Kingdom of Lithuania (1918)
The Kingdom of Lithuania was a short-lived constitutional monarchy created towards the end of World War I when Lithuania was under occupation by the German Empire. The Council of Lithuania declared Lithuania's independence on February 16, 1918, but the Council was unable to form a government, police, or other state institutions due to the continued presence of German troops. The Germans presented various proposals to incorporate Lithuania into the German Empire, particularly Prussia. The Lithuanians resisted this idea and hoped to preserve their independence by creating a separate constitutional monarchy. On June 4, 1918, they voted to offer the Lithuanian throne to the German noble Wilhelm, 2nd Duke of Urach. Duke Wilhelm accepted the offer in July 1918 and took the name Mindaugas II. However, he never visited Lithuania. His election stirred up controversy, divided the Council, and did not achieve the desired results. As Germany was losing the war and was engulfed in the German Revolution, Lithuania suspended its decision to invite Duke William on November 2, 1918, thereby ending his short reign.
Jonas Basanavičius
Born to a family of farmers, Basanavičius was to become a priest but instead chose to study medicine at the Moscow Medical Academy. He worked as a doctor from 1880 to 1905 in the Principality of Bulgaria. Despite the long distance, he dedicated substantial effort to the Lithuanian cultural work. He founded the first Lithuanian-language newspaper "Aušra" (1883), contributed articles on Lithuania to the press, collected samples of Lithuanian folklore (songs, fairy-tales, legends, riddles, etc.) and published them. He was also involved with local Bulgarian politics. He returned to Lithuania in 1905 and immediately joined Lithuanian cultural life. He became chairman of the organizing committee of the 1905 Great Seimas of Vilnius. In 1907, he founded the Lithuanian Scientific Society, a learned society dedicated to Lithuanian history, ethnography, linguistics. Basanavičius became chairman of the society and dedicated the rest of his life to its affairs. In 1917, he was elected by the Vilnius Conference to the Council of Lithuania. He chaired the council's session that adopted the Act of Independence of Lithuania on 16 February 1918 and was the first to sign it. In the aftermath of World War I, Vilnius changed hands and regimes several times, but Basanavičius refused to leave safeguarding city's museums, libraries, archives and continuing his lifelong research of Lithuanian cultural matters. After the Żeligowski's Mutiny in October 1920, Vilnius became part of Poland and Lithuanian activities were censored and limited. Basanavičius' continued presence in the city became a symbol of Lithuanian claims to the bitterly contested Vilnius Region. When he died in 1927, the Lithuanian government declared a five-day mourning period.