The Project Participants TELEBALT Baltic States
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Lithuania

General Information

Country name: (conventional long form) Republic of Lithuania, (conventional short form) Lithuania

Area: 65 200 sq km

Population: 3 607 899     (July 2004)

Capital: Vilnius

Population: 542 700

Administrative divisions: (10 counties (apskritys, singular - apskritis)) Alytaus, Kauno, Klaipedos, Marijampoles, Panevezio, Siauliu, Taurages, Telsiu, Utenos, Vilniaus

Map of Administrative Divisions

Ethnic groups: Lithuanian 80.6%, Russian 8.7%, Polish 7%, Belarusian 1.6%, other 2.1%

Government: Parliamentary democracy.   Gained independence from Russia/Germany 1918-1940, and then from the Soviet Union in 1990
Head of State: President Arturas Paulauskas since 6 April 2004
Head of Government: Prime Minister lgirdas Mykolas Brazauskas since 2001

Language: Lithuanian is the official language. Lithuania has a large number of dialects for such a small territory. Most people also speak Russian

Religion: Roman Catholic (primarily), Lutheran, Russian Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical Christian Baptist, Muslim, Jewish

Time Zone: GMT/UTC +1

Electricity: 230V, 50Hz

Weights & measures: Metric

Visas: Lithuania requires visas from most nationalities except citizens of the Baltic states, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the US



Economy

Lithuania, the Baltic state that has conducted the most trade with Russia, has slowly rebounded from the 1998 Russian financial crisis. Unemployment remains high, still 10.7% in 2003, but is improving. Growing domestic consumption and increased investment have furthered recovery. Trade has been increasingly oriented toward the West. Lithuania has gained membership in the World Trade Organization.
Privatization of the large, state-owned utilities, particularly in the energy sector, is nearing completion. Overall, more than 80% of enterprises have been privatized. Foreign government and business support have helped in the transition from the old command economy to a market economy.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) composition by sector: agriculture 7.1%, industry 26.6%, services 66.3% (2002)

Labor force (by occupation): industry 30%, agriculture 20%, services 50% (1997)

Unemployment rate: 10.7% (2003)

Industries: metal-cutting machine tools, electric motors, television sets, refrigerators and freezers, petroleum refining, shipbuilding (small ships), furniture making, textiles, food processing, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, optical equipment, electronic components, computers, amber

Agriculture - products: grain, potatoes, sugar beets, flax, vegetables; beef, milk, eggs; fish

Exports - commodities: mineral products 23%, textiles and clothing 16%, machinery and equipment 11%, chemicals 6%, wood and wood products 5%, foodstuffs 5% (2001)

Exports - partners: UK 13.4%, Russia 12.1%, Germany 10.4%, Latvia 9.7%, Denmark 5.1%, Sweden 4.2%, France 4.1% (2002)

Imports - commodities: mineral products 21%, machinery and equipment 17%, transport equipment 11%, chemicals 9%, textiles and clothing 9%, metals 5% (2001)

Imports - partners: Russia 22.2%, Germany 17.8%, Italy 5.1%, Poland 5% (2002)



Money

Currency: The national currency of the Republic of Lithuania is the litas consisting of 100 centas. At present, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 and 500 litas denomination banknotes, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 centas and 1, 2 and 5 litas denomination coins are in circulation

Currency exchange: Currency exchange isn't a problem in Lithuania, although cashing travellers' cheques is best done in large cities such as Vilnius, Kaunas, Siauliai and Klaipeda. Credit cards are common methods of payment in hotels and restaurants. Marked, torn or simply very used notes will be refused

Exchange rate indicators: £1.00= 5.00 litas, $1.00=2.73 litas
Website: http://www.lb.lt/home/default.asp?lang=e

Banking hours: Mon-Fri 09.00-17.00. Some banks also open Sat 09.00-13.00



History

The ancestors of the modern Lithuanians were known as Balts and probably reached the area from the south-east around 2000 BC. By the 12th century the Balt peoples were split into tribal groups, all practising nature religions. The two main groups in Lithuania were the Samogitians in the west and the Aukstaitiai in the east. In what is now south-west Lithuania and in neighbouring parts of Poland were the Yotvingians, also a Balt people, later to be assimilated by the Lithuanians and Poles.

