Decoding Lithuania: A Tiny Country With Reminiscences of Greatness
To my humble understanding, Lithuania and most notably Lithuanians can be comprehended through two major pillars: (1) a long history of statehood or the « myth » of the ancient Baltic tribe, arguably speaking the oldest surviving indo-European language - the very last pagans of Europe - who once ruled the largest medieval European state stretching all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and (2) collective trauma unleashed by 50 years of Soviet occupation, worse still, exacerbated by international ignorance and attempts to shake off the shackles of the homo sovieticus.
