, and the region stayed annexed to Poland until 1939. Cut off from its capital, the young republic set up its government in Kaunas, which for almost twenty years was the “temporary capital” of a country that never gave up on getting Vilnius back.
Interwar Lithuania, a small farming country that had worked hard to build a modern state and a brilliant temporary capital in Kaunas, found itself trapped between two totalitarian neighbours. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with its secret protocol dividing up Eastern Europe, sealed its fate: Lithuania was assigned to the Soviet sphere. In June 1940 the USSR occupied the country, installed a puppet government, staged rigged elections and annexed it as the “Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic”.
The first year of Soviet rule was one of terror. The Soviet political police nationalised the economy, hunted down the elites and unleashed a wave of repression that peaked in June 1941. In just a few days, tens of thousands of people (whole families, children and elderly included) were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan in cattle wagons, accused of being “enemies of the people”. Many died on the way or in exile. Those mass deportations left a deep wound in Lithuanian memory.
In June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania within days. Much of the population at first welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Soviet terror, and a short-lived anti-Soviet uprising broke out. But the Nazi occupation brought its own horror, above all for the Jewish community, which was almost entirely wiped out. When the Red Army retook Lithuania in 1944, it came not as a liberator but as an occupier returning, and a second Soviet occupation began that would last almost half a century.
On the eve of the war, around 160,000 to 210,000 Jews lived in Lithuania, an ancient community with enormous cultural standing. Vilnius was known throughout the Jewish world as the “Jerusalem of the North” (or “Jerusalem of Lithuania”) for its wealth of synagogues, Talmudic academies, printing houses and scholars. In the 18th century it had been the city of the Vilna Gaon, Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, the leading intellectual authority of non-Hasidic Judaism in his day. This Lithuanian Jewish civilisation, the Litvaks, had centuries of history and immense cultural weight.
Under the Nazi occupation, that community was almost completely annihilated. An estimated 90 to 95 % of Lithuanian Jews were murdered, one of the highest proportions in all of occupied Europe. The killing began immediately after the German invasion of June 1941 and was carried out mainly through mass shootings in pits near the towns, not in distant camps. The German death squads (Einsatzgruppen) relied on the active collaboration of Lithuanian auxiliary units, a fact that historians and Lithuanian society itself have had to face honestly. The main killing site was the Paneriai (Ponary) forest on the outskirts of Vilnius, where some 70,000 Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1944, along with thousands of Poles and Soviet prisoners.
The survivors were confined in ghettos, the largest in Vilnius and Kaunas, where they faced hunger, slave labour and extermination “actions” until the ghettos were finally liquidated in 1943-1944. Amid the horror there were acts of humanity: in Kaunas, the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara defied his government and in 1940 issued thousands of transit visas that saved the lives of several thousand Jews, and many Lithuanians who hid their neighbours have been recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations”. But the scale of the catastrophe is beyond dispute: the near-total disappearance of a Jewish world that had flourished in these lands for more than half a millennium.
With the return of the Red Army in 1944, Lithuania came under the Soviet Union once again, this time for almost fifty years. Sovietisation was brutal: renewed forced collectivisation of agriculture, nationalisation, religious persecution and a second wave of mass deportations to Siberia between 1945 and 1953, which tore hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians from their land. It is estimated that, adding up deportations, executions and forced emigration, Lithuania lost a huge share of its population in those years.
Unlike other occupied countries, Lithuania put up a long, desperate armed resistance. For almost a decade, from 1944 to the early 1950s, tens of thousands of partisans, the “Forest Brothers” (miško broliai), fought Soviet forces from the woods, in the end vain hope that the West would come to their aid. It was one of the longest and bloodiest anti-communist guerrilla wars in post-war Europe. Its defeat around 1953, with nearly all its fighters killed or deported, ended open resistance, but its memory would feed national feeling for decades.
Beneath the surface of the Soviet regime, Lithuanian identity survived. The Catholic Church, persecuted but deeply rooted, became a refuge for the nation, and an underground press, such as the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, secretly published for almost twenty years, exposed the repression to the world. Symbols like the Hill of Crosses, bulldozed again and again by the Soviets and rebuilt every night by ordinary people, embodied the quiet stubbornness of a people who refused to accept being erased.
