LithuaniaLietuva

Mindaugas united the Lithuanian tribes and was crowned king in 1253, but the country returned to paganism after his death and resisted the Teutonic Knights for more than a century. Under Gediminas, who founded Vilnius as his capital around 1323, and his successors, the Grand Duchy expanded east over Slavic lands until it stretched to the Black Sea, making it one of Europe's largest states.

Grand Duke Jogaila married the Polish queen in 1386 and was baptised, starting the conversion of Lithuania. The union deepened into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, an elected monarchy with a powerful nobility. Polish language and culture came to dominate the elite, and Vilnius University (1579) became a Jesuit centre of learning.

The partitions of 1795 gave Lithuania to Russia. After uprisings in 1831 and 1863 the tsars banned Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet (1864–1904), and book smugglers (knygnešiai) carried prayer books and primers over the Prussian border. Independence came on 16 February 1918, but Poland seized Vilnius in 1920, so Kaunas served as the temporary capital until 1939.

The Soviet occupation of 1940, the German occupation of 1941–44 and Soviet return brought deportations and a guerrilla war by the Forest Brothers that lasted into the 1950s. Lithuania declared independence on 11 March 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so; Soviet troops killed 14 civilians at the Vilnius TV Tower in January 1991, but independence held.

For centuries Vilnius (Vilne in Yiddish) was a leading centre of Jewish learning. The Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97), made it a capital of rabbinic scholarship; later it was home to the YIVO institute, printing houses and a lively Yiddish press. Before the Second World War Jews made up around 40% of the city.

Under Nazi occupation about 90–95% of Lithuania's Jews were murdered, many by local collaborators, mostly in 1941. At Paneriai (Ponar) outside Vilnius around 70,000 Jews were shot, along with Poles and Soviet prisoners. The Kaunas Ninth Fort was another killing site.

In Kaunas the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara issued thousands of transit visas in 1940 that saved Jewish refugees; his house is now a museum. Today the Jewish community is small; the Vilna Gaon Museum and the Choral Synagogue keep the memory, and Lithuania's handling of wartime collaboration remains contested.

Vilnius Old Town, one of the largest in Eastern Europe and on the UNESCO list since 1994, is a patchwork of Gothic (St Anne's brick church), Renaissance and above all late Baroque churches designed by Italian and local architects. The Gates of Dawn chapel with its icon of the Virgin is a pilgrimage site for Catholics and Orthodox alike.

Kaunas, the interwar temporary capital, built itself a modern face in the 1920s–30s: over 1,500 modernist buildings including the Resurrection Church, the Central Post Office and villas in Žaliakalnis. The ensemble was added to the UNESCO list in 2023.

Užupis, a riverside district of Vilnius once run-down, declared itself a tongue-in-cheek republic in 1997 with its own constitution posted on a wall in dozens of languages. It shows the playful side of post-Soviet Vilnius.

Lithuania is the most Catholic of the Baltic states, but it converted last in Europe, and older beliefs lasted long. Wayside crosses and roofed shrines with carved saints dot the countryside; cross-crafting is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

The Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai grew from the 19th century as a memorial to rebels; the Soviets bulldozed it several times, and each time crosses returned. Pope John Paul II visited in 1993. It now holds well over 100,000 crosses.

Folk music (sutartinės polyphonic songs, also on the UNESCO list), the Midsummer festival of Rasos or Joninės, and Užgavėnės, a Shrovetide carnival with masks, keep the pre-Christian calendar alive.

The Curonian Spit is a 98-km sand bar between the Baltic and the Curonian Lagoon, split between Lithuania and Russia's Kaliningrad region. Its dunes were stripped of forest in the 18th century and buried villages; replanting since the 19th century saved the spit. It is on the UNESCO list as a cultural landscape.

Nida, with its blue-and-brown fishermen's houses and the summer house of Thomas Mann, sits beneath the Parnidis Dune. Klaipėda, the old German port of Memel, is the gateway; Palanga is the busy beach resort with an amber museum.

Inland, Aukštaitija and Dzūkija national parks hold hundreds of lakes, pine forest and wooden villages, reached by canoe or bike. Most of the country is low and flat; the highest point is under 300 m.

Basketball is a national passion: Lithuania won Olympic bronze three times in a row in the 1990s, and Žalgiris Kaunas fills a 15,000-seat arena. The economy has grown fast since 2020, with fintech, lasers, logistics and manufacturing, and Vilnius has attracted many people relocating from Belarus and Ukraine.

Lithuania has taken a hard line on Russia and Belarus: it stopped importing Russian gas in 2022, built an LNG terminal at Klaipėda, fenced the Belarus border, and hosts a permanent German brigade being built up from 2025. Balloons carrying smuggled cigarettes from Belarus closed Vilnius airport and border crossings several times in autumn 2025.

Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave to the south-west, depends on transit across Lithuania, a regular flashpoint. For visitors, daily life is calm and Western; the tensions show up only in border rules and, occasionally, airport closures.