Baltic Paganism (Romuva)

Baltic Paganism has an unusual double character: it is both the genuinely late-surviving pre-Christian religion of the Lithuanians, Latvians and Old Prussians, and a modern reconstruction built from the fragments that survival left. The Baltic lands were the last corner of Europe to be Christianised, pagan Lithuania held out until its official conversion in 1387, and folk practice persisted for centuries after, so the raw material is deep: a vast body of folk songs (Lithuanian dainos, Latvian dainas), agrarian ritual, and the disapproving records of missionaries and church visitations. But there is no ancient scripture and no native mythography, so the "Baltic pantheon" of Perkunas, Dievas, Saule, Laima and the rest is assembled by scholars from these late and uneven sources. Recovering it means reading folk poetry, comparative Indo-European evidence and hostile clerical testimony together, and being honest about where reconstruction begins.

The organised religion practised under the name Romuva today is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century revival, and its history should be dated plainly. Its roots lie in the Lithuanian national awakening and in interwar folklore movements; the name Romuva was used from the 1920s-30s, and the modern community coalesced around the folklorist Jonas Trinkunas, with the ethnic-culture folklore movement of 1967 a key origin point and formal religious organisation following after Lithuania regained independence in 1990. Its Latvian counterpart, Dievturiba, was founded even earlier, by Ernests Brastins in 1925. These are contemporary reconstructionist (or "revival") religions that draw on authentic folk tradition but are organised in the modern period, a point their own members generally acknowledge. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Lithuania had wrongly withheld state recognition from Romuva, an episode that illustrates the movement's live, contested legal standing rather than any unbroken institutional descent from antiquity.