Lithuania

The Baltic state that was once the largest country in Europe, and the first to declare its way out of the Soviet Union. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded across Belarus and Ukraine in the fourteenth century and at its height reached from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea, governing an overwhelmingly Orthodox Slavic population from a pagan court - it was the last polity in Europe to adopt Christianity, in 1387. Dynastic union with Poland from 1385 and the Union of Lublin in 1569 produced the Commonwealth, a noble republic with an elected monarch that was partitioned out of existence by 1795. Russian rule banned Lithuanian printing in Latin script for forty years, and books were smuggled from Prussia by a network of carriers now nationally commemorated. Independence in 1918 was followed by the loss of Vilnius to Poland for two decades. Soviet annexation in 1940, German occupation and the destruction of a Jewish community that had made Vilnius a centre of Jewish learning, then Soviet return and an armed partisan resistance that lasted into the 1950s. Lithuania declared independence restored in March 1990, before any other republic, and survived a Soviet crackdown in Vilnius in January 1991. It joined the EU and NATO in 2004. Kaliningrad borders it. Vilnius is the capital and Kaunas served in that role between the wars. The country has about 2.8 million people. The Hill of Crosses near Siauliai was bulldozed repeatedly under Soviet rule and rebuilt each time. Basketball is effectively the national sport.

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