Lithuania has an amazing 700-year history as an international melting pot. This has been especially evident since 1323, the year Grand Duke Gediminas founded Vilnius as Lithuania’s capital city and immediately decided to invite merchants, craftsmen, bankers, farmers, and soldiers from all Europe to come to the new capital, guaranteeing all freedom of beliefs and good working conditions. Vilnius became international, though with less of German or Scandinavian influence, as one could expect, rather influenced by Italy and Mediterranean ideas – greatly different from the other two Baltic capitals where Hanseatic influence became dominant.

VilNews will over some time this autumn publish articles about impacts of foreign nations and cultures here. We also welcome you, dear readers, to share with us information you may have about ‘foreign footprints in Lithuania’.

THE DANES AND THE BALTS
A thousand years of coexistence

Danish sugar produced in Lithuania.

Text: Kaare E. Janson

From the time of the Vikings, more than a 1000 years ago, the neighbouring Baltic Sea and the various ethnic tribes that lived about its shores attracted the interest of the seafaring Danes.  In due course trade with these tribes began.  But it was a bellicose time when stronger nations sought to extend their domains by conquest.  These pagan tribes possessed great forests and to lay claim to them the Danes fought the Germans, the Swedes, the Finns, the Russians, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Prussians, and the Poles - but never the Lithuanians.  In fact, after Europe recognized Lithuania as an independent state and even later, when it formed a union with Poland, Lithuania and Denmark from time to time formed alliances to defend themselves from their common foes – the Germans, the Swedes, and the Russians.

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