Lithuania

The Lithuanian language — Europe's most archaic living tongue

Lithuanian is the oldest surviving Indo-European language — so conservative in its grammar and vocabulary that 19th-century linguists described it as closer to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European than Sanskrit, preserving case endings, verb forms, and words that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit abandoned two millennia ago, making it a Rosetta Stone for understanding how all European languages began.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania — Europe's largest medieval state

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1236–1569 CE) was, at its peak in the early 15th century, the largest state in Europe — stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, encompassing modern Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia — a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire that conducted diplomacy in Ruthenian (Old Slavonic) rather than Lithuanian.

The Battle of Grunwald — the greatest medieval battle

The Battle of Grunwald (15 July 1410 CE) — pitting the Polish-Lithuanian army under Jogaila and Vytautas against the Teutonic Knights — was the largest battle in medieval European history: 39,000 Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-Tatar troops against 27,000 Teutonic Knights, ending in the complete destruction of the Teutonic Order as a military force and securing Lithuania's western frontier permanently.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — Europe's first democracy

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795 CE) created by the Union of Lublin was one of history's most unusual states: a noble republic (Rzeczpospolita) of 700,000 nobles (10% of the population) who elected their king, exercised the liberum veto (any single noble could dissolve parliament), and created a multi-ethnic state of Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Jews, Germans, and Tatars.

Soviet Lithuania and the partisan resistance

Soviet occupation of Lithuania (1940–1941 and 1944–1990 CE) was accompanied by mass deportations of Lithuanian civilians to Siberia, the murder of Lithuania's Jewish population (200,000 people — 95% of Lithuanian Jews — killed in 1941, one of the Holocaust's highest proportional death rates), and an armed partisan resistance (the Forest Brothers) that continued fighting until 1953.

Lithuania's independence declaration — the first to leave the USSR

Lithuania's declaration of independence (11 March 1990 CE) was the first by any Soviet republic — a direct challenge to Gorbachev that he initially refused to recognise, imposing an economic blockade before backing down in the face of international pressure, and establishing the precedent that Soviet republics could legally separate from the USSR.