Europe

Interesting Facts About Lithuania

Discover Lithuania's remarkable history as Europe's last pagan state, its linguistically unique language, and its path to independence.

By Written Facts StaffJune 5, 2023Updated October 8, 20268 min read

You've probably looked at a map of Europe and let the three small countries on the Baltic coast blur into one. Lithuania, the southernmost and largest of them, is worth a closer look. About 2.9 million people live there. Its medieval rulers were the last in Europe to give up paganism. Its language is closer to ancient Indo-European than any other spoken today, and people kept it alive by smuggling books past the Russian Empire's police. In 1990 it became the first Soviet republic to declare independence. Here is that story, from its first mention in writing to the present day.

The name first appears in writing in 1009

Lithuania's name first shows up in the Annals of Quedlinburg, a chronicle kept at a German convent. The entry for 9 March 1009 records the death of St. Bruno, a missionary archbishop who was killed by pagans "on the border of Russia and Lithuania" along with 18 companions. The chronicle uses the Latin form Litua. The original manuscript is lost and survives only as a 16th-century copy in Dresden. Lithuania still marked the 1,000th anniversary of the name in 2009.

That first mention already shows two things that run through Lithuanian history: Christian missionaries were not welcome, and the country sat on a contested border.

The last pagan state in Europe, and one of its largest

Lithuania stayed officially pagan into the late 14th century, after the rest of Europe had become Christian. The state only converted in 1387, when Grand Duke Jogaila took the Polish crown (as Władysław II Jagiełło) by becoming a Catholic and marrying Queen Jadwiga of Poland. The conversion was as much about politics as faith, and it pulled the country toward Western Europe for centuries.

Its size is the real surprise. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania lasted from the 13th century to the late 18th century. At its height it took in present-day Belarus and Lithuania, most of Ukraine, and parts of Latvia, Moldova, Poland and Russia. The country that looks small on today's map once ruled from the Baltic Sea almost to the Black Sea.

A language that sounds like Sanskrit

Languages usually change fast. Lithuanian changed slowly. Linguists consider it the most conservative living Indo-European language. That means it has kept more features of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of most European and many South Asian languages, than any other language spoken today.

As a result, Lithuanian looks a lot like Sanskrit, even though the two are only distant relatives:

Horse: ašva in Lithuanian, ashva in Sanskrit
God: dievas and devas
Fire: ugnis and agnis

When scholars try to rebuild Proto-Indo-European, modern Lithuanian is as useful to them as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Lithuanian has always been written in the Latin alphabet. It never used runes, as is sometimes claimed. That alphabet is what the Russian Empire later tried to ban.

The book smugglers who saved it

After the 1863 uprising, Russian authorities set out to cut Lithuanians off from their written language. In 1864 they banned Lithuanian textbooks printed in "Polish characters", meaning the Latin alphabet. In 1865 this became a full ban on Lithuanian printing in Latin letters, and it lasted until 1904.

Lithuanians fought back with the knygnešiai, or book smugglers. Books were printed abroad, mostly in East Prussia, and carried across the border on foot. During the 40 years of the ban, 3,047 people were arrested in connection with it: 829 smugglers, 859 distributors and 1,359 people caught with banned books. The ban was supposed to wipe out the language. It made reading in Lithuanian a form of resistance.

The Hill of Crosses

The Hill of Crosses grew out of the same defiance. It sits about 12 km north of the city of Šiauliai, on an old hill fort. People probably began leaving crosses there after the 1831 uprising, though nobody knows exactly when it started. Records list 150 large crosses by 1895 and 400 by 1940. By 2007 there were estimated to be more than 100,000.

During the Soviet occupation (1944–1991), the hill was bulldozed several times. Most accounts say three times, though some give a higher number. The authorities blocked the roads and had the site guarded. Each time, people came back at night and put up new crosses. Today it is a place of pilgrimage and a national symbol.

Two million people holding hands

Resistance turned into a mass movement in 1989. On 23 August, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in which Stalin and Hitler divided Eastern Europe between them, about two million people joined hands. They formed a human chain about 675 km long running through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic Way remains the largest demonstration in the region's history.

Seven months later, on 11 March 1990, Lithuania declared that its independence was restored. It was the first Soviet republic to do so. Estonia and Latvia declared full independence in August 1991, as the Soviet Union was breaking up.

The land: the centre of Europe and a desert by the sea

Lithuania sits between Latvia, Belarus, Poland and Russia's Kaliningrad region, and it has a stretch of Baltic coast. It also claims to be the middle of the continent. In 1989, Jean-George Affholder of France's National Geographic Institute (IGN) calculated the geographic centre of Europe by treating the continent as a shape and finding its centre of gravity. The point fell 26 km north of Vilnius, near the village of Purnuškės. A 9-tonne boulder has marked the spot since 1997. Other countries make rival claims, depending on how you measure Europe. Lithuania's point is said to be the only one recognised by Guinness World Records.

On the coast is the Curonian Spit, a strip of sand 98 km long and between 0.4 and 4 km wide that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The northern 52 km belong to Lithuania and the rest to Russia's Kaliningrad region. Europe's largest drifting sand dunes are here, some up to 60 m high. The spit only survives because people have spent centuries planting trees and holding the sand in place. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 2000 because of this mix of dunes, forest and old fishing villages.

Lithuania today: a small country that wins big

At the start of 2025, Statistics Lithuania counted 2,890,700 residents. The population grew slightly that year after a long decline. Women make up 52.5% of residents, and 20.9% of people are 65 or older.

Lithuanians call basketball their "second religion", after Catholicism. Lithuanian-American coaches and players brought the game over in the late 1920s. The national team won the European championship in 1937, 1939 (as host) and 2003. After independence it won Olympic bronze three times in a row, in 1992, 1996 and 2000.

The country's best-known recent sporting moment came in the pool. At the London 2012 Olympics, 15-year-old Rūta Meilutytė from Kaunas won the 100 m breaststroke in 1:05.47. She was the youngest ever winner of that event and gave Lithuania its first Olympic swimming gold under its own flag.

A small country that once spread across Eastern Europe, held on to an ancient language through 40 years of smuggled books, and kept rebuilding a hill of crosses has a habit of beating the odds. Its basketball and swimming results come from the same stubbornness.

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