Lithuania
The largest Baltic state, once a sprawling medieval empire
Lithuania is the southernmost and most populous of the three Baltic states, a country of about 2.9 million with a history far grander than its present size suggests. In the Middle Ages the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea, the largest state in Europe. Today it is a compact land of lakes, forest, and rolling farmland, fiercely Catholic and fiercely independent, the first Soviet republic to declare its freedom in 1990. Its capital, Vilnius, holds one of the largest baroque old towns in Eastern Europe.
The terrain is gently undulating, scattered with some 3,000 lakes and threaded by the Nemunas River, which empties into the Baltic past the slender dunes of the Curonian Spit, a UNESCO-listed sandbar shared with Russia's Kaliningrad. The highest point, Aukstojas, is a mere 294-meter hill. Forests of pine and birch cover roughly a third of the country. A humid continental climate brings cold winters and warm summers. The economy combines agriculture and food processing with lasers, biotech, fintech, and a fast-growing services sector centered on Vilnius and Kaunas.
Lithuanian is among the most archaic living Indo-European languages, prized by linguists for preserving ancient grammatical forms. United with Poland for centuries in a powerful commonwealth, Lithuania was absorbed by the Russian Empire, briefly independent between the world wars, and then occupied by the Soviet Union. Its 1990 declaration of independence, defended at the cost of lives in Vilnius in 1991, helped trigger the USSR's collapse. A member of the EU, NATO, and the eurozone, Lithuania has become a vocal defender of Baltic security on Europe's eastern frontier.