The Wolf and the Cross: An Orthodox Pilgrim’s History of Lithuania by Ancient Faith Publishing

An Orthodox Pilgrim’s History of Lithuania

ancient faith publishing

Andrew Stephen Damick

Seraphim Richard Rohlin

chesterton, indiana

The Wolf and the Cross: An Orthodox Pilgrim’s History of Lithuania

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Published by:

Ancient Faith Publishing

A Division of Ancient Faith Ministries

1050 Broadway, Suite 6 Chesterton, IN 46304

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Authors’ Note: When a quotation or folk story does not contain a footnote source, the quotation and/or story has been written in the authors’ own words.

Photos by Bill Damick and Andrew Stephen Damick

Cover art and design by Sophie Ries

ISBN: 978-1-955890-83-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025938430

Printed in the United States of America

For Bill Damick

Brigid Rohlin

And in Memory of Antanas Petras Domeika and Olga Paulina Weiland

Robert, Albert, and Bertha Damick

George and Zanell Jackson

Along with them the stork came back to our fair land, And, husbandlike, atop the roof displayed his voice.

While he gazed and rejoiced, his sweet and loving spouse

Appeared upon the sill in gay and joyful mood

And met her gentle mate with glad and gleaming beak. They found the old thatch roof much damaged and despoiled; And even their abode, built but a year ago, Was weather-beaten, bent, and sagging on each side.

The very walls and beams and sturdy parapets

Were torn and blown away by the relentless gales.

Doors wrecked, sills fallen off, and ev’ry window gone:

The northern wrath had wrought its havoc on their home.

And so they both at once, as good homemakers should, With courage and in faith began to build again.

The husband fetched great loads of branches, rods, and twigs

With which his spouse patched up their home to suit her taste.

And when their long and hard repairs were fully done

The two of them flew off to a green marsh nearby;

Then having caught and gorged some fatter frogs and toads

Together gratefully they gave their thanks to God!

—Kristijonas Donelaitis, “Joys of Spring”

Foreword

In 2020, I was managing the social media page of what was likely the first-ever Lithuanian Orthodox parish to hold services entirely in Lithuanian. One day, an American priest began commenting on posts about the saints of Lithuania. He asked if we had a list of these saints and posed similar questions. I responded to him with a message, and word by word, a lifechanging friendship began.

Father Andrew Stephen Damick turned out to be one of the hosts on Ancient Faith Radio and later became the chief content officer of Ancient Faith Ministries. This came as a great surprise to me, as I had been a listener of the station—though not specifically of Fr. Andrew’s shows. One of my favorite radio personalities from AFM was Fr. Thomas Hopko, of blessed memory. Through Fr. Andrew, I became a devoted fan of The Lord of Spirits.

I feel that The Wolf and the Cross is, in some ways, a practical application of The Lord of Spirits. When you travel through places and contemplate not just their material reality but also the stories behind them, you begin to re-enchant the world. You start to hear and see things that remain invisible to the secular, indifferent bystander.

Gazing at the Curonian Lagoon, you can see the silhouette of the giantess Neringa, who filled her apron with sand and, standing in the Baltic Sea, spilled it into the water to form the Curonian Spit. Looking at Trakai Castle, you can sense the spirits of the great medieval dukes and the soldiers who fell defending the ancient Lithuanian state. Standing on the Hill of Three Crosses and overlooking Vilnius, with dozens of crosses adorning the rooftops of its ancient churches, you realize how many Christians have prayed here through the ages, finding their eternal resting place near the churches they loved.

When Fr. Andrew and Richard came to Lithuania, it felt almost unbelievable—America is so far away! We also didn’t know if there would ever be another opportunity to show them the country. And, of course, they were preparing the documentary that would later become the foundation for this book. So we did our best to pack everything into a single trip.

The pilgrimage aimed to showcase both the history of Lithuania and its statehood—so dear to all Lithuanians—as well as the history of Orthodox Christianity in the country. This was no simple task, as Lithuania is a predominantly Catholic nation where, for many generations, Orthodoxy has been associated with Russian imperial politics.