In the mid-13th century Mindaugas, leader of the Aukstaitiai, unified the Lithuanian tribes for a short time under the Catholic mantle. Pagan princes fought back, then were subjugated by another Christian, Vytenis, who became grand duke in 1290. His brother Gediminas, grand duke from 1316 to 1341, took advantage of the decline of the early Russian state to push Lithuania's borders south and east. It was Gediminas' grandson, Jogaila, who converted to Catholicism and married the crown princess of Poland in 1386, thus forging a 400-year bond between the states. The Aukstaitiai were baptised in 1387 and the Samogitians in 1413, making Lithuania the last European country to accept Christianity. By the end of the 16th century Lithuania had sunk into a junior role in its partnership with Poland, especially after the formal union of the two states at the Treaty of Lublin in 1569. Lithuanian gentry adopted Polish culture and language, Lithuanian peasants became serfs, and the joint state became known as the Rzeczpospolita (Commonwealth).

Poland-Lithuania began to cast interested eyes over Livonia (Latvia) and Estonia, as did Sweden and Russia's Ivan the Terrible. Ivan invaded first in 1558, initiating the 25-year Livonian War. It took Poland-Lithuania and then Sweden many years to expel Ivan and his Russian compatriots. After they managed this in 1592, Catholic Poland-Lithuania and Protestant Sweden settled down to fight each other in the Baltics. The Swedes won, securing Estonia and most of modern Latvia. Meanwhile, conflict continued between Poland-Lithuania and Russia, with the Russians eventually invading the Rzeczpospolita and annexing significant territory. A Prussian revival in the 17th century further weakened the Rzeczpospolita, which was eventually carved up by Russia, Austria and Prussia, with most of Lithuania going to the Russians.

Lithuania was involved in two Polish rebellions against Russian rule in the 19th century, and its peasants weren't freed until 1861. The Russians persecuted Catholics and, from 1864, books could only be published in Lithuanian provided they used the Russian alphabet, and publications in Polish were banned altogether.

During WWI Germany occupied Lithuania, but on 11 November 1918, the day Germany surrendered to the Allies, a Lithuanian republican government was set up. Matters were complicated by the re-emergence of an independent Poland. Polish troops took Vilnius in 1919 and retained it, apart from three months in 1920, until 1939. In 1920 Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Lithuania recognising its independence.

Lithuania suffered a military coup in 1926 and from 1929 was ruled by Antanas Smetona along similar lines to Mussolini's Italy. But on 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, which placed Lithuania under the Nazi sphere of influence. When Lithuania refused to join the Nazi attack on Poland, it was placed in the Soviet sphere. Lithuania regained Vilnius in October 1939, when the Red Army invaded eastern Poland; Germany invaded western Poland at the same time. By August 1940 Lithuania had been placed under Soviet military occupation, communists were in government and the nation had become a republic of the USSR. Hitler invaded Lithuania in 1941, and during the Nazi occupation nearly all of Lithuania's Jewish population was killed in camps or ghettos. The Red Army reconquered Lithuania by the end of 1944, and it took until the late 1980s for the nation to take its first steps towards regaining its sovereignty.

A popular front, Sajudis (The Movement), formed as a direct result of Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), and Lithuania led the Baltic push for independence from the USSR. Sajudis won 30 of the 42 Lithuanian seats in the March 1989 elections for the USSR Congress of People's Deputies and, in December, the Lithuanian Communist Party broke away from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This pioneering act was a landmark in the break-up of the USSR and, equally daringly, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to legalise non-communist parties. Sajudis won a majority in the elections to Lithuania's supreme soviet in February 1990, and on 11 March this assembly declared Lithuania an independent republic.

In response, Moscow carried out weeks of intimidatory troop manoeuvres, then clamped an economic blockade on Lithuania. Sajudis leader Vytautas Landsbergis agreed to a 100-day moratorium on the independence declaration in return for independence talks between the respective Lithuanian and Soviet governments. However, Soviet hardliners gained the ascendancy in Moscow, and in January 1991 Soviet troops occupied strategic buildings in Vilnius, killing 13 people in the storming of the TV tower and TV centre. Everything changed with the 19 August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev in Moscow. The western world finally recognised Lithuanian independence and so too did the USSR on 6 September 1991. On 17 September 1991 Lithuania joined the United Nations and began to enjoy its rediscovered nationhood.

In early 1998 the fruits of the Lithuania diaspora became apparent when Valdas Adamkus, who had spent most of his adult life in Chicago working as a senior policy expert for the US Environmental Protection Agency, was elected president. Meanwhile, the country continued an inexorable march towards full membership of both NATO and the European Union.

Lithuania acceded to the EU in May 2004 and to NATO in the summer of 2004.


