Lituania

Vilnius was called the “Jerusalem of the North”: the Vilna Gaon made it in the eighteenth century the world centre of Talmudic study. The university, founded in 1579 by the Jesuits, is one of Eastern Europe's oldest; Lithuanian is the most archaic living Indo-European language.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched in the fifteenth century from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jogaila's conversion in 1387, tied to his marriage to the queen of Poland, completed the continent's Christianisation and founded a union that would last four centuries.

After the partitions of Poland-Lithuania the country passed to Russia. The ban on Lithuanian printing in Latin characters between 1864 and 1904 triggered cultural resistance through book smuggling, a case unique in Europe.

Independent in 1918, annexed by the USSR in 1940, Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to proclaim its sovereignty, on 11 March 1990. The Baltic Way of 1989 had gathered two million people in a human chain six hundred kilometres long. A member of the Union and NATO since 2004, of the euro since 2015.