Because Lithuania is a predominantly Roman Catholic country, its history is often presented through a Catholic lens. However, Lithuanian book culture began with the Protestant Reformation—the first book ever published in Lithuanian was a Lutheran catechism written by Pastor Martynas Mažvydas. Additionally, during the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the majority of the population was Ruthenian Orthodox. Yet today, both Protestant and Orthodox communities are small, and their historical contributions have often been overshadowed in the telling of Lithuania’s history. One of the key tasks for these communities during the national revival at the end of the twentieth century was to reclaim their own Lithuanian history and reaffirm their place within Lithuanian society.

For Orthodox Christians, this task was even more challenging due to the legacy of Russian imperial history. If you consider Lithuania’s past, the country has almost always been either in conflict with Russia or under its occupation.

Tensions with the Principalities of Rus’ began almost immediately after the formation of the Lithuanian state, following the assassination of King Mindaugas. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Lithuania and Moscow were in constant struggle for control over Slavic lands, trade routes, and influence in Eastern Europe. After the Union of Lublin (1569), Lithuania merged with Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which remained a major rival to Russia. However, Russia gradually gained the upper hand, culminating in the Partitions of the Commonwealth (1772, 1793, 1795), after which most Lithuanian ethnic lands were annexed by the Russian Empire (a small portion was annexed by Prussia).

During 120 years of Russian imperial rule and colonization, Lithuanians faced Russification and repression but responded with two uprisings (1831 and 1863) and formed an underground movement to preserve their ethnic culture. After briefly regaining independence in 1918, Lithuania sought neutrality, but in 1940 it was occupied by the Soviet Union, the political successor to the Russian Empire. When Lithuania declared the restoration of independence in 1990, the Soviet regime responded with crackdowns, culminating in the bloody events of January 1991.

After the dissolution of the USSR, it seemed that the struggle was finally over. However, in 2008 the Russo-Georgian War reignited concerns, and when war broke out in Ukraine in 2014, the question arose once again: How safe is Lithuania?

Sadly, this historical background has tainted the reputation of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania. Most people know little about Orthodoxy, except that it is “the Russian faith” and that it was the religion imposed on Lithuanians by the Russian Empire. Many have also heard that during imperial times, “the Russian emperor was the head of the Orthodox Church,” a reference to the synodal period when there was no patriarch and the emperor influenced a lot of decisions.

Moreover, since 2014, the close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government only reinforced these negative perceptions. Many associated the local Orthodox communities of Lithuania with Russian politics.

It is true that during Fr. Andrew and Richard’s pilgrimage, the only operating Orthodox Church in Lithuania was the Russian Orthodox Church (also known as the Moscow Patriarchate). But even while my brothers and sisters in Christ and I were still within the Moscow Patriarchate, it was important for us, as Lithuanian citizens, to reclaim our history from Russian imperial politics, rediscover our identity free from its influence, and tell our story anew.

This does not require artificially rewriting history. In fact, from the beginnings of Lithuanian Christianity until the seventeenth century, Orthodox Christians in Lithuania were actually under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and had their own unique culture. It was the imperial narrative that artificially rewrote the local history to fit its own agenda after the local Christians were

“moved” to the Russian Church. The new narrative proposed the idea that, actually, the local communities were always Russian.

In 2023, I witnessed an extraordinary historical event: His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew visited Lithuania and reestablished the presence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. It was the first visit of an Ecumenical Patriarch to Lithuania since the visit of Patriarch Jeremias II in 1589. During his visit, His All-Holiness addressed Lithuanian politicians in the parliament, speaking about the history of Orthodoxy in these lands and helping to dismantle the harmful stereotype that Orthodoxy is exclusively Russian.

Authentic Christian mission always goes hand in hand with the process of inculturation. As His All-Holiness said in conversations with priests, no one needs to become Greek or Russian to be Orthodox. On the contrary, Orthodoxy bears witness to the gospel’s universal message in different languages and cultures. That is precisely why Ss. Cyril and Methodius translated the liturgy into Slavonic. And yet, it is unfortunate that only in the past twenty years have we begun celebrating the Divine Liturgy in Lithuanian.

In this sense, although Lithuania has an ancient Orthodox history, Lithuanian Orthodoxy itself is still quite young. In this regard, I feel we have much in common with American Orthodox Christians, which is why I have always loved listening to Ancient Faith Radio.