Culture

Lithuania has the most ethnically homogenous population of the three Baltic states. Modern Lithuanians are descended from the Balt tribes, and the Lithuanian diaspora is by far the biggest of any of the peoples of the Baltic states, mainly due to emigration for political or economic reasons in the 19th and early 20th century and during WWII. Lithuanians are stereotypically gregarious, welcoming and emotional, placing greater emphasis on contacts and favours than method and calculation. Cooler Estonians and Latvians see Lithuanians as hot-headed and unpredictable. The independence campaign of the late 1980s and early '90s illustrated the contrast between Lithuanians and their Baltic neighbours. In Lithuania the struggle was romantic, daring, cliff-hanging and risky, with at least 20 deaths. In Estonia it was gradual, calculated and bloodless, leading to the unkind saying that 'Estonians would die for their freedom - to the last Lithuanian'.

Lithuanian is one of only two surviving languages of the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. Low Lithuanian is spoken in the west and is a different dialect to High Lithuanian, which is spoken in the rest of the country. The Catholic Church is a conservative force in Lithuanian society, and its head is the Archbishop of Kaunas. Russian Orthodoxy is practised in the country, and there are also Old Believers, a sect of the Russian Orthodox church that has suffered intermittent persecution since the 17th century. There are also pagans in Lithuania, highlighted by the Romuva movement, which has congregations in Vilnius and Kaunas as well as among Lithuanian communities overseas. The movement works towards rekindling Lithuania's ancient spiritual and folklore traditions.

The first major fiction in Lithuanian was the poem Metai (The Seasons), by Kristijonas Donelaitis, describing the life of serfs in the 18th century. Jonas Maciulis, known as Maironis, is regarded as the founder of modern Lithuanian literature thanks to the poetry he wrote around the beginning of the 20th century. Lithuania is also the birthplace of several major Polish writers, among them Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel prize for literature.

An interesting Lithuanian folk-art tradition is the carving of large wooden crosses, suns, weathercocks or figures of saints on tall poles that are placed at crossroads, in cemeteries, village squares or at the sites of extraordinary events. In the Soviet period, such work was banned, but it survived to amazing effect at the Hill of Crosses near Siauliai.

Dairy products and potatoes are mainstays of the Lithuanian diet, and pancakes are particularly popular. A traditional (and unforgettable) meal is cepelinai, a zeppelin-shaped parcel of a glutinous substance (allegedly potato dough), with a wad of cheese, meat or mushrooms in the centre. It comes topped with a sauce made from onions, butter, sour cream and bacon bits. Sakotis is a tall, Christmas-tree shaped cake generally served at weddings, while dinner on Christmas Eve consists of 12 different vegetarian dishes. Utenos and Kalnapilis are the best local brands of beer, perhaps preferable to midus (mead), which can be as much as 60% proof. Those who prefer to make their own decision about when to lie down should look out for stakliskes, a honey liqueur.


Environment

Lithuania is the biggest of the three Baltic states and covers an area roughly the same size as Ireland. It borders Latvia in the north, Belarus in the south-east, the Baltic Sea in the west and Poland and the truncated Kaliningrad Region of Russia in the south-west. It's a predominantly flat country, and its highest point, Juazapines, measures only 294m (964ft). Lithuania's Baltic coast extends about 100km (62mi), half of which lies along the extraordinary Curonian Spit - a pencil-thin 98km (61mi) long sandbar that's up to 66m (216ft) high.

Just over one quarter of Lithuania is forested, in particular the south-west of the country. Elk, deer, wild boar, wolf and lynx inhabit the forests, though you're unlikely to bump into any without some guidance. Lithuania also has about 2000 otters, and Lake Zuvintas, in the south, is an important breeding ground and migration halt for waterbirds. There are five national parks in Lithuania and a number of nature reserves, the highlight being the Kursiu Nerija National Park, a special environment of high dunes, pine forests, beaches, a lagoon and seacoasts.

The Lithuanian climate is temperate. From May to September daytime highs vary from about 14°C to 22°C (57°F to 72°F), but between November and March it rarely gets above 4°C (39°F). July and August, the warmest months, are also wet, with days of persistent showers. May, June and September are more comfortable, while late June can be thundery. Slush under foot is something you have to cope with in autumn, when snow falls then melts, and in spring, when the winter snow thaws.


