Jūratė Statkutė de Rosales, A Scholar of Baltic Prehistory

October 6, 2023

On September 23, 2023, a Lithuanian-born Venezuelan journalist Jūratė Statkutė de Rosales passed away. The 93-year-old journalist was also a scholar of Baltic prehistory.


Born in Kaunas in 1929, Statkutė de Rosales and her mother fled West in 1944. Her father, Jonas Statkus, the Secretary General of the Lithuanian Nationalist Union, was arrested by the NKVD in July 1940 and imprisoned in Moscow’s Lubyanka and Butyrki prisons. He disappeared without a trace.


Since 1951, Statkutė lived in Venezuela. She worked as editor-in-chief of the democratic weekly political, economic and cultural magazine Zeta and collaborated with the Lithuanian-American newspaper Dirva. Statkutė de Rosales also researched the Baltic prehistory and argued that the Baltic tribes once had a significant influence on the development of European history.


She is the author of many works: Traces of the Baltic Languages in the Iberian Peninsula (1985), Los Godos—Un eslabón perdido de la historia europea (1998-1999), Los Godos (2004, two editions), The Goths and the Balts (2004), The Great Deceit (Vilnius 2007), The Old Chronicle of the Aryan Tribe (Kaunas, 2009) and The Roots of Europe and We, Lithuanians (2011 and 2015).


In 1996, Statkutė de Rosales was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Gediminas.


A documentary film, “Jūratė Statkutė de Rosales, Dedicated to Her ancestral History and to Lithuania,” has been made about the researcher.

Photo: Jūratė Statkutė de Rosales. Photo credit: E. Ovčarenko / BNS photo

Source: LRT.lt