Tag: Lithuanian diaspora

A Variety of Topics at the Lithuania Diaspora Researchers’ Seminar

By Silvija Stankevičiūtė

Photo by Vygaudas Juozaitis / National Library of Lithuania

This May, the community of Lithuanian diaspora researchers gathered at the National Library of Lithuania for the eleventh time. The event featured a wide variety of topics.

The first half of the seminar focused on a recently launched eKultura.lt platform, the Lithuania’s largest digital cultural space. Dr. Giedrė Milerytė-Japertienė, Deputy Director General for Science and Outreach at the National Museum of Lithuania and a specialist at the Dizi company, presented the collections of audio and video recordings related to the Lithuanian diaspora and showed a few of curated content narratives, which will be gradually appear on the new platform.

The main geographical areas covered by the collected recordings include the United States, Argentina, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Radio programs created and produced by Lithuanian-American Giedrė Kumpikas for Lithuanian radio in New York, brought to Lithuania, transcribed, and cataloged, as well as recordings from the Lithuanian Archives Project, supplemented with metadata, will become part of the eKultura. The archival material from film director Arvydas Reneckis, who emigrated from Lithuania to the U.S. nearly four decades ago, will also be available soon.

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Researching Post-War West and Post-Soviet East

Gintarė Venzlauskaitė at the National Library of Lithuania. Photo by Dalia Cidzikaitė

On March 6, a Ph.D. student from the University of Glasgow, Gintarė Venzlauskaitė, stopped at the National Library of Lithuania to talk about her research, entitled “From the post-war West to the post-Soviet East: manifestations of deportations, collective memory and experience of Lithuanian diaspora.” Recently, she came back from the United States where she interviewed 30 Lithuanian emigres, or so called DPs, people displaced at the end of World War II. Currently, Gintarė is finishing her Russian trip that has lasted for 2 months and stretched over 16 cities, towns and villages, making it 17,000 km-long. In Siberia, she has been collecting testimonies from Lithuanian survivors of massive deportations of the Stalin era.