The Balts

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In the amber country along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, the forest never quite gave way to the cathedral. While Saxony built its bishoprics and Poland its abbeys, the woods between the lower Vistula and the upper Daugava kept their old shape: oaks that no axe was permitted to touch, clearings where a fire was fed and never allowed to die, priests who read the will of the sky in the flight of birds and the fall of lots. The people who tended these things were not Slavs, though they lived beside the Slavs and their tongues were cousins. They were the Balts — and they were the last in Europe to be baptized.

The eastern branch

The Balts are a group of peoples on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea who speak, or spoke, the Baltic languages: a distinct limb of the Indo-European family. Linguists place Baltic and Slavic together in a Balto-Slavic grouping, close kin born of a long shared neighborhood, yet the two are not the same and the Balts are not a Slavic people. What sets the Baltic tongues apart is their conservatism. Lithuanian and Latvian, the only Baltic languages still spoken, retain a number of archaic features — case endings, sound-patterns, whole roots — that have worn away elsewhere, so that Lithuanian in particular is often called the most archaic living Indo-European language, a speech in which a comparative philologist can still hear something close to the ancestral grammar. (This is a claim about structure, not about age: every living language is exactly as old as every other. It means that Lithuanian changed slowly.)

There was never a single Baltic nation. The name covers a scatter of tribes spread across the forests and river valleys between the Vistula and the Dnieper headwaters, and scholars sort them into two wings. The East Balts became the peoples we still know: the Lithuanians, gathered from the Aukštaitians and the Samogitians of the lowlands, and the Latvians, who absorbed the Latgalians, the Semigallians, the Selonians, and the seafaring Curonians. The West Balts are the lost ones — the Old Prussians, the Sudovians or Yotvingians, the Galindians, the Scalvians — tribes of the southwestern coast and the lake country, whose names survive mostly on the maps of those who conquered them. By the high Middle Ages the Balts held roughly the ground their descendants hold now, the Lithuanians and Latvians in their two countries, with the old Prussian lands long since folded into Germany.

This is a people known almost entirely from the outside. The Balts left no scriptures, no temple archives, no native chronicle of their gods — the religion lived in speech, in song, and in the gesture of ritual, and was written down only by strangers. What we have are the reports of those who came to convert or to conquer: the German and papal chroniclers of the crusading centuries, the treaty-makers of the Teutonic Order, and, much later, the antiquarians of the Renaissance, who described a paganism already half a memory. Behind these stand two further witnesses, late and oblique: the folk-songs that the Lithuanian and Latvian peasantry kept singing for centuries after the lords were baptized, and the spade, which turns up the cremation grounds and the hill-forts. Every confident sentence about Baltic religion is a sentence reconstructed from such fragments, and the honest history keeps the seams showing.

The sky, the oak, and the fire

At the head of the Baltic sky stood Dievas — in Latvian Dievs — whose very name is the old Indo-European word for the daylight god, the bright sky itself, the same root that gives Sanskrit Dyaus, Greek Zeus, and Latin the deus that means simply “god.” He is the high father, remote and benevolent, less a character in stories than the presiding brightness over them. Beneath him moved the working powers of the world, and the most active of these — the one the chroniclers heard named first and feared most — was Perkūnas, in Latvian Pērkons: the thunder.

Perkūnas is the god of storm and oak and striking fire, and his name is one of the clearest threads tying the Balts to the wider Indo-European cloth. It stands beside the Slavic Perun, the thunder-wielder of the Rus and the western Slavs; beside the Vedic rain-god Parjanya; and it shares its root with the Norse thunderer’s mother, Fjörgyn. The same divine pattern surfaces across the family — the sky’s champion who carries the lightning and the storm — and in the Baltic forests it wore the face of Perkūnas. He dwelt in the oak, the tree the lightning loves, and so the oak was his; to fell one carelessly was to lay hands on the god. In the folk imagination his great antagonist was Velnias, lord of the dead and the underworld, whom Perkūnas pursues across the sky with his hammer-stroke and his bolt — a duel of thunder and chthonic shadow that the later songs preserve, and that students of comparative myth read as a Baltic cousin of the storm-god’s combat told all across the Indo-European world.

