My Path

The Oldest Living Words

A language that remembers what others forgot

Lithuanian is one of the most archaic living Indo-European languages on earth. Linguists have long marvelled at how closely it mirrors Sanskrit — the ancient sacred language of India. The 19th-century scholar August Schleicher said a Lithuanian peasant could understand simple Sanskrit phrases. This is not coincidence. It is memory held in the mouth.

Every Lithuanian word carries meaning. Our names come from nature — Eglė (spruce), Rūta (rue), Aušra (dawn), Gintarė (amber). Our months tell us what the land is doing: Birželis (birch month), Liepa (linden month), Rugpjūtis (rye harvest), Lapkritis (leaf fall), Gruodis (frozen ground).

A Land of Water, Forest & Light

The geography that shaped everything

Lithuania is one of the greenest, cleanest countries in Europe. Forests cover a third of the land — mostly pine, spruce, and birch — and the country holds nearly 3,000 lakes, with vast underground water reserves beneath the surface. The air has a scent you notice the moment you step off the plane: pine resin, damp earth, something impossibly clean.

The Baltic Sea borders the west, and there — stretching 98 kilometres between sea and lagoon — lies the Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A ribbon of sand dunes, some rising over 50 metres, so fragile and so beautiful that large parts are protected from human foot. The Parnidis Dune near Nida is one of the tallest shifting sand dunes in Europe.

On the spit, tucked into the forest near Juodkrantė, is Raganų Kalnas — Witches' Hill. A winding trail lined with nearly 80 wooden sculptures carved by Lithuanian folk artists: witches, devils, spirits, tricksters, and mythological creatures that every Lithuanian child knows by name.

Amber — Tears of the Sea

Gintaras: the gold of the Baltic

Baltic amber is 40 to 60 million years old — fossilised tree resin from ancient forests that once covered northern Europe. Lithuania sits at the heart of the world's richest amber deposits, and for millennia, amber was the most precious thing the Baltic had to offer the world.

The Amber Road — an ancient trade route as significant as the Silk Road — carried Baltic amber south through Central Europe to the Adriatic, and onward to Rome, Greece, and Egypt. Baltic amber has been found in Mycenaean tombs and Egyptian burial chambers. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the Aestii — the Baltic peoples — and their amber gathering in 98 CE. Lithuania's connection to the Mediterranean is not new. It is thousands of years old.

In Baltic tradition, amber was called gintaras and worn for protection. Placed on newborns, burned as incense for purification, and carried as a talisman against illness. The legend of Jūratė and Kastytis says amber pieces washing ashore are fragments of the sea goddess's palace, shattered by the thunder god's fury.

Stories Every Lithuanian Carries

The legends that shaped our understanding of the world

The Old Ways, Still Living

Pagan holidays, straw gardens, charm work & the rhythm of the land

Lithuania was the last country in Europe to accept Christianity — not until 1387. The old faith didn't disappear. It folded itself into daily life, into the holidays, into the things our hands still know how to make.

Žolininkės — the charm women — carried knowledge of plants and spoken charms (užkalbėjimai) passed orally from mother to daughter across generations. This was not witchcraft. It was care — knowing which plant eases which burden, which words to speak over a feverish child, which roots to steep in winter. The knowledge was as ordinary as bread-making and as precise as prayer.

Linen and hemp were the fabrics of Lithuanian life. Flax was cultivated, spun, and woven for centuries on heavy wooden looms that took up half the room. Linen clothed us, wrapped our dead, decorated our ritual tables. But the cloth was more than material — each woven pattern was a message. Geometric motifs told others which region you came from, whether you were married, what your family honoured. The patterns were a language spoken through thread. Hemp gave us rope, oil, food, and cloth. Both crops are woven into our folk songs, our proverbs, our muscle memory. Lithuanian linen is still sought after around the world.

Sutartinės — the ancient polyphonic songs — were sung by two or three women whose voices wove in and out of each other in overlapping, repetitive patterns. Not performance, but practice. Meditative, almost trance-like, sung while working, walking, grinding grain. UNESCO recognised them as a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage. When I hear recordings of sutartinės, something in my chest remembers a rhythm I never consciously learned.

What My Hands Remember

The things that stayed in my body long after I left

Peeling kidney beans by hand for a whole day, sitting on the floor, playing in the pile of them like they were treasure. Swimming in wheat in my aunt's barn — burying myself in the grain until only my head stuck out, warm and dusty and golden. Peeling potatoes from the age of four, standing on a stool at the kitchen table, doing it badly but doing it. In the kitchen from as young as I can remember.

Outside, I pretended to cook — cutting herbs with blunt scissors, arranging them on leaves like plates. I remember cutting Queen Anne's lace and the smell of lilacs on a summer morning. The sun rising and coming in through the window at six, the cockerel crowing, and the whole day already begun. Running outside barefoot to open the greenhouse, pick up the eggs, swing on the swing, eat cucumbers straight off the vine with honey drizzled on top.

These are not memories I chose to keep. They kept themselves. They are the reason KoraKira exists — because my body never forgot what living close to the earth felt like, even when my mind tried to move on.

Living Close to the Earth

The Lithuania I carry is a country of rich, dark soil. Sunflower fields stretching to the treeline. Rye and potatoes pulled from the ground by hand. Snowy winters so deep and so quiet that the only sound was the crack of ice and the hiss of wood in the stove. Farm life was not romantic — it was hard, honest, and complete. Everything we needed came from the land, and what we took, we gave back.

This is the world my grandmother lived in. This is the rhythm KoraKira is trying to remember — not to recreate, but to honour. The connection between the Baltic and the Mediterranean is older than any border. Amber moved south, olive oil moved north. The trade routes that carried our gold to Rome are the same invisible threads that brought me to the south of Europe, where I live today. Some paths are older than we know.