Both in Lithuania and America, the work of translation and inculturation is an ongoing effort, and the Orthodox are a minority. In Lithuania, we exist between East and West, and the faithful of the Moscow Patriarchate live side by side with those of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, leading to an exchange of different Orthodox customs. This is evident in liturgical practices, music, and iconography, which contain elements from different cultures and also from the medieval Lithuanian Orthodox culture (which itself was a unique synthesis). When I watch broadcasts of services from America, I notice many similarities stemming from the similar cultural interchange. Additionally, one of my seminary professors was a student of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, and many of my young parishioners listen to Ancient Faith Radio programs, so we are not unfamiliar with what is going on in America.

For all these reasons, I believe this book will not only be valuable to Americans—who can embark on a pilgrimage of the mind to Orthodox

Lithuania through the centuries by reading these pages and perhaps even visiting in person someday—but also to Lithuanians seeking a fresh perspective on their history. Guided tours of Orthodox Vilnius (or Ruthenian Vilnius) have recently emerged as a new genre, attracting both tourists and locals who were previously unaware of the rich history of their Orthodox neighbors.

By the way, many of these historical Ruthenians in the past migrated to America and helped establish the Orthodox Church there, which further reinforces my belief that Orthodox Lithuania and Orthodox America are like long-separated cousins. In any case, we are truly brothers and sisters in Christ.

I hope that this book will make the spiritual ties between our communities stronger and maybe will deepen someone’s faith. Lithuania has a whole heavenly community of martyrs, confessors, and other saints who inspire us even today. Through their prayers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us!

—The Rev. Dr. Gintaras Jurgis Sungaila

On the Day of the Re-Establishment of the Statehood of Lithuania, February 16, 2025

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book took three years to write, but in some sense, I have been writing it my whole life. It was not intended as a book initially but rather began its life as a podcast documentary with the same title, based on a 2022 pilgrimage I took with my daughter Evangelia and my friend Richard (now Deacon Seraphim) Rohlin. The ostensible purpose of the pilgrimage was that documentary, but its deeper purpose for me was to reconnect a cord that had been broken.

My great-grandparents Antanas and Olga Domeika (Anthony and Olga Damick) came separately to the United States from Lithuania around the turn of the twentieth century, and in short order took up the task of being Americans, cutting the cultural, linguistic, and historical cord that had bound them to their Baltic family history for untold generations. They passed almost nothing of who their families had been in Lithuania to their children, including my grandfather. So I went to see what I could discover, and along the way I found that Lithuania also had a deep, fascinating, and varied Orthodox Christian history.

That Orthodox story is one I believe Orthodox Christians in the English-speaking world need to know. It is a story of shifting borders, changing culture, ascensions and defeats, all with Orthodox Christians as a minority religious group among pagans initially and then Roman and Greek Catholics. It is also a story of adoption and adaptation, of taking whatever is good from the surrounding culture and offering it to Christ in His Holy Orthodox Church.

Because this book came from a pilgrimage and also because this story is actually many stories, its structure, while generally following a diachronic

historical narrative, is not strictly linear. The book, rather, is structured like our pilgrimage itself, with introductory passages, historical context, lives of saints, legends, fairy tales, travelogue, and encounters with wonder-working icons, liminal spaces, and holy shrines. That is why many of the chapters are short and do not necessarily flow directly from the previous chapter. This book is also not a straightforward history (even religious history) of Lithuania, though I hope the reader will come away with a solid working knowledge of that history, particularly because most people in the English-speaking world have very little (if any) knowledge of Lithuania.

Certain parts of this text are written in the first-person voice, and we have indicated which of the two of us is the speaker. This matters because the book includes thoughts from both of us that are quite personal—and in certain cases we want you, the reader, to have, as much as possible, the sense that you are on pilgrimage with us. Although Richard is now Deacon Seraphim, we have used Richard throughout the text because that is the name he used when we were on pilgrimage.

It may seem a strange thing to mention, but we are very much aware that how one spells names of people and places can be the subject of controversy, and that is true of subjects in this book. In choosing spellings, we generally tried to use the most common versions found in English or Lithuanian, and if it was a toss-up, we chose transliterations closest to the endonyms used in the modern country in question. We are philologists and historians, not ideologues, so one shouldn’t read any agenda into our orthographical choices.

