W is for Women

M was for men and in V we read about Vilnius having a 20% higher female population than men, so it feels right that W is for Women. Lithuania is of course the land of beautiful ladies (which gives me an excuse to inbed this video again)

There are three main types of Lithuanian woman in common parlance, močiutė, lietuvaitė and everyone else.

A močiutė - or grandma - is what our Russian friends might call a babushka. She's traditonally short, rounded, a little weather-beaten but still has plenty of fight about her. She cares for her family and she can tell you some amazing stories of what it was like in her day.

She can also batter her way onto a trolley bus with no remorse and will doubtless find a bargain everywhere and anywhere.

A lietuvaitė on the other hand is currently living in "her day". Literally meaning a Lithuanian girl/ young woman the name sums up tradition, village life, purity, youth, beauty, singing, patriotism and everything that the illustration below represents.It's this that many people - not just men - have in mind when their first question to newly arrived foreign men is, "what do you think of Lithuanian girls?"

I would have to concede that there does seem to be a higher percentage of attractive women in Lithuania than in other countries I have visited, but it becomes both uncomfortable and almost obscene as people ask your opinion of their womenfolk in the same way a farmer might begin selling his prize livestock.

Behind this pride in breeding stock lies a sadder and much less innocent reality. The divorce rate in Lithuania is perhaps the highest per capita in the EU, yet it is culturally more acceptable for a woman to be divorced than to have never married at all.

Lithuania is in many ways a matriarchal society. Except for politics and big business - where men rule the roost (though I'd be interested to meet their wives) - women often seem to be the ones who lead families, who do the hard graft both at work and at home, who go to church, who get involved in social projects and who want to create better futures. Even amongst students I find it is the young women who get higher marks, who speak more foreign languages, who travel and have dreams and plans for their lives - whereas the young men often seem content with the status quo and even if they're not, who don't seem to want to put in the effort to make any changes, firstly with themselves or with their surroundings.

Many men do have low self-esteem in Lithuania which is partly why many become alcoholics, therefore becoming less useful at work, often unemployed and leaving a wife to look after the house, the family and become a model to her children. I've also been told that because so many men have gone to fight over the numerous wars over the last century and a half, men have become a precious commodity and as a result "mothered" by their wives and mothers - sons treasured and allowed to do what they want while daughters have been made to work on the land and earn their due. This leads to men living in an extended adolesence whereas women mature even quicker than relative to their brothers.

V is for Vilnius, Village and Versions of history

Vilnius
To many urbanite foreigners Vilnius is a small town - 1 airport, 1 train station, 1 bus station and you could walk across it in a few hours. To many Lithuanians, Vilnius is a sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis. For first impressions of Vilnius, and because many of my readers are new, please read
B is for Beginnings.

Since I first arrived in Vilnius a little under three years ago, a lot has changed. There are a lot more new cars, the beer is about 20% more expensive (rising prices and a weaker pound), there's an Irish bar, more of the churches have been renovated, there are more expensive shops, there are more road signs guiding you to nearby streets and there are dozens of new shiny tower blocks being built. Vilnius is a city that is growing like any other (Central) European city. It is swallowing up the surrounding countryside to house more people as people come in from outside or as others move to newer premises. Others buy land just outside the city to build their own houses, in turn creating the beginnings of a modern suburbia.

A recent edition of the Baltic Times had a front page article headlined "City of Women".

High suicide rates, alcoholism and emigration have led to females outnumbering men by more than 20 percent in Vilnius, according to the most recent government statistics. The Statistics Department released numbers indicating that despite similar birth rates, women outnumber men in Vilnius in all adult age groups. Other cities show similar trends.

One woman who recently made big news in Vilnius was Bjork. She played live, outside in Vingio Park to an audience of 8'000, of whom I was one, right at the front. Her final song was Declare Independence, which seemed very fitting as Vingio Park was home to the "Singing Revolution" when even larger crowds (parents of today's young Bjork fans) would gather to sing national and traditional songs during the latter years of the Soviet Union.

This is the official video. There's some live footage on youtube, but it won't let me embed it.

Village

Where Vilnius represents modernity, the future, realised dreams, creativity, (and a greater chance to find a wife?) "The Village" represents something quite different but perhaps even more important in the Lithuanian psyche.
Going to "the village" means more than a trip to the countryside. It means returning to parents and grandparents, to sandy-dirt roads, to wooden houses, stone churches, immaculately carved wooden crosses by the roadside, infrequent buses, clean air, lakes, forests and farms.
One might argue that Lithuanians, deep in their soul are agricultural people. Vilnius itself was mostly populated with Poles and Jews up until the early 20th Century. For Lithuanians the land is important for identity and for life. It's in the countryside and the villages that they fought the Partisan War, the resistance movement against Soviet Union. It's the villages that suffered under collective farming. Returning to the village is returning to the very idea of Lietuva, to tevyne - the fatherland - of their ancestors.

It's also the land of hard work, little profit, unemployment, and alcoholism. It's unsurprising that like most of the world, the young people move away to the cities for education and work. Yet it is those same young people who seem to have a wild glint in their eyes when they tell me they're going "home to the village" for the weekend or for the summer.


Versions of History

Lithuania's history before, during and after World War II is a sad and often complex affair. Recent history never seems far from current affairs and in the last few weeks, as Pime Minister Kirkilas visited Jewish communities in New York. The BBC's Crossing Continents recently reported,"A judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Lithuania has led to accusations that the small Baltic state is trying to distort the history of World War II."

For copyright reasons and general manners, I shan't repeat the whole article and would rather you read it in its entirety on the bbcnews webpage (click the above quote).

If you want to even begin to try and understand the situation in the 1940's, it's worth asking yourself, especially if you're a young man, this question,

"who am I going to fight for? Hitler's Nazis or Stalin's Soviet Union?"