History of Lithuanian culture

The culture of Lithuania, dating back to 200 BC, with the settlement of the Balts and has been independent of the presence of a sovereign Lithuanian state.

Earlier, the Balts, ancestors of Lithuanians and Latvians, had arrived at the territories between the Dnepr and Daugava rivers and the Baltic Sea.

An Indo-European people, the Balts are presumed to have come from a hypothetic original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans; many scientists date this arrival to 3rd millennium BCE.

After the period of Gothic domination in Europe, the culture of the Balts appeared in a more restricted territory between the Wisla and Daugava rivers.

The most archaic language forms were preserved by the Western Balts, who lived approximately in the territory of later Prussia (today's Kaliningrad and north-west Poland).

For example, some popular simplifications took hold, such as a decrease in the number of verb forms, which presumably happened when the ancient cultural elite lost its influence over the people.

It is known that Balts at the end of this period had a social structure comparable with that of Celtic people in South-West Europe during the 2nd—1st centuries BC.

Material forms of this life were closely connected with unsophisticated wooden shrines, nature objects ( such as trees and stones), and special ornamented vestments and their accessories.

This theory is supported by historical sources that wrote about existence of centers of religious life (named Romuva, using the present-day variant of this word), concentrated around more significant shrines, holy and mystic areas.

Information concerning religious unity is influenced by later Lithuanian and Latvian myths and is not strongly based on historical sources and archaeological research.

The new point of distinguishing the Balts' nations and their cultural development was the occupation of a significant part of the land by Catholic military orders in the 13th century.

Livonian order occupied northern territories, beginning from areas around the Gulf of Riga, creating so-called Livonia.

In the middle of the 14th century, Lithuania emerged as a large eastern European state, with former Kievan Rus' and some Ruthenian regions to the north of it (approximately present Belarus) included.

It consisted of a non-Christian Lithuanian part in North-West (later known as Lithuania Propria) and Eastern Christian Orthodox Ruthenian regions (partial Duchies).

These rights included, for example, customs, that Lithuanian dukes had to be christened before taking office in a partial duchy in orthodox parts.

The issuance of a written law codex shows a significant western influence on Lithuanian political culture of this time.

In this time, Lithuanians were getting acquainted with Western European culture and this process had interesting discoveries, which also caused later ruling political ideas.

From the mid 16th century until the end of the Reformation, sporadic street scuffles between Catholic and Protestant hotheads were often found in these towns.

However even in the time of the religious struggle, some partial tolerance existed, and both involved sides proclaimed their abstinence from solving the question in the form of violence.

The Reformation in Lithuania remained on the level of political and religious regulating ideas and didn't turn into a cultural movement as it did in West European countries.

And in these discussions, the Latin language, eloquence, citation and knowledge of ancient philosophers referred more to Italy than to any other country of Western Europe.

Thus after the middle of the 17th century, the non-Orthodox part of Lithuania became firmly Catholic (with a Protestant minorities in some towns like Vilnius, Kėdainiai, and Biržai).

Presence of printed books became the signal factor to change ancient Lithuanian cultural attitude against literacy.

Even more, these two tendencies, the inculturating and the negating one, remained as two main components in Lithuanian culture till the beginning of the 19th century and have their evident consequences now.

The ritual became strictly connected with the calendar of rural works and other factors of this kind; witnesses of that time found a multitude of sacred objects (they simply described them as "gods"), which were connected totally with all material life, but didn't refer to more philosophically common or abstract ideas (in opposition to descriptions of religion in the 14th century).

Firstly the extinguishing of original attributes of the old religion, as names, forms of rite, details of clothing, and especially words of holy prayers, songs and poems.

Later, some of them survived the time of the very understanding old culture values and became known by neighboring nations as Lithuanian popular traditions since the middle of the 19th century or sporadically even earlier.

As the best example, traditional (both iron and wooden) crosses in present Lithuania, West Belarus and Northern Poland with raying sun and moon could be noted.

At the beginning, after 1530, for this purpose the first secular ruler of Prussia, the duke Albert invited a number of educated Lithuanians Protestants from G.D.L.

had some influence to Prussian ruling persons and even put some pressure on them, and it did not allow disregarding of existing Lithuanians and their cultural needs.