Monthly Archives: December 2025

The winter edition of the Baltic Heritage Network quarterly newsletter is now available. In these pages, you will find information about our past and future events, new publications, and what is happening across the globe within the diaspora research and archive communities.

Descriptive Cataloging for the Ilmar Mikiver Estonian Collection Materials (Onsite)

Nonprofit association Estonian Diaspora Academy has published a calendar of Estonians around the world in the last century.

In 2025, EstoCast, now in its fourth season, continued to grow as one of the most compelling voices connecting global Estonian culture with curious listeners everywhere. Presented by Estonian Museum Canada (VEMU), Estonian Music Week, and the Eesti Elu/Estonian Life newspaper, the podcast delivers a rich mix of cultural storytelling, identity exploration, and community insight — all with a distinctly global Estonian lens.

2025 is the Year of the Book, marking 500 years since the publication of the first printed work containing the Estonian language. To celebrate, events are taking place both in Estonia and everywhere Estonians live around the world.

The Faculty of Communication, together with the Faculty of Philosophy of Vilnius University, Vytautas Magnus University and the NGO Global Lithuanian Leaders, has launched a project, The Formation of the Lithuanian Diaspora and Relations with Lithuania: Comparing Waves and Generations. Researchers of Lithuanian origin from the Universities of Essex (UK) and New York (USA) are also participating in the project. The project is funded from the Lithuanian Studies 2025–2030 Program and will last until the end of 2028.

By the decision of the Board of the Lithuanian Cultural Institute (Germany), part of its archive has been transferred to Lithuania. The audiovisual archive will end up at the Central State Archives of Lithuania, the documents of the choirs that were active in the DP camps will go to the Lithuanian Archive of Literature and Art, and various magazines, newspapers, bulletins, mainly published in 1944–1950, are being donated to the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

Most often, Lithuanians associate Siberia with Stalin’s repressions of 1941–1953. Previous forced relocations of Lithuanian residents, for example, those that took place after the 1863–1864 Uprising in Lithuania and Poland, are often forgotten. In 2016, during the project Lithuanian Siberia, initiated by Dr. Viktoras Bilotas, over 3,000 copies of historical documents concerning the nineteenth century exiles from Lithuania were found in the main archives of Siberia: Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Tobolsk. They were copied and brought to Lithuania.