When Mikhail Gorbachev opened the era of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR in the mid-1980s, Lithuania was among the first to seize the opening. In June 1988 Sąjūdis (“the Movement”) was born: a reformist, national front led by the musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis that within a few months became an unstoppable social force. The movement brought crowds onto the streets, demanded the truth about the deportations and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and turned a cultural outcry into an open demand for independence.
One of the high points of that Baltic awakening was the Baltic Way of 23 August 1989. Some two million people from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined hands to form an unbroken human chain almost 600 kilometres long, from Vilnius to Tallinn. They were marking fifty years since the pact that had handed the three countries to Stalin, and demanding their freedom. It was one of the most striking peaceful protests in history. Soon afterwards, on 11 March 1990, the new Lithuanian parliament, dominated by Sąjūdis, proclaimed the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania. It was the first of the fifteen Soviet republics to declare independence, and that move began to take the Soviet Union apart.
Moscow responded first with an economic blockade and then, in January 1991, with force. On 13 January Soviet troops stormed the Vilnius TV Tower, which crowds of unarmed civilians were defending. Fourteen people were killed and hundreds wounded, but the peaceful resistance held firm and the international community rallied behind Lithuania. After the failed August 1991 coup in Moscow, Lithuanian independence was recognised around the world. Since then Lithuania has rebuilt a democracy and a market economy. It joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2015, completing its return to the European family that history had torn it away from for two centuries.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Kaunas grew up where Lithuania's two great rivers, the Nemunas and the Neris, flow together, and that strategic position shaped its whole history. In the 14th century Kaunas Castle rose here, the oldest stone fortress in the country, built to defend the heart of Lithuania against the Teutonic Knights, who raided upstream along the Nemunas from the west. In 1362 the order took and destroyed the castle after a long siege, one of the harshest episodes of the wars against the crusaders. The Lithuanians rebuilt it, and Kaunas remained a key military stronghold.
Once the Teutonic threat had passed with the victory at Grunwald in 1410, Kaunas thrived as a trading town thanks to its river location. It joined the Baltic trade networks, kept up ties with the Hanseatic League (Hanseatic merchants even had a trading office here) and grew into a river port that shipped timber, grain and other goods down to the sea. Its old town still has the Town Hall Square from that era, with the slender white building nicknamed “the White Swan”, as well as remarkable Gothic and Renaissance churches.
Like the rest of the country, Kaunas fell under Russian rule after the partitions of the 18th century. In the 19th century the Tsars turned it into a great fortress city, ringing it with forts to protect the empire's western frontier. Its role as a stronghold and railway junction unknowingly set the stage for the unexpected part the city would play in the 20th century, when the loss of Vilnius made it the capital of all Lithuania.
When Polish troops occupied Vilnius in October 1920, the young Republic of Lithuania was left without its historic capital. The government moved to Kaunas, which from 1920 to 1939 served as the country's “provisional capital” while it waited to recover Vilnius, which only happened when the Second World War broke out. That status, a mix of pride and grievance, defined the city for two crucial decades.
Suddenly the seat of the state without ever having been a major capital, Kaunas went through a feverish transformation. In barely twenty years it went from a provincial Russian town to a modern European capital. Ministries, banks, universities, museums, cafés and entire residential districts went up, and the city buzzed with cultural, political and economic life. This was Kaunas's golden age, the moment Lithuania showed the world it could build a modern state from almost nothing.
The most visible legacy of those years is its architecture. The buildings put up in Kaunas between the wars, an original blend of Art Deco, functionalism and modernism adapted to local means and tastes, form one of the most remarkable ensembles of interwar architecture in Europe. In recognition of its outstanding value, “modernist Kaunas” was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. The listing celebrates the optimism and ambition of the provisional capital of a small country that was inventing itself.