Caspar Hennenberger’s 1584 print of the three Old Prussian gods (Patrimpas, Perkūnas, Patulas), after Simon Grunau. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Around these stood the bright host of the calendar and the home. Saulė, the sun, was a goddess, mother and mistress of the sky’s daily round; Mėnulis or Mēness, the moon, her wandering and unfaithful husband; Aušrinė, the morning star, the dawn-bringer who lights Saulė’s path. These are not idle personifications. The Baltic folk-songs sing of the sun’s marriage and the moon’s betrayal, of Saulė riding her copper wagon down into the sea each night and the daughters of the sun drying their kerchiefs on the branches of the world-tree — a whole mythology of light kept alive in verse. Set against the sky-powers were the powers of the ground: Žemyna, the earth-mother of the Lithuanians, the soil that receives the seed and the dead, honored with the first and last draughts of the feast; and the fate-goddess Laima of the Latvians, who stood at the threshold of every birth and apportioned what a life would hold. A typical Indo-European pairing runs through the whole: father sky above, mother earth below, and between them the labor of living.

The Baltic gods were not housed in temples in the manner of the south. The proper place of worship was the alkas — the sacred grove or holy site, a stand of old trees, a spring, a stone, a hill set apart. Within it the rules were absolute: no axe might cut, no animal be hunted, no blood be shed except in the ordained sacrifice. The grove was the god’s own ground, and to violate it was sacrilege rather than trespass. In such places, and at the hearth of the community, burned the perpetual fire — the sacred flame fed by appointed keepers and never permitted to go out, a fire whose extinction would have been a calamity for the whole people. Tending these flames and reading the omens were the priests, of whom the chronicles name a chief: the krivis. A crusading account of the early fourteenth century speaks of a great priest, a Kriwe held in reverence by Prussians and Lithuanians alike, whose word and whose messengers carried authority across the tribes. How much organized priesthood the Balts truly possessed is uncertain — the figure may be magnified in the telling — but that there were keepers of fire and readers of signs the sources agree.

The dead were not gone. Baltic religion held a strong cult of the ancestors, who lingered near the living and were fed and remembered, their souls bound up with Velnias’s underworld realm and, in the songs, set walking along the Milky Way, the road of the departed across the night sky. The funeral was a passage to be done correctly, the grave a place of continuing obligation. Here as everywhere the frame is one in which the world is densely populated — the sky tenanted, the earth maternal, the grove forbidden, the fire holy, and the dead still in the neighborhood.

Perkūnas, the thunder-god, painted in 1909 by the Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Romuva, and the limits of the record

One name has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for the whole of Baltic paganism: Romuva. In the early sixteenth century the Prussian chronicler Simon Grunau described a central sanctuary of that name, the holy heart of Old Prussian religion — a perpetually green oak hung with the images of a triad of gods, Patrimpas of spring and fortune, Perkūnas of thunder, and Patulas of the dead; an eternal fire; vestal keepers; and over all the supreme priest, the Kriwe of Kriwes, a kind of pagan pope of the Baltic forests. It is a vivid picture, and it has shaped every romantic vision of the Balts since.

It is also, in large part, a construction. Here the registers must be kept apart. That the Balts had sacred groves, perpetual fires, and a priesthood is well attested. But Grunau’s Romuva as a single great temple with a unified hierarchy is treated by modern scholarship with deep skepticism. The supposed site has never been located, by the Teutonic Knights who would have prized its destruction or by archaeologists since; no independent source corroborates Grunau’s elaborate detail; and the historian S. C. Rowell has argued that an earlier chronicler, Peter von Dusburg, may have shaped the account precisely to make Baltic heathenism legible to Christian readers as a kind of counter-church, with its own pontiff and its own creed — the better to be opposed. The “trinity” of gods, the centralized priesthood, the temple itself: these may be a Christian frame laid over a religion that had no such center. What lies underneath is most likely an ordinary alkas, a holy grove, whose importance was magnified in the retelling until it became a cathedral of the woods. The grove was real. The temple, as the Renaissance described it, is partly a thing made later — and the modern movement that took the name Romuva took it from this disputed page.