It is something of a cliché to call a large project a “labor of love.” This one certainly qualifies, however, and not only in the sense that we did this because we loved it. The path from pilgrimage to publication is a path of friendship and of family. In this pilgrimage, Richard and I, already friends and collaborators, became bound together with something immutable. It was also my great privilege and joy to bring my daughter along on the original pilgrimage but then two more of my children and also my father Bill on further journeys to Lithuania.

While we were in Lithuania, we met Fr. Gintaras Sungaila, his wife Justina, and many other new friends. We are indebted to all of them, but most especially to Fr. Gintaras. He is almost a coauthor of this book. He not only guided

us through our 2022 pilgrimage and took up the mantle again twice more when I returned in 2023 and 2024, but he also has been a close collaborator, reading the scripts for the documentary and offering comments. If you listen to the podcast documentary version of this story, you will hear his voice many times. In this book, his voice is embedded everywhere, absorbed into the narrative. Over the past few years, we have become fast friends, knit together initially by our mutual love for Lithuanian Orthodox history but now by virtue of Christian friendship. Labai ačiū, mano drauge. Tavo kunigystę teatmena Viešpats Dievas Savo Karalystėje visaĩs laikaĩs.

As each of us, whoever and wherever we are, stand over the bones of our ancestors—even if it cannot be literally so—may we pray for them and never forget that Christ unites all of us across the sweep of history and in whatever lands we find ourselves.

Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, 2025

Almost the first thing I ever read concerning the Orthodox Church was an account—written by a Protestant author—of the life of St. Seraphim of Sarov. In this account, the author mentioned that St. Seraphim had a particular icon of the Mother of God before which he prayed. Captivated by both his life and this icon, I commissioned a copy of it from an iconographer in St. Petersburg. Bear in mind, I was still a Baptist minister at the time! This was the beginning—or at least, one of several beginnings—of my journey to the Orthodox Church. It was also the beginning of my relationship with the culture, history, and people of Lithuania.

The story of that icon, and its relation to the famous wonder-working icon of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, is one of the stories you will read in the pages of this book. There is another story that does not come into this tale, in which my family received a miraculous healing at the Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God, another icon with deep significance in the life of St. Seraphim. It’s important to mention these encounters since unlike Fr. Andrew, I do not (to my knowledge) have any Lithuanian ancestors. When he invited

me to go with him on this pilgrimage to Lithuania, I was going first and foremost to see her. It was a true pilgrimage, an opportunity to go and stand before her icon and offer thanks for the grace that God had bestowed upon us through her intercessions.

What I found, to my great surprise, was that Lithuania was exactly the place I’d always hoped existed somewhere in the world. The people, the food, the countryside, and most of all, the old town of Vilnius itself captivated my heart and imagination. I am deeply grateful to our Lithuanian friends for their hospitality and to Fr. Andrew for taking me on this adventure. Working on The Wolf and the Cross documentary, and on this book, has meant that Lithuanian history, culture, and the saints that hallowed it, have been a constant part of my life for the last three years.

In assisting Fr. Andrew with the task of writing this book, I have been particularly focused on the myths and legends, as well as on the stories of the Lithuanian saints and wonder-working icons. As someone whose prior religious life was so often devoid of color, beauty, and wonder, the time I have spent writing the hagiography for this book has been a deep balm for my soul and an unlooked-for fulfillment of my writer’s vocation. Through their prayers, I hope to return to Lithuania one day soon and introduce my children to this land between the forest and the sea.

Deacon Seraphim Richard Rohlin Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, 2025

The Baltic Sea

Journey with us in your mind to the ancient shores of the Baltic Sea. It is a cold northeastern arm of the Atlantic Ocean, resting between Scandinavia at the west and the Baltic nations to the east. Within its depths lie the remains of an ancient, primeval evergreen forest from which fossilized tree sap has washed up to the eastern shore for untold millennia. Beginning at least 3,500 years ago, a sea-born golden-reddish jewel was carried along the Amber Road south to the Mediterranean, adorning courts from the senators of Rome to the kings of Syria to the pharaohs of Egypt and throughout the world.

