Culture and Traditions
The Lithuanian national sport is usually considered to be basketball (krepšinis), which is popular among Lithuanians in Lithuania as well as in the diasporic communities. Basketball came to Lithuania through the Lithuanian-American community in the 1930s. Lithuanian basketball teams were bronze medal winners in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Summer Olympics. But there are a huge number of football fans in Lithuania and their number is increasing constantly.
Joninės (also known as Rasos) is a traditional national holiday, celebrated on the summer solstice. It has pagan origins. Užgavėnės (Shrove Tuesday) takes place on the day before Ash Wednesday, and is meant to urge the retreat of winter. There are also national traditions for Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas.
Read more about this topic: Lithuanian People
Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or traditions:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Napoleon never wished to be justified. He killed his enemy according to Corsican traditions [le droit corse] and if he sometimes regretted his mistake, he never understood that it had been a crime.”
—Guillaume-Prosper, Baron De Barante (1782–1866)