Tomas van Quint wrote:
quote:
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Originally posted by Vrykolakas
I also have a very active interest in World War I as the event that almost single-handedly manufactured our modern times.
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Well, I don't know about that one, it seems like that gives way to much credit to 'the big butchery'.
Yup, that was part of the picture - butchery on a scale and in ways Europe had never seen before. The social, economic and political impact was suitably immense.
Vilnius is in Lithuania isn't it? how come your family is polish then?
I'm going to really try hard to be brief here; brevity is not one of my virtues. Vilnius was founded either by the Lithuanians themselves or by some Eastern Slavic tribes (some dispute there) but it definitely became the focus and capital of the 13th and 14th centuries Lithuanian empire that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. In 1386 a weakening Lithuania signed an agreement with neighboring reviving Poland whereby the two independent states shared a common monarch (and therefore dynasty), an act that brought Lithuania into Christian Europe. Poland and Lithuania remained independent but cooperated closely in foreign policy since they had similar enemies (Russia, Teutonic Knights/Prussia, Sweden, Ottoman Turks, Tartars, etc.). Increasing Lithuanian weakness however prompted over the next two centuries both to increasingly merge until finally in 1569 at the Union of Lublin the two countries molded into one, with one government, etc. - ironically at a time when their mutual dynasty (the Jagiellonians) was just dying out. Over the two centuries of their shared monarchy (1386-1569) Poland took over more and more Lithuanian territories because it was more militarily powerful. For the next two centuries (1569-1795) many parts of Lithuania and Lithuanian society became Polonified, especially in the old capital, Vilnius (in Polish, "Wilno"). Russian captivity (1795-1918) did little to change this. One of the top 3 Classical 19th century Polish poets, Adam Mickiewicz, was from Lithuania and he began his epic 1840 work in Polish Pan Tadeusz with the line: "Litwo! Ojczyzna moje! Ty jestes jak zdrowie!" ("Lithuania! My Fatherland! You are like my own health to me!"). By 1900, Vilnius' ethnic population breakdown (by language) was something like this: Polish - 70%, Jewish/Yiddish - 20%, German - 5%, Lithuanian - 5%. The surrounding countryside was almost exclusively Lithuanian, but the city was heavily ethnically Polish. This created problems when independent Poland and Lithuania emerged after WW I, and the two in typical modern nationalist fashion fought a series of wars over the city (Poland won in 1922), poisoning their 20th century relations. (Poland's interbellum ruler/dictator, Józef Pilsudski, was born and raised in Vilnius.) In the 1920s and 30s Lithuania moved its capital "temporarily" to Kaunas, and the two countries didn't have any diplomatic relations until WW II.
In WW II the Soviets, as a part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, effectively occupied and annexed Lithuania and the Baltic states, but as a sop to the Lithuanians for destroying their state and enslaving them after the war the Soviets deported all of the non-Lithuanian elements of Vilnius (my family among them), which meant mostly Poles since the Jews had been killed by the Nazis and the Germans had fled before the Soviet Army. I believe the modern expression is "ethnic cleansing". Today Vilnius is nearly 100% ethnically Lithuanian.
This is a part of the mess that was Poland in 1944-1955; with some 2 million Poles being forcefully deported from Soviet Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine, some 10 million Germans being equally forcefully deported from the new Polish borders in Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia; several hundred thousand Ukrainians being deported from Poland because of the OUN civil war in southern Poland, 5 million Poles returning from slave labor in Germany, another 5 million Poles within Poland being homeless because their homes had been destroyed, and to boot more than 6 million war dead.
The Soviets continued deportations of Poles from formerly Polish areas of the USSR until 1955, when Khrushchov put a stop to it - although by then they had pretty much been wiped clean. There still are some lingering Polish communities, though mostly in rural locations and unfortunately in recent times they have become among the most reactionary, conservative elements in these countries (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine). It's embarrassing to read their newspapers. Often ethnic Poles and Russians have teamed up politically in these countries - and you just know that can't be a good thing.
That's how a Pole can have roots in Vilnius....