One hundred sixty-three miles of the eastern shore of the Baltic belongs to the modern country of Lithuania, from which amber still makes the journey out into the world. One-fifth of that coastline is protected by the Kuršių nerija , the Curonian Spit, a long sandbar that is said to have been thrown there by a young giantess named Neringa to ward off evil storms sent by an angry suitor.

Poised between East and West, between Orthodox and Catholics, this last of Europe’s pagan nations did not forget its ancient tales of the giantess Neringa, Eglė Queen of Serpents, or the Iron Wolf, but rather remembered them, and added to them the legends of the Hill of Crosses and the miracle-working icon of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn.

In this green northern land, history and legend have met and fused. With the martyrdom of Ss. Antanas, Eustachijus, and Jonas in 1347, the Baltic sun cross once carried by pagans became the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Lithuania was once the largest country in Europe. Its earliest Christian contacts were with the Orthodox Church, and the first church built in Lithuania was an Orthodox church.

Through centuries of history, from its first and only king Mindaugas, to the time of the grand dukes, to the union with Poland in the Commonwealth of Two Nations, to the partitioning between the empires of Eastern Europe, to early independence in the twentieth century, to invasions and occupations of both Nazis and Soviets, to becoming the first nation to break away from the Soviet Union, this proud people has kept their faith in Christ—among them, centuries of Orthodox Christians and dozens of saints.

But there is still much work to be done in this little land where Orthodox Christians are a minority. So let us now walk with them a little while on pilgrimage—to venerate at their holy places, to pray before their miraculous icons, to learn their legends, to meet their saints, and to worship our Christ.

St. Bruno and the Balts

The Annals of Quedlinburg , written at Quedlinburg Abbey in central Germany, say that in the year 1009 St. Bruno, also called Boniface, an archbishop and monk, was killed by pagans at the border of the Rus’ Kingdom and Lithuania, along with eighteen of his companions, who entered into heaven on the ninth of March: “Sanctus Bruno, qui cognominatur Bonifacius, archiepiscopus et monachus, XI suae conversionis anno in confinio Rusciae et Lituae a paganis capite plexus, cum suis XVIII, VII. Id. Martii petiit coelos.”1 Bruno had been working as a missionary in the area for about a year, baptizing a tribal leader named Netimer, chieftain of the Yotvingians (Lith. Jotvingiai), an early Baltic tribe whose territory was roughly in what is now southwest Lithuania. He was beheaded by Netimer’s brother Zebeden, who hanged Bruno’s fellow missionaries.

This brief note of mission and martyrdom written in Latin is the earliest-known mention of the name Lithuania. It would be almost four hundred more years before the Christianization of Lithuania, the last pagan nation in Europe.

But in 1009, Lithuania was not even a nation. Instead, it was a collection of Baltic tribes spread along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea—from Old Prussia, now Kaliningrad Oblast and northern Poland, up through the lands next to the Gulf of Riga in modern Latvia.

1 Albinus and Fabricius, Chronicon Quedlenburgense

But where are these places? Where is the Baltic Sea? And what is the story of these people?

Father Andrew: From August 15 to 25, 2022, my friend Richard and I took a pilgrimage to Lithuania, along with my teenage daughter Evangelia. For me, this was the trip of a lifetime, though I did not know at the time that I would return multiple times in the years that followed. My great-grandparents Antanas and Olga Domeika immigrated separately from Lithuania to America around the turn of the twentieth century, and except for one visit home for Olga in 1936, no one in my family had been back to our ancestral homeland. The memory of Lithuania and its culture disappeared when they died, erased in a single generation. And with that new American generation losing touch with each other over their lifetimes, even the memory of our Lithuanian history was lost. So by the time I was born in the mid-1970s, three generations after the immigration, Lithuania was just a name, a word for some distant point in the past. For the first half of my life, if you had asked me what it meant to be Lithuanian, I would have had no answer to give, though I could point it out to you on a map.

Especially after I became an Orthodox Christian in early adulthood, I began to be interested in the history and especially the Orthodox history of Lithuania. So I made contact with Orthodox Christians in Lithuania and began to learn from them. I also began to research as best as I could the people from my family—the Domeika family—that here in America for my little branch became Damick .