As the de facto capital in the 1930s, Kaunas was home to the foreign diplomatic missions, and that detail placed it at the centre of one of the brightest stories of the Holocaust. In the summer of 1940, with Eastern Europe trapped between Stalin and Hitler and thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing east, Japan's consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara, decided to disobey his government's orders. For weeks, right up to the last minute before the consulate closed, he wrote out thousands of transit visas by hand. Those documents allowed several thousand Jews, many of them Polish refugees, to escape through the Soviet Union and Japan, and saved their lives. Sugihara was later recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations”.
The other side of the story was horrific. Kaunas had a large, long-established Jewish community, and under the German occupation that began in June 1941 it saw some of the first massacres of the Holocaust in Lithuania, carried out with the help of local collaborators. The surviving Jews were confined in the Kaunas Ghetto, in the Vilijampolė (Slobodka) district. They were forced into slave labour and subjected to repeated extermination “actions” at the Ninth Fort, one of the city's old Tsarist forts, which became a site of mass shootings. The ghetto was liquidated in 1944.
Today the Ninth Fort is a museum and memorial that honours both the victims of the Holocaust and the Lithuanians deported by the Soviet regime, since the Soviet secret police had also imprisoned and executed prisoners on the same site. Within a few kilometres, Kaunas holds both great tragedies of Lithuania's 20th century, the Nazi extermination of the Jews and the Soviet terror, alongside the lone act of a diplomat who went against the tide of his time and chose to save lives.
The centre and north-east of the country make up the historical and ethnographic region of Aukštaitija, or “Upper Lithuania”, a name that refers to the highlands of the upper river basins. It was the original core of the Lithuanian state: the first grand dukes came from the Aukštaitian tribes, and their dialect became the basis of modern standard Lithuanian. In a sense, Aukštaitija is Lithuania at its deepest and most foundational, a land of ancient burial mounds, traditional songs (the sutartinės, polyphonic chants listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage) and old rural customs.
The natural heart of the region is Aukštaitija National Park, created in 1974 and the oldest in Lithuania. It is a maze of more than a hundred lakes linked by rivers and surrounded by dense forests of age-old pines and spruces. Among its waters and villages a traditional way of life lives on: villages of wooden houses, old mills, beekeeping museums (beekeeping is an ancient craft in these forests) and rural architecture that has vanished from almost everywhere else in Europe. It is one of the country's great natural refuges.
Aukštaitija also holds the memory of Lithuania at its most spiritual and deeply rooted. Its hills and forests were the setting for pre-Christian pagan worship and, much later, for the anti-communist partisan resistance after the war, whose fighters found shelter in these thick woods. Travelling through the region means stepping into the landscape that forged Lithuanian identity: a country of water, forest and village that has changed less than any other over the centuries.
In the north-east of Aukštaitija, on the banks of the Šventoji River, the small town of Anykščiai holds an outsized place in Lithuanian culture thanks to literature. This was the home of the poet and bishop Antanas Baranauskas, author of Anykščių šilelis (“The Grove of Anykščiai”), a long poem written around 1858-1859 that celebrates the beauty of a pine forest cut down by the occupiers and became a founding work of modern Lithuanian poetry. Written at a time when the language was banned, the poem was an act of love for nature and for the country's language, and it is still learnt in schools today.
Anykščiai brought together several key figures of the 19th-century national revival. Besides Baranauskas, the writer Jonas Biliūnas lived and worked here, and the town has house-museums and monuments dedicated to these authors, who kept the Lithuanian word alive while it was outlawed. The town is proud of this literary heritage, which has made it a kind of sentimental capital of the country's letters.
The forest that inspired Baranauskas is still Anykščiai's great attraction. Today a treetop walkway (the Medžių lajų takas) lets you stroll at the height of the pines and take in the landscape from a panoramic tower. Nearby are Lithuania's largest erratic boulder, carried here by glaciers, and narrow-gauge tourist trains that recall the past. Anykščiai blends nature and cultural memory in one of the best-loved corners of central Lithuania.
Klaipėda, Lithuania's only major port and its window on the sea, had a very different history from the rest of the country for seven centuries, tied to the German world. It was founded in 1252 by the Teutonic Knights (or, more precisely, by the Livonian Order), who built a fortress called Memelburg here on top of an old Baltic settlement. As Memel, the city became part of the Order's state and later of East Prussia, and for centuries it was the northernmost port of the German-speaking world, with a mostly German population.
