Read The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17)

The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17)

Jonathan Bousfield

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Description:Introduction The Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are far from being the grey, Soviet-scarred republics that many people imagine them to be. For a start, they’re graced by three of the most enthralling national capitals in Eastern Europe, each highly individual in character and boasting an extraordinary wealth of historic buildings, as well as an expanding and energetic nightlife and cultural scene. Outside the cities lie great swathes of unspoiled countryside, with deep, dark pine forests punctuated by stands of silver birch, calm blue lakes, and a wealth of bogs and wetlands, all bordered by literally hundreds of kilometres of silvery beach. Peppering the landscape are villages that look like something out of the paintings of Marc Chagall, their dainty churches and wonky timber houses leaning over narrow, rutted streets. As you’d expect from a region periodically battered by outside invaders, there are dramatic historical remains aplenty, from the grizzled ruins of the fortresses thrown up by land-hungry Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, to the crumbling military installations bequeathed by Soviet occupiers some 700 years later. Although the half century spent under Soviet rule has left Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians with a great deal in common, they’re each fiercely proud of their separate status, and tend to regard the "Baltic States" label as a matter of geographical convenience rather than a real indicator of shared culture. The Latvians and Lithuanians do at least have similar origins, having emerged from the Indo-European tribes who settled the area some two thousand years before Christ, and they still speak closely related languages. The Estonians, on the other hand, have lived here at least three millennia longer and speak a Finno-Ugric tongue that has more in common with Finnish than with the languages of their next-door neighbours. In historical and religious terms, it’s the Lithuanians that are a nation apart – having carved out a huge, independent empire in medieval times, they then converted to the Catholic faith in order to cement an alliance with Poland. In contrast, the Latvians and Estonians were conquered by Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century and subjected to a German-speaking feudal culture that had become solidly Protestant by the mid-1500s. From the eighteenth-century onwards, the destinies of the three Baltic peoples began to converge, with most Latvians and Estonians being swallowed up by the Tsarist Empire during the reign of Peter the Great and the Lithuanians following several decades later. Despite their common predicament, no great tradition of Baltic cooperation emerged, and when the three Baltic States became independent democracies in 1918–1920 – only to lose their independence to the USSR and Nazi Germany two decades later – they did so as isolated units rather than as allies. The one occasion on which the Baltic nations truly came together was in the 1988–1991 period, when a shared sense of injustice at what the Soviet Union had done to them produced an outpouring of inter-Baltic solidarity. At no time was this more evident than when an estimated two million people joined hands to form a human chain stretching from Tallinn to Vilnius on 23 August, 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – the cynical Soviet-Nazi carve-up that had brought the curtain down on inter-war Baltic independence. Baltic fellow feeling became less pronounced in the post-Soviet period when each country began to focus on its own problems, and it’s now the differences – rather than the similarities – between the Baltic peoples that most locals seem eager to impress upon visitors. How different they actually are remains open to question, with both locals and outsiders resorting to a convenient collection of clichés whenever the question of national identity comes under the Lithuanians are thought to be warm and spontaneous, the Estonians distant and difficult to know, while the Latvians belong somewhere in between. In truth there are plenty of ethnographic similarities linking the three nationalities. A century ago the majority of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians lived on isolated farmsteads or small villages, and a love for the countryside, coupled with a contemplative, almost mystical feeling for nature, still runs in the blood. Shared historical experiences – especially the years of Soviet occupation and the sudden re-imposition of capitalism that followed it – have produced people with broadly similar outlooks and, wherever you are in the Baltic States, you’ll come across older people marked by fatalism and lack of initiative and younger generations characterized by ambition, impatience and adaptability to change. The Baltic peoples today are also united by gnawing concerns about whether such relatively small countries can preserve their distinct identities in a rapidly globalizing world. The rush to join NATO and the EU has been...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17). 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Description: Introduction The Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are far from being the grey, Soviet-scarred republics that many people imagine them to be. For a start, they’re graced by three of the most enthralling national capitals in Eastern Europe, each highly individual in character and boasting an extraordinary wealth of historic buildings, as well as an expanding and energetic nightlife and cultural scene. Outside the cities lie great swathes of unspoiled countryside, with deep, dark pine forests punctuated by stands of silver birch, calm blue lakes, and a wealth of bogs and wetlands, all bordered by literally hundreds of kilometres of silvery beach. Peppering the landscape are villages that look like something out of the paintings of Marc Chagall, their dainty churches and wonky timber houses leaning over narrow, rutted streets. As you’d expect from a region periodically battered by outside invaders, there are dramatic historical remains aplenty, from the grizzled ruins of the fortresses thrown up by land-hungry Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, to the crumbling military installations bequeathed by Soviet occupiers some 700 years later. Although the half century spent under Soviet rule has left Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians with a great deal in common, they’re each fiercely proud of their separate status, and tend to regard the "Baltic States" label as a matter of geographical convenience rather than a real indicator of shared culture. The Latvians and Lithuanians do at least have similar origins, having emerged from the Indo-European tribes who settled the area some two thousand years before Christ, and they still speak closely related languages. The Estonians, on the other hand, have lived here at least three millennia longer and speak a Finno-Ugric tongue that has more in common with Finnish than with the languages of their next-door neighbours. In historical and religious terms, it’s the Lithuanians that are a nation apart – having carved out a huge, independent empire in medieval times, they then converted to the Catholic faith in order to cement an alliance with Poland. In contrast, the Latvians and Estonians were conquered by Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century and subjected to a German-speaking feudal culture that had become solidly Protestant by the mid-1500s. From the eighteenth-century onwards, the destinies of the three Baltic peoples began to converge, with most Latvians and Estonians being swallowed up by the Tsarist Empire during the reign of Peter the Great and the Lithuanians following several decades later. Despite their common predicament, no great tradition of Baltic cooperation emerged, and when the three Baltic States became independent democracies in 1918–1920 – only to lose their independence to the USSR and Nazi Germany two decades later – they did so as isolated units rather than as allies. The one occasion on which the Baltic nations truly came together was in the 1988–1991 period, when a shared sense of injustice at what the Soviet Union had done to them produced an outpouring of inter-Baltic solidarity. At no time was this more evident than when an estimated two million people joined hands to form a human chain stretching from Tallinn to Vilnius on 23 August, 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – the cynical Soviet-Nazi carve-up that had brought the curtain down on inter-war Baltic independence. Baltic fellow feeling became less pronounced in the post-Soviet period when each country began to focus on its own problems, and it’s now the differences – rather than the similarities – between the Baltic peoples that most locals seem eager to impress upon visitors. How different they actually are remains open to question, with both locals and outsiders resorting to a convenient collection of clichés whenever the question of national identity comes under the Lithuanians are thought to be warm and spontaneous, the Estonians distant and difficult to know, while the Latvians belong somewhere in between. In truth there are plenty of ethnographic similarities linking the three nationalities. A century ago the majority of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians lived on isolated farmsteads or small villages, and a love for the countryside, coupled with a contemplative, almost mystical feeling for nature, still runs in the blood. Shared historical experiences – especially the years of Soviet occupation and the sudden re-imposition of capitalism that followed it – have produced people with broadly similar outlooks and, wherever you are in the Baltic States, you’ll come across older people marked by fatalism and lack of initiative and younger generations characterized by ambition, impatience and adaptability to change. The Baltic peoples today are also united by gnawing concerns about whether such relatively small countries can preserve their distinct identities in a rapidly globalizing world. The rush to join NATO and the EU has been...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17). To get started finding The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17), you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17)

The Rough Guide to The Baltic States (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Jonathan Bousfield (2004-05-17)

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