Geology

Geological structure. Lithuania is located in the west of the East European platform. The western and middle areas of the country are located in the Baltic syneclise and the eastern area is occupied by the Byelorussian anteclise.
The thickness of the Earth’s crust ranges from 45 to 55 km, which is characteristic of ancient stable platforms. The crust comprises the crystalline basement and the sedimentary cover. The crystalline basement of the crust occurs at a depth of up to 2100 m in the Baltic syneclise and rises up to 120 m in the Byelorussian anteclise area. It is composed of strongly dislocated Archean and Proterozoic gneiss, magmatite, crystalline schist, quartzite, and granite formed more than 1.5 milliard years ago.
The sedimentary bed of a thickness ranging from 200 to 2100 m is represented by terrigenous, carbonaceous and halogen deposits. The lowermost part of the sedimentary basin is composed of Vendian and Cambrian clay, sandstone and aleurolite that were replaced by limestone, marl and argillite in the Ordovician (480 million years ago). In the Devonian and Carboniferous, sandy – clayey sediments overlapped those deposits. Carbonaceous halogen deposits, clay, marl and aleurolite accumulated in the Permian – Mesozoic. Cenozoic deposits locally occur. For the major part, they are represented by sand, sandstone, clay and marl. In the west and south, Quaternary sediments overlay Permian and Mesozoic rocks, in the northeast they overlay Devonian formations.

Geological Map

The greatest thickness of sedimentary deposits is noted in the territory of Lithuania located in the middle of the Baltic syneclise.

Geological crustal section across Baltic countries

Natural resources. The overall western area of Lithuania and the adjacent water area of the Baltic Sea show good prospects for oil and gas. Economically recoverable Cambrian oil was discovered in 1968 (Shupariaiskoe oil field). In the area of Kaunas, Permian anhydrite thick layers occur at a depth of 150 – 200 m; in the northwest, cement limestone locally occurs. Dolomite used in rubble production is located in Devonian deposits; Neogene deposits comprise glass sand of high quality. Anthropogenic are deposits of clay, sand and gravel mixture and construction sand. Peat deposits are abundant. Deposits of chalk and gypsum occur, ferrous and rare-earth mineralization manifests itself in crystalline basement, titanium and zircon placer deposits are encountered on the Baltic seashore. Amber locally occurs. Mineral waters are well known.


Getting Around

Large towns (with population): Vilnius (542 700) , Kaunas( 381 300), Klaipeda (193 900), Siauliai (130 500), Panevezys (116 900)

Buses and trains are the best ways to get around, as they go just about everywhere. Although buses are quicker and slightly cheaper, train travel is far from dear: you can track 100km (62mi) on little more than small change in general seating class.
Driving isn't a bad option since the main roads are good, traffic is light and distances are small. It's best to bring your own vehicle, because car rental is very expensive. Cycle touring hasn't really taken off in Lithuania, but the country's flatness, small size and light traffic make it good pedalling territory.


Accommodation

Hotels: Since independence, western-style hotels and motels have been built in Lithuania in co-operation with foreign firms
Website: http://www.lithuanianhotels.com

Camping: Campsites are not numerous. The majority of them are located in the most picturesque regions: Palanga (on the shore of the Baltic Sea), Trakai (lake district) and near larger towns

Private Rooms: Travel agencies can arrange rental of rooms in private homes as well as houses. This is especially popular in resort regions
Website: http://www.oldtown-apartments.com

Youth Hostels:
Website: http://www.balticbackpackers.com



Further Reading

  • Grigialis A.A. et al. The geological structure and oil and gas presence of Baltic countries. Nedra, Moscow, 1970.
  • Geological map of Eurasia. NILZarubezhgeologia, Moscow, 1972.
  • Keistutis P. Devenis Ancient Lithuanian and the history of Deltuva.
  • Lithuanian Mythological Tales. Translated from Lithuanian by Birute Kiskyte. VAGA Publishers, 2000, 239 pages, In English.
  • Zigmas Kiaupa. The History of Lithuania. Vilnius, Lithuania, 2002, 450 pages, In English.
  • About Lithuania. Published in Vilnius, Lithuania, 110 pages, In English.
  • Alfonsas Eidintas. Lithuania in european politics. The years of the first republic, 1918-1940. Vilnius, Lithuania, 248 pages, In English.
  • Lithuania map, Scale:1:400 000. Briedis, Vilnius, 2000, In Lithuanian, English and German.
  • Baltic States and Kaliningrad region Road Atlas. oad atlas of the Baltic states and Kaliningrad. 72 city and town plans and place name index is included. Jana Seta, 152 pages.
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