As a Hanseatic and Prussian city, Memel prospered on the timber and grain trade coming down the Nemunas and on shipbuilding. It had its moments in the spotlight: in the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic Wars, when Napoleon occupied Berlin, the Prussian royal court took refuge in Memel, which for a few months was the de facto capital of the kingdom. The city always kept a Nordic-German feel, with its half-timbered houses (Fachwerk) and brick architecture, very different from the Baroque of Vilnius or the functionalism of Kaunas.
That long belonging to the German world is part of a wider historical region, Lithuania Minor (Mažoji Lietuva), the strip of East Prussia where, alongside the Germans, a population of Prussian Lithuanians, Protestant and Lithuanian-speaking, had lived since time immemorial. It was in this Lithuanian Prussia that the first books in Lithuanian were printed in the 16th century, and from here that the knygnešiai smuggled books during the Tsarist ban. Today Klaipėda is the gateway to this mixed borderland world at the country's far western edge.
After the First World War and Germany's defeat, the Treaty of Versailles separated the city of Memel and its surroundings from Germany and placed them under international administration while their fate was decided. Lithuania, newly born as a state and desperate for access to the sea, did not wait: in January 1923 it organised an uprising, the so-called Klaipėda Revolt, which, with the covert backing of the Lithuanian government, took control of the region and annexed it to the country. The powers accepted the fait accompli, Memel was renamed Klaipėda, and Lithuania got its longed-for port on the Baltic.
The Klaipėda Region joined Lithuania as an autonomous territory, with a special status that recognised the weight of its German population. During the 1920s and 1930s the city prospered as the country's main port, but relations grew tense as Nazism spread among the local German population and the Third Reich openly demanded Memel's “return” to Germany.
The end came in March 1939. A few days after occupying Czechoslovakia, Hitler issued Lithuania an ultimatum demanding the immediate handover of Klaipėda. Alone and without allies, the small republic had no choice but to give in: on 23 March 1939 the region was annexed by Nazi Germany, and Hitler arrived in person aboard a battleship to give a triumphant speech in the city. It was the Reich's last peaceful annexation before the war, and for Lithuania it meant the loss of its only port and a humiliation that foreshadowed the catastrophe of 1940. Klaipėda would not be Lithuanian again until the end of the war.
Across from Klaipėda, separating the Baltic Sea from a large lagoon, lies one of Europe's natural wonders: the Curonian Spit (Kuršių nerija), a narrow and very long tongue of sand of almost a hundred kilometres, shared between Lithuania and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, covered in pine forest and topped by huge shifting dunes that are among the highest on the continent. This fragile, spectacular landscape, shaped over centuries by wind and sea and saved from turning into desert by a massive reforestation effort, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000.
In the heart of the spit, the fishing village of Nida (Nidden in German) is the jewel of the region. Its painted wooden houses, carved weathervanes and traditional boats create a scene from another time at the foot of the “great dune”. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the spit belonged to East Prussia, Nida attracted a colony of German artists who found an almost unreal landscape in its sands and light.
Its most famous visitor was the writer Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Captivated by the place during a holiday, he had a summer house built on a hill above the lagoon, where he spent the summers of 1930 to 1932 and wrote part of his great novel Joseph and His Brothers. The Thomas Mann house in Nida is now a museum and cultural centre, and its story sums up the cosmopolitan character of this coast: a German Nobel laureate writing on a Baltic spit, among Lithuanian fishermen, in a corner that 20th-century history would divide between countries and flags.
North of Klaipėda, Palanga is the liveliest and most popular resort on the Lithuanian coast, a place of long white-sand beaches, dunes and pine woods where the whole country heads for its summer holidays. Unlike Klaipėda, Palanga was always Lithuanian and Samogitian, and its development as a seaside resort began in the 19th century, when the local aristocracy discovered the benefits of its beaches and sea air. Its long wooden pier stretching into the Baltic and its bustling pedestrian street, Basanavičiaus, are the very image of a Lithuanian summer.
