After went left Kedainiai, our lessons under the tutelage of Rimas began in earnest. Alex had warned us that when he was visiting with his friend (Rimas’ eldest son), they would get detailed instructions on what they were to see each day and would then be quizzed upon their return. So I did some studying before we left. Before resuming the travelogue, here are some of the things I learned. (Hope it isn’t too boring!):

The Last Pagan Country: Lithuania was the last holdout in Europe to Christianity (or to Islam or Judaism for that matter). It didn’t happen until 1387. This made Lithuania a target of crusades by the Teutonic Knights, who spent several hundred years attacking Eastern European countries and acquiring territory in the name of Christianity.

The Biggest Country in Europe: Around the same period, through a combination of diplomacy, marriages and wars, Lithuania became the largest country in Europe. It comprised most of what is now Belarus, the other Balkan states and a large part of Poland. (Rimas told us that Latvia and Estonia had no real history and were creations of other powers, which is essentially right, if a bit Lithuanian-centric. They both had a separate ethnic identity but never existed as independent states until they were created in 1918.) During this period the country was ruled by someone who was the Grand Duke of Lithuania and the King of Poland. From this peak, the country gradually shrunk, under attack from the Tartars and the the Muscovites from the East and groups like the Teutonic Knights from the West.

The Battle of Grunwald: This was one of the biggest and most important battle in the history of Medieval Europe. It has incredible resonance in Lithuania and Poland and altered the course of history. But people in the West have never heard of it. Despite the conversion in 1387, the Teutonic Knights continued their campaign against Lithuania/Poland. In 1410, this all culminated in the battle between the Knights and the Polish and Lithuanian armies. The Knights first attacked the Lithuanian Army and after hours of fighting, the Lithuanians retreated. (The interpretation of this is contested. Some view it as a simple retreat. This is certainly the Polish view. However, Rimas told us the Lithuanian version, which is that Lithuania had learned this tactic in battling the Tartars, who employed it to great effect. It requires great discipline to retreat and then re-form, rather than simply fleeing.) The Teutonic Knights, believing that they had routed the Lithuanians, then turned on the Polish Army and were engaged in battle with them when the Lithuanians returned and attacked them from behind. The Teutonic Knights were essentially completely wiped out. Prussia could probably have been taken, but it was left to survive. But Prussia ceased to be threat or a force in Europe until Bismark, hundreds of years later.

Saint Casimir: He was the younger brother of one of the rulers of Lithuania and Poland. He had short and unsuccessful military career as the equivalent of a prince and concentrated more on doing good works and being generally pious. He died at a young age, probably of tuberculosis. The event that lead to his sainthood occurred about 30 years after his death. Polotsk is a city in what is now Belarus. In the early 1300s, it was absorbed by Lithuania. In 1518, it was under siege by the Muscovite army, in one of the endless number of Lithuanian-Muscoite conflicts. The Russian attackers ran out of food and had to cross the river to find some. This permitted the Lithuanians to reinforce Polotsk and their force then went out to attack the Russians. But they could figure out how to get across the river until a mysterious figure on a horse (you guessed it–the long-dead Casimir) showed up, led them across the river and disappeared. A Lithuanian ruler later petitioned Rome for sainthood for Casimir based on this “miracle” and about a hundred years later it was granted. He is now the Patron Saint of Lithuania and is generally pictured holding lilies, a symbol of purity. There is a miraculous three-handed painting of him in the Vilnius cathedral. According to legend, the artist had tried several times to paint over the hand, but it kept reappearing. So he is often painted with an extra hand, undoubtedly symbolizing something or other.

Lithuanian Tolerance: This was a tolerant country, especially when viewed in the context of its time. They were welcoming of other people and in 1573, the Warsaw Confederation guaranteed religious tolerance (for at least the higher born), the first such document of its type. While the level of tolerance ebbed and flowed, it was certainly far greater than the other nation-states of Medieval Europe. They also invited Germans, Armenians and Jews to come and settle in Lithuania. Crimean Karaites, a group not ethnically Jewish, but who decided to accept the Jewish religion (sans rabbinic teaching) and came to live in and around Trakai. They are pretty much gone now. Less than 500 are left.

Holocausts: The great age of Lithuania ended around 1700, brought on by a combination of a famine, an outbreak of the plague, a Swedish invasion in the 1650s (called the Deluge) and subsequent Russian invasions. What followed was almost three centuries of misery, mostly at the hands of the Russian. During the entire nineteenth century, for example, the Russians closed Vilnius University and generally tried to destroy the Lithuanian people. The Lithuanian language was banned for long periods of time. There was systematic ethnic cleansing. It is hardly surprising that Nazi troops were initially welcomed into the country. And the Soviet occupation following World War II was possibly even worse. Many Lithuanians were sent to Siberia, either to the gulags or to communities set up for them, in an effort to make Lithuania into a Russian state. Rimas’ father and grandfather were both sent to Siberia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Lithuanians view this whole history as a form of holocaust, and it seems justified. Vilnius has a Holocaust Museum dedicated to this history, located in the building that was once the KGB headquarters (and previously Gestapo headquarters). (We missed it this trip.)

Vilnius has a second Holocaust Museum, which details the extermination of the 200,000 or more Jews in the country during the Nazi occupation. There can be little question that the Nazis were helped by local collaborators, as is true in the rest of Europe. It is also true that a few jews were saved by Lithuanians. (Rimas told us a story about how his small home village had saved several jewish girls by hiding them and passing them from family to family.) In one notable incident, the Japanese Ambassador in Vilnius save thousands of jews by giving them exit visas. Then Tokyo found out about it and recalled him. He died a pauper. There is now a memorial to him in Vilnius. In some ways the Nazi genocide in Lithuania was even worse than in other parts of Europe (if that is even possible). They didn’t even bother to send tens of thousands of jews to death camps, choosing to just kill them in the woods. The surviving jews, living in the ghettos, were summarily executed as the Nazis retreated the Soviet advance. There is little point in trying to equate the systematic attempts by Russians and later the Soviets to eliminate all Lithuanian culture (as bad a that was) and the wholesale slaughter of the jews. Both were horrible, but the Nazi atrocities were incomparably worse.

There is much more pretty interesting history, but if you have made it this far (congratulations and thanks), I won’t subject you to it. Back the travelogue next time.