Lithuania: Regions, Cities & Travel Guide

What is Lithuania known for?

Lithuania is known for a baroque capital, a sand-dune coast, and the largest state Europe once held. Vilnius carries one of the continent's biggest surviving old towns. Kaunas keeps the interwar modernist buildings from its years as a provisional capital. Along the shore, the Curonian Spit runs as a thin ribbon of pine and shifting dune between the Baltic Sea and its lagoon.

Basketball is a near-religion.

Where is Lithuania?

Lithuania is a low, glacier-worked country, and its highest ground barely clears the trees. The land tilts gently from the morainic hills of the east toward the flat central plain and the Baltic coast in the west, where the Curonian Spit walls off a shallow lagoon with dunes tall enough to bury old villages. Aukštojas Hill, the country's summit near the Belarus border, reaches only a few hundred metres.

Beyond that low relief, it is the rivers and lakes that shape Lithuania. The Neman, called the Nemunas here, gathers the country's drainage and empties through a wide delta into the lagoon, while the Neris joins it at Kaunas after threading through Vilnius. Thousands of lakes freckle the east, most left by retreating ice, and forest still covers roughly a third of the whole.

Five ethnographic regions map onto this relief. Highland Aukštaitija spreads across the lake country of the north-east; Žemaitija, the Samogitian lowland, holds the wetter west; Dzūkija covers the pine forest of the south along the Nemunas. The plainest ground lies in the south-west.

It is farm country, worked for centuries.

What is the history of Lithuania?

Lithuania first entered the record as a kingdom in 1253, when Mindaugas was crowned and baptised, briefly making the country a Christian state. The pagan revival that followed his death set the pattern for the next century, as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania grew under Gediminas and his heirs into the largest country in Europe, stretching from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. A dynastic bargain changed everything.

In 1386 Jogaila married the Polish queen, converted the last pagan realm in Europe, and tied the duchy to Poland, a link the Union of Lublin turned into a single commonwealth in 1569. That state was carved apart. Partitions handed most of Lithuania to the Russian Empire by 1795, and full independence returned only in 1918, after the First World War.

The twentieth century dealt harshly with the country. Soviet occupation under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi invasion, and a second Soviet annexation cost half a century of statehood. On the 11th of March 1990 the parliament in Vilnius voted unanimously to break from the Soviet Union.

It was the first republic to leave. The others soon followed.

What is Lithuania like?

Lithuanian culture rests first on its language, an Indo-European tongue that has kept more of its ancient grammar than almost any other living speech, prized by linguists for how close it stays to Proto-Indo-European roots. Song holds nearly the same weight. The Song and Dance Celebration, a mass gathering of choirs and folk dancers that UNESCO recognises, pulls performers from every corner of the country and reaches back to the national revival of the nineteenth century.

Faith runs Catholic and deep, most visibly at the Hill of Crosses outside Šiauliai, where pilgrims have planted a hillside with more than a hundred thousand crosses. Basketball is the other devotion. Table matters too.

Cepelinai, the heavy potato dumplings named for the Zeppelin airships they resemble, share the plate with cold pink šaltibarščiai in summer and the branched, spit-roasted šakotis cake at weddings. In Vilnius the Užupis district declared itself a tongue-in-cheek republic in 1997, wrote its own playful constitution, and became the base for the city's artists and galleries. The threads pull one way.

They bind a small nation to a long past.

What is the climate of Lithuania?

Lithuania sits in the humid continental band, cold and snowy in winter, warm and green through a short summer. The Baltic Sea softens the western coast around Klaipėda, so its winters run milder and its air damper than the interior. Inland it is harsher.

January hovers well below freezing across the eastern lake country, and hard frosts are routine, while July brings warm, showery days that carry the year's heaviest rain. Spring and autumn arrive brief and changeable.

How do you get to Lithuania?

Most travellers land at Vilnius, whose airport sits a short train ride south of the old town and handles the bulk of the country's flights. Kaunas, an hour to the west, runs a second airport favoured by budget carriers. Once inside, trains link the main cities cheaply, threading from Vilnius through Kaunas out to the coast at Klaipėda in a little over four hours.

From the Klaipėda ferry port, ships sail across the Baltic Sea to Germany and Sweden. Buses fill the gaps between towns.