Palanga's great treasure is amber, the “gold of the Baltic” that makes this whole coast famous. The town is home to the Palanga Amber Museum, one of the most important in the world devoted to this fossil resin, housed in an elegant neoclassical palace surrounded by a magnificent botanical garden. With its collection of thousands of pieces, including amber that has trapped insects and plants millions of years old, the museum tells the geological and human story of a material that has been sought, traded and worked on these beaches since prehistoric times.
The palace that houses the museum belonged to the noble Tiškevičius (Tyszkiewicz) family, and its garden was designed by a famous French landscape architect. Palanga thus combines beach life with the history of the old Baltic aristocracy and the age-old fascination with amber, the “gold” that already in Antiquity linked the peoples of this coast with Rome via the Amber Road. For many, picking up a piece of fossil resin washed ashore is still the most charming ritual of a day on the Lithuanian coast.
Inland from the coast lies Samogitia (Žemaitija), “Lower Lithuania”, a historical and ethnographic region with a strong personality, its own dialect (so different that it is sometimes considered almost a separate language) and a marked sense of identity. The Samogitians were the most battle-hardened Balts in resisting the Teutonic Knights, and their land, the westernmost and most exposed, was the last corner of Europe to give up paganism: it was not Christianised until 1413-1417, when the rest of the continent had been Christian for centuries. Being Europe's last pagans is a source of local pride.
The natural heart of the region is Žemaitija National Park, an area of forests, hills and lakes centred on beautiful Lake Plateliai. It is a land of very lively traditions (the Samogitian carnival, Užgavėnės, with its wooden masks, is one of the most famous in the country) and of distinctive rural and religious architecture, with wooden churches and calvaries. Samogitian culture, with its language, stubborn character and humour, holds a place in the Lithuanian imagination similar to that of other regions with a strong identity in Europe.
Hidden in the forests of Žemaitija, next to Lake Plateliai, is an unsettling relic of the Cold War: an underground Soviet ballistic missile base, built in secret in the early 1960s and one of the first installations of its kind in the USSR. From those silos hidden underground, the Soviet Union could launch nuclear missiles at Western Europe. Today that bunker of death has become the Cold War Museum, where you can go down into its galleries and grasp just how much small, wooded Samogitia was on the front line of the nuclear stand-off that divided the world.
Šiauliai, Lithuania's fourth-largest city and the capital of the north, has a name that recalls the sun (saulė), and its history begins with one of the most decisive battles of the Baltic Middle Ages. On 22 September 1236, somewhere in these lands, the Samogitians and other Balts inflicted a crushing defeat on the Sword Brothers, the German military order that was trying to subjugate and Christianise the peoples of the eastern Baltic. At the Battle of Saulė (the “Battle of the Sun”), the order's master and many of its knights were killed.
The defeat was so severe that the Sword Brothers were destroyed as an independent force: the following year, what was left of them had to merge with the Teutonic Knights, forming the Livonian Order. The Battle of Saulė held back the German advance inland for a long time and is remembered as one of the great triumphs of Baltic resistance to the Northern Crusades; the city of Šiauliai traces its symbolic founding date back to it.
For centuries, Šiauliai was a farming and craft town in northern Lithuania. In the 19th century it grew into a railway junction and industrial centre, famous for its leather industry and, later, for photography and optics. Although it was badly damaged in both world wars and rebuilt in a functional style in Soviet times, the city remains the regional capital and the usual base for visiting the place that made it known worldwide: the nearby Hill of Crosses.
About twelve kilometres north of Šiauliai rises a modest mound, an ancient prehistoric hill fort, that has become one of the most striking and unusual places in Europe: the Hill of Crosses (Kryžių kalnas). Piled one on top of another are countless crosses of every size and material, from large carved wooden crucifixes to tiny rosaries, forming a sacred metal forest that has kept growing for almost two centuries.
Tradition places the first crosses in 1831, after the crushing of that year's uprising against the Russian Empire. The families of rebels who had been killed or deported, unable to recover or bury their loved ones' bodies, began planting crosses on this hill as a way of mourning and remembering. The custom grew stronger after the failed insurrection of 1863, and the hill took on a double meaning: religious, because of the country's deep Catholic devotion, and patriotic, as a silent monument to those who fell resisting Russian oppression.
