Lithuania History FDC

Lithuania FDC
Name: 1000th Anniversary of Lithuania
Issue date: 2007 June 23rd

One of the first expressions of the Lithuanian national revival after the uprising of 1863 was the newspaper “Aušra”, which was issued in 1883–1886 in Eastern Prussia and edited by Jonas Basanavičius. The newspaper was secretly carried through the border and spread in Lithuania. “Aušra” helped to awake the Lithuanian national consciousness and to unite Lithuanian intellectuals. It also gave an impulse to develop Lithuanian periodical press.

The prohibition on Lithuanian press in Latin characters gave birth to such a phenomenon as secret carrying of books, when Lithuanian books, printed in Eastern Prussia, were secretly transported to Lithuania. Massively spread Lithuanian press and an open dissatisfaction of Lithuanian intellectuals forced the authority of Tsarist Russia to abolish the prohibition on the 7th of May, 1904.

The growing Lithuanian national movement of liberation encouraged its leaders to look for various ways of uniting the nation. On the 4–5th of December, 1905, in Vilnius a meeting of Lithuanians took place, known as the Great Seimas of Vilnius. The delegates who gathered to the meeting formulated a demand for Russia, which was suffering from the revolution, to grand Lithuania a political autonomy within ethnographic Lithuania with a democratically elected parliament (seimas). The Great Seimas of Vilnius put the foundations of Lithuanian statehood.

On the 11th of December, 1917, the Council of Lithuania declared the reestablishment of the State of Lithuania and on the 16th of February, 1918, it proclaimed the Independence of Lithuania. All 20 members of the Council of Lithuania signed the Act of Independence at former Didžioji Street No. 30 (present Pilies Street No. 26). The Act of Independence legally marked the birth of a modern national state.

1000th Anniversary of Lithuania Series FDCs
2007, 2008, 2009.