Perhaps the Least Known and Most Interesting Little Nation in the World

They say that people have lived hereabouts since the last Ice Age, and possibly before that. They say that around thirty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon man from France, and Lungby man from Denmark, started migrating and met up somewhere in northern Germany, and together, continued eastward along the shores of the Baltic Sea. By the time they reached my country, the present Lithuania, they had homogenized into one genus, Baltic Man. Here, along the fertile shores of the river they called Nemunas, secure in clearings surrounded by thick forests, they stayed and stopped roaming. They took up farming, and in their language called themselves as arejai, or plowmen, Centuries later, others would refer to them as arians.
Their language gave the world many words. Their word meaning end—galas, gave us Gaelic, their name for the people who lived as far at the end of the sea as they could sail. The edge of France, became Gaul, and the western end of Spain—Galicia. Their ancient name for the amber which they traded in the Brithish Isles, sakas, earned the people who bought it and traded it to the Mediterraneans, the name of Saxons, and their word for coal—anglis, became synonymous with the place they went to get it and started to call Anglija. I could tell you about many more words and names that we gave the world, I could talk about our Grand Duke Vytautas, who extended my country from the Baltic in the north, all the way down to the Black Sea in the south. I could talk about how he broke the back of the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Tannenberg, but I am afraid I would be tedious.

For me, being born a Lithuanian is all about music in the country that calls itself “Dainava”—Land of Song.
In the words, of renowned archeologist Marija Gimbutas, "For about 190 days of the year cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, collected from the whole village, were kept in pastures and guarded by an old shepherd, who made music on a buck's horn, and shepherd children, who played flutes and quaint wooden pipes. In the fields, around fires, as well as by the mother's spindle wheel and loom during long winter evenings, folk/songs and tales flourished and were transmitted from generation to generation. Collective field labours were followed by songs, sung in rotation by several voices, and with refrains which harmonized with the rhythm of harvesting, and flax and hemp plucking and drying. From lullabies and wedding songs to songs of lamentation during wakes, man's life was inseparable from daina, 'the song' (in the folkloristic archives of Lithuania and Latvia there are about 500, 000 collected songs, leading us to wonder how many more may have disappeared in past ages and with the Russian Occupation). The Balts sang ceaselessly, as though singing were as necessary and as easy as breathing. And their songs for all occasions reflect these people's feeling of kinship with mother earth and her many creatures, and appreciation of her manifold gifts".

Uz Tevyne ir Tave!