Tėvyne Lietuva, mielesnė už sveikatą!
Kaip reik tave branginti, vien tik tas pamato,
Kas jau tavęs neteko.

They are the opening lines of a poem published in 1834 by a graduate of Vilnius University and classmate of the father of Lithuanian History, Simonas Daukantas. The lines are majestic in their emotive strength, tied in precisely with the vogue of romantic poetry. The speaker is alone, thinking of his homeland Lithuania, dearer to him than his very health. And this dearness and importance is amplified by the fact that he, and anyone who loves their homeland Lithuania, loves it the more since they know, and have felt, what it is like not to have a homeland to love.

Lietuvos Taryba. wikipedia

I hated V-16 as a kid, as the holiday was always marked with boring minėjimai in the claustrophobic basement of St. Peter’s in South Boston. And now that I’m an adult, the stench of strident nationalism has kept me away (as has abject laziness, academic commitments, Super Mario Galaxy, u.s.w.).

The stark way that Vincas asked the question, though, made me feel odd for not commemorating the event, so I decided to stage an anti-commemoration of sorts on these pages. That is, I’m not so certain that V-16 deserves our commemorating. The establishment of the Republic of Lithuania involved a lot of hard decisions regarding several competing tensions, all tugging away at different views of what that part of Europe should look like. It strikes me that in choosing as they did, the Lietuvos Taryba perhaps did more harm than good, creating animosities that last to this day. And while I hesitate to affix a valuative judgment on the enterprise as a whole, I think that a deeper understanding is very, very useful as a way of refashioning a self-understanding as “Lithuanian.”

The next three posts, then, will hopefully create the space for this anti-commemoration. The first post, which I hope goes up today, will be a sort of contextualization of the different theoretical conflicts in Lithuania at the time. It will be the most generally historical. The second part will be more about the actual results of the declaration of independence, mostly in the way it harmed relationships among various ethnic, religious, and social groups, wondering if the strident nationalist goal of an independent Lithuania was worth it. The third part will be a recovery, trying to imagine what a politically sound V-16 commemoration might feature.

Vilnius already has distinct features.

Now it is time to look at the few concrete examples that have already made it into the press. I have absurdly varying levels of commitment to each of the proposals, but I can already guarantee that the large bulk of this final post will be about the trying to get a Guggenheim Museum to come to Lithuania.