Over the decades, the Hill of Crosses became a place of pilgrimage and a symbol of Lithuanian national identity. Every cross planted was both a prayer and a statement of belonging to a faith and a nation that the occupiers were trying to erase. Nobody organised it: Lithuanians themselves, spontaneously and anonymously, kept adding crosses generation after generation, building a collective monument with no equivalent anywhere else in the world.
During the Soviet occupation, the Hill of Crosses became an intolerable challenge for an atheist regime that persecuted religion and wanted to wipe out the symbols of Lithuanian national identity. The Soviet authorities decided to destroy it, and tried to do so by force: in 1961, and again in 1973 and 1975, they sent bulldozers and excavators that razed the hill, tore out thousands of crosses, burnt them or melted them down as scrap, and flattened the mound. There were even plans to flood the area by building a dam and wipe the place off the map for good.
But every time the Soviets destroyed the hill, the same thing happened: Lithuanians came back, almost always at night and at the risk of harsh punishment or worse, and planted new crosses on the ashes of the old ones. Destruction and rebuilding repeated themselves over and over for years, in a silent tug of war between the power of the state and the stubbornness of a people. Together with the underground Church, the Hill of Crosses became one of the great symbols of Lithuania's peaceful resistance to communism.
That struggle turned the site into more than a shrine: it was living proof that a totalitarian regime, with all its resources, could not break the will of ordinary people. No bulldozer could compete with the anonymous determination of thousands of farmers and believers who, cross by cross, rebuilt before dawn what the machines had knocked down by day. When independence came in 1990, the hill had not only survived but was reborn bigger than ever.
Once independence was restored, the Hill of Crosses grew explosively. Freed from fear, Lithuanians and pilgrims from all over the world filled the mound with new crosses until they became impossible to count: around 55,000 were estimated in 1990, more than 100,000 by the 2000s, and the number keeps rising. Counting the large crosses plus the countless crucifixes, rosaries and medals hanging from them, there are thought to be several hundred thousand devotional objects on the hill.
International recognition came through the Church. On 7 September 1993, Pope John Paul II, himself a symbol of Catholic resistance to communism in Eastern Europe, visited the Hill of Crosses, celebrated Mass there before huge crowds and proclaimed it a symbol of hope, peace, love and sacrifice. That visit sealed the hill's status as a shrine of worldwide importance, and in his memory a Franciscan friary, donated by the Pope himself, was built nearby.
Today the Hill of Crosses is one of the most visited and photographed places in Lithuania, and a pilgrimage site that draws travellers from all over the planet. Beyond its religious side, it has become the great symbol of the endurance of the Lithuanian people: the image of a small nation that, planting crosses on a hill at night, held out against two centuries of empires and, through quiet stubbornness, overcame those who wanted to make it disappear.
The Šiauliai region covers northern Lithuania, a flat, fertile land that is part of the old historical region of Semigallia (Žiemgala), a Baltic territory now split between Lithuania and neighbouring Latvia. The Semigallians were among the Baltic tribes that most fiercely resisted the German crusaders, and they did not submit until the end of the 13th century, after decades of war; many chose to emigrate rather than surrender. That heritage of borderland and resistance runs through the whole history of the north.
For centuries this was mainly a farming area of vast grain plains and estates, strongly shaped by its closeness to Latvia, with which it shares a Baltic language, a past and a landscape. In the 19th century, with the arrival of the railway linking Russia to East Prussia, Šiauliai and other northern towns industrialised and grew, drawing in people and becoming transport hubs between the interior of the empire and the Baltic.
Northern Lithuania suffered especially hard in the wars of the 20th century (the front passed through here in both world wars and Šiauliai was badly destroyed) and in the Sovietisation that followed, with its kolkhozes and heavy industry. Today it is a quiet region of fields, villages and small towns. Its main claim to fame is still the Hill of Crosses, but it keeps the tough, frontier character of a land that for centuries was the country's shield against the military orders to the north.
Hardly anything that happened to Lithuania happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
