Outline of Lithuania
During the 14th century, Lithuania was the largest country in Europe, as present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569 Poland and Lithuania formed a new state: the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was finally destroyed by its neighboring countries in 1795. Most of Lithuania's territory was annexed by the Russian Empire, until the Act of Independence was signed on 16 February 1918, which declared re-establishment of a sovereign state. Between 1940 and 1945 Lithuania was occupied by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at different times. When World War II was near its end in 1944 and the Nazis retreated, the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania. On 11 March 1990, Lithuania became the first Baltic republic to declare its restored independence after 50 years of Soviet occupation.
Lithuania became a full member of the Schengen Agreement on 21 December 2007. In 2009, Lithuania celebrated the millennium of its name.Geography of Lithuania
Lithuania
After the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), when German diplomats assigned what were seen as Russian spoils of war to Turkey, the relationship between Russia and the German Empire became complicated. The Russian Empire resumed the construction of fortresses at its western borders for defence against a potential invasion from Germany in the West. On 7 July 1879 the Russian Emperor Alexander II approved of a proposal from the Russian military leadership to build the largest "first-class" defensive structure in the entire state – the Kaunas Fortress. Large numbers of Lithuanians went to the United States in 1867–1868 after a famine.Simonas Daukantas promoted a return to Lithuania's pre-Commonwealth traditions, which he depicted as a Golden Age of Lithuania and a renewal of the native culture, based on the Lithuanian language and customs. With those ideas in mind, he wrote already in 1822 a history of Lithuania in Lithuanian – "Darbai senųjų lietuvių ir žemaičių" ("The Deeds of Ancient Lithuanians and Samogitians"), though still not yet published at that time. A colleague of S.Daukantas, Teodor Narbutt wrote in Polish a voluminous "Ancient History of the Lithuanian Nation" (1835–1841), where he likewise expounded and expanded further on the concept of historic Lithuania, whose days of glory had ended with the Union of Lublin in 1569. Narbutt, invoking the German scholarship, pointed out the relationship between the Lithuanian and Sanskrit languages. A Lithuanian National Revival, inspired by the ancient Lithuanian history, language and culture, laid the foundations of the modern Lithuanian nation and independent Lithuania.