I went to Lithuania not only to venerate its holy places and to meet its Orthodox Christians, but also to see if I could somehow heal something that had been broken, an old wound. For me, this pilgrimage wasn’t about trying to become something that I am not, to claim something that I was not given. I am not one of those native-born Americans who makes a big deal out of ethnic heritage and claims it as central to their identity.

For me, the pilgrimage was about connection, both old and new. As with all pilgrimage, it was about integration; it was to receive something that God would give me, to make it now my own, and to bring it back and tell the story to those who would listen.

Richard: In August of 2022, I had the opportunity to travel with Fr. Andrew to his ancestral homeland. Now, as far as I know, none of my ancestors are from Lithuania, though some of them—Scandinavian explorers, merchants, and pirates—almost certainly sailed the Baltic. For as long as I can remember, my imaginative landscape has been dominated by the misty shores of that sea, their vast pine forests, rivers, and valleys there at the crossroads of East and West. I had gleaned these images from the literature of the Middle Ages— sagas, chronicles, romances, and heroic poetry—but until a few years ago, my impressions of that part of the world were relegated to the distant past. Then, two things happened to change that.

The first was that, for a period of time, my wife and I fostered a young girl from the Baltic states. She arrived knowing very little English, and so I made an effort to learn some words of her Latvian language so that we would be able to communicate in some basic ways. We took her into our home and our hearts, and for her part, she taught us about her culture and even introduced us to Latvian cuisine.

The second thing that happened, right around that same time, is that I (along with my wife and children) became an Orthodox Christian. With these relationships, my connection to the shores of the Baltic was more than academic: It was wrapped up in friends, adopted family, and saints my family learned to love and venerate.

My own patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov, kept a particular icon of the Mother of God in his cell. Unusually for an Eastern icon, it depicted the Theotokos without the Christ child. She is depicted from the waist up, her hands folded on her chest, her head bowed in the act of prayer and assent—for, it is said, this icon depicts her at the moment of the Annunciation, when she gives her assent, her fiat to the Archangel, and becomes the mother of Emmanuel, God with us. Saint Seraphim was found on his knees before this icon when he reposed.

I was captivated by this icon from the moment I first saw and read about it, and I commissioned a reproduction of it before I was even a catechumen. As it turns out, this icon is almost visually identical to (and there are reasons to believe it may be a distant copy of) an important Lithuanian icon known as Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn.

I have a personal theory that goes something like this: It is through Mary, the Mother of God, that Christ became incarnate within time and history. Therefore, a culture, a civilization, a nation is not really Christianized—has not really manifested the reality of the Incarnation—until it has its own particular icon of the Mother of God. For Lithuanians, and particularly for the people of Vilnius, Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn is that icon.

We’ll say more about this beautiful wonder-working icon in a later chapter, but suffice it to say for now that this icon has been very important to me, my relationship with the Theotokos, and my journey to the Orthodox Church. So when Fr. Andrew asked what I’d be interested in seeing in Lithuania, there was really just one answer. I wanted to go and see Our Lady. Along the way, I venerated several other wonder-working icons of the Theotokos, kissed the bones of the martyrs, and encountered Christ in the faces of my brothers and sisters in the Faith—and I gained a fresh perspective on what it means to be an Orthodox Christian in the age in which we find ourselves.

We owe a great debt for our pilgrimage to Fr. Gintaras Sungaila and his wife Motinėlė Justina Trinkūnaitė-Sungailienė. Father Gintaras and Motinėlė

Justina generously gave us ten days of their time, traveling with us throughout Lithuania and teaching us many things along the way.

You may have noticed that Fr. Gintaras and Motinėlė Justina seem to have two different surnames—his is Sungaila and hers is Trinkūnaitė-Sungailienė .

So here’s one of your first lessons in Lithuanian culture.

Lithuanian men have a last name that gets altered for their daughters and their wives. So his name is Sungaila while hers is Sungailienė . That ending means it’s her married name. If they had a daughter, the name would be Sungailaitė .

Justina’s maiden name is in there, too—Trinkūnaitė , which is a form of Trinkūnas. She uses this because of her professional work as a composer and musician. Using both maiden and married names in this way is common in Lithuania.

If the Damick family used traditional Lithuanian surnames, the father and sons’ surname would be Domeika , the wife’s would be Domeikienė , and the

daughters’ would be Domeikaitė . So in one family you can have three different versions of one family name.

