National costumes from various regions of Lithuania. In pairs from top to bottom, Vilnius, Samogitia, Klaipeda, Dzukai, and Zanavykai.
Part of the Russian Empire since 1795, Lithuanians had long desired independence. Following the Russian Revolution, the possibility of breaking free began to look increasingly realistic. When Germany occupied Lithuania during World War I, they allowed a series of councils of independence-minded Lithuanians to take place, in hopes that a new state would maintain a close relationship with them.
On February 16, 1918, the Council of Lithuania declared
the restoration of the independent state of Lithuania, founded on democratic principles, with Vilnius as its capital, and declares the termination of all state ties which formerly bound this State to other nations.
Lithuania’s independence, of course, was not to last - in 1944 it was swallowed up by the Soviet Union and would not regain its independence until 1990. But because Lithuania considers the modern state to be a continuation of the original state that declared independence in 1918, the document never lost its legal standing.
Happy Independence Day, Lithuania!
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Catechismusa prasty szadei (1547) by Martynas Mazvydas is the first book published in the Lithuanian language. Despite the title, the catechism took up only one quarter of the book; the rest of it was an instruction manual to the clergy on how to teach the faith and a primer on reading and writing.
Mazvydas wrote the book with funding from Albrecht Brandenburg, the Duke of Prussia, in Koenigsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia). The Duke was a great patron of the Protestant Reformation in the Baltic region, and the Catechismusa prasty szadei was part of his missionary strategy.
About 200-300 copies of the book were published. Two survive today, one in the Vilnius University Library, the other in the Torun University Library in Poland.
Lithuania’s government and central bank agreed to seek euro adoption in 2015, pledging action to ensure inflation falls to the required level.
“We’ve agreed to seek the ambitious goal of joining the euro zone in 2015,” Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius said today in the capital, Vilnius, after meeting Finance Minister Rimantas Sadzius and central bank Governor Vitas Vasiliauskas.
The government will maintain fiscal discipline and state institutions will avoid raising regulated prices to bring price growth within the European Union’s limit, Vasiliauskas said. Inflation is the only euro-adoption criteria that Lithuania doesn’t already meet, he said.
The 2015 target would probably make Lithuania the last of the three Baltic nations to introduce the euro. Latvia plans to join the euro area next year, while Estonia made the switch in 2011. Lithuania missed a previous 2007 goal because inflation was 0.1 percentage point more than than the level permitted by the EU.
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Lithuania from a pinhole camera.
Lithuanians carry Lithuanian flags in the center of Vilnius on January 10, 1990, during demonstration asking for the country’s independence.
I see some Latvian flags in there as well.
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