The long agony and the last baptism

The Balts entered written European history mainly as the objects of crusade. In the thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights — a German military order redirected from the Holy Land to the Baltic frontier — launched a holy war against the heathen of the southeastern coast, and its first and fullest victims were the Old Prussians. Tribe by tribe, over decades of conquest, rebellion, and reconquest, the Prussian lands were broken to the Order’s rule. The native nobility was destroyed or absorbed, German settlers were planted, and the surviving Prussians were Christianized and slowly Germanized. Their language did not survive the process: Old Prussian, the westernmost Baltic tongue, faded through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was effectively dead by the start of the eighteenth, leaving little behind but a few catechisms printed by Protestant missionaries and a scatter of place-names. An entire branch of the Indo-European family went out, and we read it now only by its bones.

The Lithuanians met the same crusade and did something almost unique: they survived it as a pagan power, and grew. Through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, while still sacrificing to the thunder-god and burning their dead and their fallen horses on great pyres, the Lithuanian grand dukes welded the tribes into a state and then drove it east and south across the lands of the divided Rus, until the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was among the largest realms in Europe — a heathen empire ruling a vast Orthodox Christian population, its grand dukes lighting fires to Perkūnas at the western edge of a domain that reached toward the Black Sea. It was an extraordinary anomaly: the last pagan state of the continent, expanding in the age of Gothic cathedrals.

The anomaly ended in a marriage. In 1385, by the Union of Krewo, the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila agreed to accept Latin Christianity, to bring his people with him, and to wed the young Queen Jadwiga of Poland — and so to join the two crowns against the Teutonic threat. He was baptized at Kraków in February 1386, taking the name Władysław, and became king of Poland; the following year, in 1387, the formal Christianization of Lithuania began, with mass baptisms at Vilnius and the founding of a bishopric. This was the last formal conversion of a European nation — the final old realm to pass officially out of paganism — and it was driven as much by statecraft as by the spirit, the price and the prize of the Polish crown. The remoter province of Samogitia, in the northwest, held out longer and was not baptized until 1413. Beneath all of it, the older religion did not so much die as go quiet, persisting among the peasantry for centuries in the rites of the seasons, the honoring of the dead, and the unbroken singing of the songs.

The afterlife in song and in fire

Those songs are the Balts’ strangest legacy. The Latvian dainas — short, dense folk-songs, most of them four-line quatrains in a strict trochaic meter — were sung for generations in the fields and at the festivals, and they carried, half-submerged beneath a thin Christian surface, an astonishing freight of the old world: Saule the sun and Mēness the moon, Laima who measures out a fate, Dievs riding down from his hill, the whole life-cycle of birth and marriage and death threaded through with pre-Christian gods. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the scholar Krišjānis Barons gathered and ordered this oral ocean into the great collection of the Latvju dainas; the corpus now preserved runs to well over two hundred thousand texts. No Baltic priest wrote a sacred book — but the Baltic peasant, without meaning to, kept a scripture in the air. For the reconstruction of the lost religion the dainas and their Lithuanian counterparts are sources no written chronicle can match, precisely because they come from inside the tradition rather than from its enemies.

And the fire was relit. In the twentieth century, out of folklore scholarship and national feeling, the Balts produced one of the most deeply rooted of all the European pagan revivals. In Lithuania the movement took the disputed old name Romuva, gathering in oak groves to kindle the aukuras, the fire-altar, to make offerings of grain and herbs and drink, and to sing the dainas as the flame was lit; in Latvia a parallel movement, Dievturība, sought the same return to Dievs and Saule and Laima. Suppressed under Soviet rule, the revival re-emerged with independence, and Romuva — recognized by the Lithuanian state and carried abroad by the diaspora to North America and beyond — counts its members in the thousands. It is a reconstruction, and it knows it; the chain to the medieval grove runs through chroniclers and folk-singers and modern collectors rather than through any unbroken priesthood. But it draws on a continuity the rest of pagan Europe cannot claim, for the songs never stopped, and the oak is still the oak.

The Balts were the people history was slowest to reach, and the cost was steep — a whole tongue and people erased on the Prussian sands, a great state converted for a crown. Yet of all the old religions of the European north, theirs is the one that left the longest echo in living voices, and the easiest to hear again across the gap of centuries: a sky-father and a thunder in the oak, a fire that was not allowed to die, and a road of souls running white across the night.

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