We met Fr. Gintaras through the internet a couple years before we made our pilgrimage, so we were already friends, but by the time the pilgrimage was done we had truly become fast friends, brothers in Christ. Father Gintaras was also the best possible guide for us because the story we want to tell you is framed by Lithuanian history, and he’s a great historian. We pilgrims and Fr. Gintaras all love history, and Lithuanians have a sense of their history that understandably goes pretty deep.

It’s impossible to transmit that same feeling for history without actually being part of a culture, but we hope that by the end of this book, you will begin to have a sense for how Lithuanians feel about the long story of their land, from ancient Baltic paganism to the modern period.

In a moment we will talk about that Baltic paganism, the religion practiced in what is now Lithuania, as well as in the lands to its immediate west and north. But who are these ancient and last pagans? Where do they live?

First, this word Baltic—that’s not a word these people applied to themselves or to their religion. When referring to these ancient people, Baltic is a modern academic word, though it was used to refer to the sea near which these people lived as far back as the third century bc. But now the word is used in the languages of the three Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—to refer to their region, and it’s used in English that way, too.

Modern Lithuania is a small country about the size of the American state of West Virginia, home to 2.8 million people. It’s at the same latitude as Newfoundland in Canada. If you look at a map of Europe, it is in the northeast, due east of Denmark and northern England, lying on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.

To its north is Latvia. To its southeast is Belarus. Southwest is Poland, and it shares a western border with the small Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. At various points prior to the nineteenth century, some or all of these territories were part of the Lithuanian state.

As Lithuania emerged as a state onto the global map in the early thirteenth century, two distinct Lithuanian tribes inhabited most of the region—in the

east, the Aukštaitians (the highlanders), and in the west, the Samogitians (the lowlanders). But there were other Baltic tribes—the Curonians out on the coast, the Skalvians, Prussians, and Yotvingians to the southwest, and the Semigallians, Selonians, and Latgalians to the north, in what is now Latvia. Most of these groups had various subtribes, as well.

These people were the descendants of Baltic tribes that had lived in this region since about 2000 bc. In modern times, some of these tribes became ethnic groups within Lithuania, and the country’s population remains one of the most genetically distinct in the world. Until the medieval period, most Baltic tribes had little contact with the outside world, and very little is known about their prehistoric life beyond a handful of archaeological finds and linguistic traces left in the names of rivers.

Many linguists believe that the languages spoken by these Baltic peoples had their ancient origins in a proto-Balto-Slavic tongue, with the Baltic languages emerging in the west and the Slavic languages in the east. Some, however, argue that the Baltic languages were never joined with the Slavic but only have similarities because of loanwords crossing between languages.

That said, while there are many Slavic languages still being spoken, such as Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Bulgarian, only two Baltic languages remain—Latvian and Lithuanian. There were historically several others, including Old Prussian, a west Baltic language. The last Old Prussian speaker died in the early eighteenth century.

Lithuanian is the oldest Indo-European language still being spoken. What does that mean? The Lithuanian language preserves many archaic features that stretch far back into the Indo-European language past. This largest of the language families of the earth includes such diverse modern tongues as French, Hindi, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Danish, German, Russian, Welsh, and English.

All of these languages and many more have their origins in one ancient Proto-Indo-European language, which changed in numerous ways over thousands of years and resulted in hundreds of distinct languages. The one living language that has held onto these ancient roots most tenaciously is

Lithuanian, which is why it has many words that are very close to Sanskrit, the language of ancient India.

If you’ve ever learned Latin or Greek or other inflected languages, you know how difficult it can be to learn all the case endings to figure out how a word fits into a sentence. Lithuanian has two grammatical genders for nouns and three for adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and participles. There are twelve noun declensions declined in seven cases, five adjective declensions, and one participle declension. In the indicative and indirect moods, verbs can have eleven different tenses.

Accent on words is irregular and has to be learned by rote. Lithuanian uses a modified form of the Latin alphabet, with thirty-two letters. All this complexity is part of why there are not very many people who learn Lithuanian as a second language.

Not everyone in Lithuania speaks what is called “Standard Lithuanian.” The Samogitians in the western part of the country speak their own dialect that is mostly mutually intelligible with the standard dialect but also has a lot in common with Latvian to the north.