My village

I think, You are interresting in Lithuania. This is a little story :)

Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika), is a country in northern Europe. Situated along the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of the Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest. Lithuania has been a member state of the European Union since 1 May 2004.

Lithuania entered into European history when it was first mentioned in a medieval German manuscript, the Quedlinburg Chronicle, on 14 February 1009. The Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas in 1236, and neighbouring countries referred to it as "the state of Lithuania". The official coronation of Mindaugas as King of Lithuania, on July 6, 1253, marked its recognition by Christendom, and the official recognition of Lithuanian statehood as the Kingdom of Lithuania.

In 1401, the formal union was dissolved as a result of disputes over legal terminology, and Vytautas, the cousin of Jogaila, became the Grand Duke of Lithuania. Thanks to close cooperation, the armies of Poland and Lithuania achieved a great victory over Teutonic Knights in 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald, the biggest battle in medieval Europe.

As a result of the growing centralised power of the Grand Principality of Moscow, in 1569, Lithuania and Poland formally united into a single dual state called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a member of the Commonwealth, Lithuania retained its sovereignty and its institutions, including a separate army, currency, statutory law which was digested in three Statutes of Lithuania. In 1795, the joint state was dissolved by the third Partition of the Commonwealth, which forfeited its lands to Russia, Prussia and Austria, under duress. Over ninety percent of Lithuania was incorporated into the Russian Empire and the remainder into Prussia.

Church in my village

After a century of occupation, Lithuania re-established its independence on February 16, 1918. The titular monarchy of the Monaco-born King Mindaugas II, the official government from July through November 1918, was quickly replaced by a republican government. From the outset, the newly-independent Lithuania's foreign policy was dominated by territorial disputes with Poland (over the Vilnius region and the Suvalkai region) and with Germany (over the Klaipėda region, German: Memelland). Most obviously, the Lithuanian constitution designated Vilnius as the nation's capital, even though the city itself lay within Polish territory. At the time, Poles and Jews made up a majority of the population of Vilnius, with a small Lithuanian minority of only 1%. Such demographic obstacles were the legacy of the Russian occupation of Lithuania from the early 19th century onward and the attendant purges, which reduced the population of ethnic Lithuanians throughout the country, and most especially within Vilnius. In 1939 the capital was relocated to Kaunas, which was officially designated the temporary capital of Lithuania. (see History of Vilnius for more details).

In 1940, at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A year later it came under German occupation, during which around 190,000 or 91% of the Lithuanian Jews were killed, one of the highest total mortality rates of the Holocaust. After the retreat of the Wehrmacht, Lithuania was re-occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944.

During the Soviet and Nazi occupations between 1940 and 1954, Lithuania lost over 780,000 residents. An estimated 120,000 to 300,000 of that number were killed or exiled to Siberia by the Soviets, while others chose to emigrate to western countries.

Fifty years of communist rule ended with the advent of perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s. Lithuania, led by Sąjūdis, an anti-communist and anti-Soviet independence movement, proclaimed its renewed independence on March 11, 1990. Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to do so, though Soviet forces unsuccessfully tried to suppress this secession. The Red Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower on the night of January 13, 1991, an act that resulted in the death of 13 Lithuanian civilians. The last Red Army troops left Lithuania on August 31, 1993 — even earlier than they departed East Germany

On February 4, 1991, Iceland became the first country to recognize Lithuanian independence. Sweden was the first to open an embassy in the country. The United States of America never recognized the Soviet claim to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Lithuania joined the United Nations on September 17, 1991. On May 31, 2001, Lithuania became the 141st member of the World Trade Organization. Since 1988, Lithuania has sought closer ties with the West, and so on January 4, 1994, it became the first of the Baltic states to apply for NATO membership. On March 29, 2004, it became a full and equal NATO member and on May 1, 2004, Lithuania joined the European Union.

WIKIPEDIA