Quite often when I am travelling or just being in international company, up pops the question ‘Where are you from?” and once I answer then it starts… Ukraine? Slovenia? Is it in Europe? Is it Russia? Do you speak Russian? Is it in the EU? …and so on.
Yes I am a Lithuanian, and super proud to be one.
No, it is not a part of Russia, but yes a few times we were occupied by Soviets. We have our own amazing language which is not Slavic (which means that it is far away from Russian) but has many similarities with Sanskrit. We even have different dialects, like Zemaiciu that I even can’t understand.
Probably I should have started by saying that Lithuania is in Europe and in the EU. It is a beautiful tiny country with less than 3 million people, one of the three Baltic nations, that it has a great history and that we have a different religion – basketball.
I used to joke that Lithuania is a wooden country with wooden laptops, wooden/stony Flintstone type cars with a population that still believes in spirits. The reality is that Lithuania has a very strong technology sector and some of the fastest internet in Europe, but still in a way that my wooden statements are a bit true because we do have lots of beautiful and very varied forest for such a small territory.
Why I am writing all of this?
Because just a couple days ago in the news I read an article about one Lithuanian guy was so fed-up with all the questions about Lithuania that he created a short film called ‘What is LITHUANIA? (My Country You Know Nothing About)’. While our government is spending so much money and effort on creating the face of our county and to make it a destination, he just did it himself.
It shows that the youth care about the image of our homeland, that we want everyone to discover it and to know about it. We are proud about our long history full of struggles and we know what it means to stand up and shine!
So thank You Jokūbas Laukaitis for the video and your ‘manual’ about Lithuania