Culture as a way of life
Culture finds expression everywhere in Lithuania: in the country’s identity, its sense of community, how it understands its past, present and future, and as a singular voice for freedom. We are a singing nation – song helped carry us to independence in the Singing Revolution. Today, we gather with our Baltic neighbours for the UNESCO-recognised Song and Dance Celebration (Dainų šventė). And we proudly champion bold modern cultural spaces, from the contemporary art of MO Museum to the Lost Shtetl, a museum of Jewish life and memory.
The Baltic Way to independence
The spirit of the Singing Revolution reached a high point on 23 August 1989. On that day, about one in four people in the Baltics joined hands to form a 600-kilometre human chain stretching from Tallinn through Riga and down to Vilnius. This powerful demonstration, known as the Baltic Way, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009.
Cultural spaces worth knowing
The cultural credentials of MO Museum and the Lost Shtetl are undeniable. MO, which opened in Vilnius in October 2018, was Studio Libeskind’s first project in the Baltics. It now displays around 6,000 works charting the journey of Lithuanian art from the 1960s onwards, much of it once considered taboo by the Soviet authorities.
The Lost Shtetl, designed by Rainer Mahlamäki, the architect behind Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, is equally captivating, recreating a lost shtetl townscape complete with its distinctive rooflines. At the heart of the museum’s appeal is a heartfelt blend of photographs, artefacts and personal stories from the Jewish descendants of Šeduva. Further afield, the Stasys Museum in Panevėžys, though less widely known, shares the same vision of creating spaces with a singular voice, focusing on the work of artist Stasys Eidrigevičius.
Globally and UNESCO-celebrated artistic heritage
It’s safe to say that Lithuania punches above its weight when it comes to cultural impact. One of the country’s most famous sons is undoubtedly the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. Having fled Nazi-occupied Lithuania in the 1940s with his brother Adolfas, Jonas settled in New York. For more than half a century, Mekas documented and took part in many movements, some of which he spearheaded, including Fluxus, founded by another Lithuanian émigré, George Maciunas (Jurgis Mačiūnas). Mekas also documented Andy Warhol’s Factory and was friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Also of note is the émigré artist Aleksandra Kasuba, whose environmental art graces many public spaces across the US.
In the humanities, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (Gimbutienė), the semiotician Algirdas Julius Greimas and the Kaunas-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas have all had a lasting influence on Western thought.
Back at home, a number of Lithuanian landmarks and cultural traditions have received the highest international accolade: UNESCO designation. Take the interwar modernist architecture unique to Lithuania’s second city, Kaunas. Then there’s the country’s intangible heritage, which quite literally finds its voice in sutartinės, a unique form of multipart polyphonic singing, and in the Song and Dance Celebration (Dainų šventė), held every four to five years.