Traditions that survived

Hey there! Yesterday I told you my origin story really briefly of how I got where I am now.

But let me just go more into detail about some things of that story that I believe will be interesting to hear.

So today I want to go back to the episode where I didn’t find anything or almost anything about Baltic mythology and couldn’t understand why.

I will paint you a mental picture of how Lithuania looked back then when I was a teenager with an obsession for fairy-tales and legends.

Lithuania had just gained it’s independence from Soviet Union. After the joy period and the grief-over-victims period was over, started a very hard rebuilding the state in all possible angles period. We were occupied by Soviet Union for over 50 years. With all the terrible repressions, exiles and murders of thousands of innocent people during that time, the mentality and attitude of everyone who survived the Soviet Union was changed. People were still afraid to say what they think, to think what they want or to show who they really are. Did you know that even celebrating Christmas in your family during the occupation was considered worth penalty of death or lifetime exile to Siberia? Children not excluded. Yeah, that does things to people’s minds.

So, naturally, no one really wanted to admit that they knew more than they say about the cultural heritage of Lithuania when I started digging. They were still afraid that someone might be listening somewhere around the corner. All traditions were suspended for a very long time. And the fact that I wasn’t yet an adult didn’t help. Nobody took me seriously. That little that I managed to find out could fit in a small workbook. Just bits and scraps about some of the old gods and customs.

Of course, that didn’t make my curiosity just go away. I remember how fascinated I was when my grandmother told me that our most important god was the thunder god Perkunas. And only then I connected all the little sayings that people used with that name to the actual god.

But anyway, only later I found out that there were very little written sources that survived the wars and occupations (not just from the Soviet Union, but the earlier ones). And those which remained were mainly written by Christian writers, who didn’t really care about those traditions, but rather wanted to show them as the wrong ones to compare with Christianity. Lithuanians were the last Indo-European nation to become Christianized, only doing so after a long crusade to force us to convert. So the main part of the old belief system might be lost, but the remains of that can be found in the unique fairy-tales and legends, that I am so exited about.

Now there are some very serious researchers who writes about Lithuanian cultural heritage and archeology and things you can find out from the oldest living indo-european language. But I will not bore you with scientific stuff.

In fact, let me tell you a story.

It’s a legend of the founding of Vilnius (capital of Lithuania).

Grand Duke, Gediminas, was on a hunting trip in the forests of Šventaragis valley around the mouth of the River Vilnia. When night fell, the party, feeling tired after a long and successful hunt, decided to set up camp and spend the night there. While he was asleep, Gediminas had an unusual dream in which he saw an iron wolf at the top of the mountain where he had killed a European bison that day. The iron wolf was standing on the top of a hill with its head raised proudly towards the moon, howling as loud as a hundred wolves.

Awakened by the rays of the rising sun, the Duke remembered his strange dream and consulted the main priest Lizdeika about it. The latter interpreted the dream as follows: ‘Let that happen to the Ruler and the Lithuanian State what was fated to happen!’ He told the Duke that the dream was a direction to found a city among these hills. The howling of the wolf, explained the priest, represented the fame of the future city: that city will be the capital of Lithuanian lands, and its reputation would spread far and wide, as far as the howling of the mysterious wolf…’

So the Grand Duke of Lithuania, obeying the will of gods, immediately started to build the future capital, and took it the name — Vilnius — from the stream of the rapid Vilnia.