A graveyard in autumn
History

Special signs placed on gravestones of Soviet troops in north Lithuania

The municipality of the Biržai district, northern Lithuania, has initiated placement of signs next to gravestones of Soviet troops to specify that the inscriptions on the gravestones are not consistent with historical truth, Lietuvos Žinios daily said on Saturday. […]

Mid summer celebration in Lithuania
History

Role of female slaves in the ancient Balts societies

Issues related to the history of slavery in Lithuania have neither been properly studied nor have they drawn a greater international attention yet due to the scarcity of sources. This aspect of the early history of Lithuania can be brought to light by employing only very sparse sources and the comparative context as the background. The social structure and evolution of Lithuanians and other Balt peoples resembled that of societies in Northern and Eastern Europe. The historiographic description of Lithuanians as “Vikings of the overland”, by Edvardas Gudavičius, represents more than a mere metaphor as it reveals typological similarities which become evident in comparing Viking and Curonian societies. The same is true speaking of other Balt tribes. […]

Old books
History

Educational Commission in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Pope Clement XVI’s decree pronouncing the closure of the Jesuit Order reached the Lithuanian and Polish Commonwealth in 1773. Jesuits have financed a number of schools in Lithuania and Poland, including the Academy of Vilnius. The state faced the tasks of making use of the huge wealth of the Order and of finding new supervisors of the schools or, in other words, of solving problems in the area of education. […]

Voroshilov, Molotov, and Stalin.  Yezhov airbrushed out of history by unknow Soviet artist  Public Domain
History

Airbrushed out of history in the USSR – Part 1

Some believe that photo manipulation started with Photoshop some 25 years ago. In fact, as early as 1846, when the first negatives were created, image altering took off. People and objects appeared and disappeared in photos. Photographic images acquired new meanings and ‘truth’ with the help of scissors, some ink, acid, and, eventually, airbrushes. […]

Yuli-Yoel Edelstein
History

Knesset speaker in Vilnius honors family for saving Jewish woman from Holocaust

Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, the speaker of the Knesset, has honored the family of Ignacy and Katarzyna Bujel, who saved the life of a young Jewish woman during World War Two, at a ceremony in Vilnius, the Israeli embassy to Lithuania said. […]

No Picture
History

Papermaking in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Paper mills, their key characteristic being the use of water energy, were an important element of the technology revolution. The production of paper, which replaced parchment, encouraged the spread of literacy and book reading, because the price of paper could sometimes account to as much as half of all costs of printed materials. […]

No Picture
History

Written documents in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania oral culture

Pre-Christian Lithuania was a land of oral culture. Peter of Dusburg, the chronicler of the German Order, retold an ironic joke in the early 14th century about the pagans gazing at written characters for the first time: “[Prussians] did not use writing /…/ They were completely amazed to find out that a human was able to convey his wishes to another person, who was not here, through writing.” If we leave the theories about “Lithuanian runes” aside as legends, we can safely assume that Lithuanians did not use writing for communication between themselves until the late 14th century. […]

Map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
History

Journeys of diplomatic missions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Moscow at the end of the 15th – the 16th centuries

After the State of Moscow, which grew into the Russian Empire in later ages, became the centre of Slavic statehood, Lithuania acquired a fierce rival with whom more than once it had to fight both on the battlefield and with the help of diplomatic measures. In the 15th -16th centuries, tension between the states determined not only the problems of foreign policy but also diplomatic contacts. […]