History · Lithuania

Lithuania: The Last Pagan Empire

The medieval great power that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, joined to Poland for four centuries, partitioned by Russia, and reborn twice in the 20th century

By Worldlore Editorial · 10 September 2026

A skyline of baroque church towers and red rooftops across the old town of Vilnius
The old town of Vilnius, one of the largest surviving medieval city centres in Eastern Europe, founded by Grand Duke Gediminas around 1323. (Augustas Didžgalvis / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A small country with an imperial past

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic states, with about 2.9 million people and one of the most archaic living languages in Europe. Unlike its northern neighbours, it was never conquered by the medieval German crusaders — it was the last pagan state on the continent, and it became a great power, ruling a realm that ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. That empire, its four-century union with Poland, and its two 20th-century rebirths are the frame of Lithuanian history.

A short history

  1. 1253

    Mindaugas

    Lithuania's only king is crowned; the state forms against the crusaders.

  2. 1323

    Vilnius

    Founded by Grand Duke Gediminas.

  3. 14th–15th centuries

    The Grand Duchy

    Lithuania becomes the largest state in Europe.

  4. 1385–1387

    Union with Poland

    Jogaila becomes King of Poland; Lithuania is Christianised.

  5. 1410

    Grunwald

    The Teutonic Knights are decisively defeated.

  6. 1569

    The Commonwealth

    Poland and Lithuania merge into one state.

  7. 1795

    Partition

    Most of Lithuania is annexed by the Russian Empire.

  8. 1918

    Independence

    Lithuania declares statehood.

  9. 1940–1990

    Occupation

    Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet again; the Holocaust and deportations.

  10. 1990

    Restoration

    Lithuania is the first Soviet republic to declare full independence.

The Grand Duchy

The Lithuanian state coalesced in the 13th century as a military answer to the Teutonic and Livonian Orders pressing from the north and west. Then it expanded the other way — east and south, into the fragmented, Mongol-weakened lands of the Rus'.

The last pagan power

A historical map showing the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea
The growth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. By 1430 it covered modern Belarus, most of Ukraine, and parts of Russia and Poland — a mostly Orthodox, East Slavic realm ruled by a Lithuanian elite. (Knutux / Wikimedia Commons)
A detail from Matejko's crowded battle painting showing armoured knights fighting on horseback
The Battle of Grunwald, 1410, in Jan Matejko's painting. A joint Polish–Lithuanian army broke the Teutonic Knights, ending their expansion. (Jan Matejko / Wikimedia Commons)

Lithuania remained pagan until 1387, when — as part of a dynastic union in which Grand Duke Jogaila became King of Poland — it accepted Catholic baptism, the last major European people to convert. The two states drew closer until the Union of Lublin in 1569 merged them into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of Europe's largest states, a noble republic with an elected king. Over the following centuries the Lithuanian nobility Polonised, and Lithuanian survived mainly as a peasant language. Vilnius, meanwhile, became a world centre of Jewish learning — "the Jerusalem of the North".

Partition and the press ban

The Commonwealth was carved up by Russia, Prussia and Austria between 1772 and 1795, and most of Lithuania passed to the Russian Empire. After failed uprisings in 1830–31 and 1863–64, Russia closed Vilnius University and, from 1865, banned printing Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet — a ban defied for forty years by book smugglers carrying Lithuanian books from Prussia. Out of that resistance grew a distinct Lithuanian national movement, separate from the Polish one.

Independence, occupation, and the Holocaust

Lithuania declared independence on 16 February 1918, then fought wars against Soviet Russia and Poland — which seized Vilnius, the historic capital, and held it throughout the interwar period, forcing Lithuania to govern from Kaunas. A parliamentary democracy gave way to an authoritarian government after a 1926 coup.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact assigned Lithuania to the Soviet Union, which occupied and annexed it in June 1940. Nazi Germany then occupied Lithuania from 1941 to 1944, and the Holocaust there was almost total: about 95 per cent of Lithuania's roughly 200,000 Jews were murdered, mostly by shooting in 1941, with heavy local collaboration.

A stone memorial in a forest clearing at Paneriai, where mass shootings took place
The memorial at Paneriai, outside Vilnius, where tens of thousands of Jews were shot in 1941. The killings ended a Litvak Jewish civilisation nearly a thousand years old. (Adam Jones / Wikimedia Commons)

The Red Army returned in 1944. An armed anti-Soviet partisan movement, the "Forest Brothers", fought on until about 1953, and mass deportations to Siberia — more than 130,000 people — broke rural resistance and forced collectivisation.

Restoration

Lithuania led the Baltic push for independence.

1988–1991

A vast open-air crowd at a 1988 rally in Vingis Park, Vilnius
A rally in Vilnius on 23 August 1988 condemning the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The reform movement Sąjūdis drove Lithuania toward independence. (Lithuanian Central State Archives / Wikimedia Commons)
An unarmed man standing in front of a Soviet tank in Vilnius, January 1991
Vilnius, 13 January 1991. Soviet troops storming the TV tower killed 14 unarmed civilians; the crowds held, and the USSR backed down. (Andrius Petrulevičius / Lithuanian Central State Archives / Wikimedia Commons)

On 11 March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare the full restoration of its independence. Moscow imposed a blockade and, in January 1991, tried force — and failed. Recognition followed the August 1991 coup, and the last Russian troops left in 1993.

Lithuania now

Lithuania joined NATO and the EU in 2004 and the euro in 2015. Emigration has cut the population by about a quarter since 1990. Because Soviet-era immigration was lighter than in Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania stayed about 80 per cent ethnic Lithuanian. It has taken a hard line toward Russia and Belarus — hosting NATO forces, sheltering the Belarusian opposition, and clashing with China over Taiwan — as a front-line state bordering both Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad exclave.

What Lithuania carries

Lithuania is the only Baltic nation that was once an empire, and the memory of the Grand Duchy — vast, multi-ethnic, tolerant, and joined to Poland — sits behind its modern identity. Between that height and the present lie the partitions, the press ban, the Holocaust that erased Vilnius's Jewish world, and fifty Soviet years. That the small modern republic exists at all is, as in 1918, a recovery from an empire's fall.

Explore the destination