Baltic

The Baltic tradition covers the Lithuanian and Latvian peoples — the two surviving Baltic-speaking nations — along with the historical regions of Old Prussia, Curonia, and Samogitia that absorbed or were absorbed by them. Estonian belongs linguistically to the Finno-Ugric family and is generally treated separately, though it shares much of the same regional history. The Baltic languages preserve features lost in every other branch of Indo-European; Lithuanian in particular is closer to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European than any other living language.

What the tradition produced, despite a millennium of pressure from larger neighbours, is a culture with unusually deep folk roots. The Latvian dainas — short folk songs collected in the nineteenth century by Krišjānis Barons — number in the hundreds of thousands and represent one of the largest oral literatures ever assembled. Lithuania, the last European nation to convert to Christianity (1387), retains pre-Christian folk material in active use. The Catholic Baroque inheritance, the Vilnius and Riga architectural traditions, and the twentieth-century recovery of national sovereignty round out a culture much larger than the population numbers would suggest.

We cover the Baltic languages and folk traditions, the medieval and early-modern history, the Catholic inheritance, the national-revival period, and the contemporary cultural life of Lithuania and Latvia.