It was during our Christmas adventure that we first entered the Baltic region, a region that consists in the countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. During our long bus journey (I think it was about 11 hours), we entered Lithuania through the 100km long Suwalki gap which is an area that has become nowadays geopolitically very crucial since it connects the Baltic states to the rest of Europe and the russian oblast of Kaliningrad to the rest of Russia. Generally the three countries have a lot in common in terms of culture, cuisine and lifestyle and the biggest difference that we experienced was probably the cost of living, with Estonia being significantly more expensive than the other two. On my side I felt that generally Lithuania and Latvia are more stringed to their soviet past, while Estonia has a more scandinavian flair. A special mention goes to the beautiful frozen coast of Jurmala in the Riga region, that I had the luck to visit on a snowy day trip and to the Jagala waterfall in the neighbours of Tallin, where part of one of my favourite movies was set, the post-modern masterpiece of Andrej Tarkovskij called Stalker.
The first time I heard about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and how powerful and wide it was, it was while I was listening to the history of Ukraine on a podcast of the historian Timothy Snyder. The Grand Duchy saw its existance from the XIII century until 1795 when it was dissolved. The state was for a while the biggest state in Europe and included the modern state of Lithuania, Bielarus, part of Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Moldovia and part of Russia. The state was of course multi-ethnic due to its size, polytheistic and culturally very diverse. In 1569 after the Union of Lublin it changed its name into Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and became eventually even bigger. The official language of the Commonwealth at that time were Polish and Latin. After so many years the Commonwealth felt under decline and under the attacks of its neighbouring countries (III. The time when Poland disappeared from the map).