Aukštaitians Erotic

Ask an Aukštaitian where they are from and the answer is usually just "Lithuania," which tells you something. The aukštaičiai, the "uplanders," are the people of Aukštaitija, the largest of Lithuania's ethnographic regions. It spreads across the northeast and center of the country through Panevėžys, Utena, Biržai, Rokiškis and Anykščiai. Their Samogitian neighbors to the west hold on hard to a separate regional identity. Aukštaitians tend to treat theirs as simply the normal way of being Lithuanian. History explains part of that. This was Lithuania proper, the heartland of the medieval state, which old sources set apart from Samogitia. The name only makes sense next to its neighbor's. It usually refers to position along the Nemunas: upstream from Samogitia, the "lowlands," rather than on higher ground. Around Panevėžys the land is mostly flat farmland. Only in the east does the landscape earn the label, with moraine hills, pine forest and hundreds of glacial lakes. Part of that lake country became Lithuania's first national park in 1974.

The dialect reaches further than the region. Linguists divide Lithuanian speech into two main dialect groups, Samogitian and Aukštaitian. The Aukštaitian group is broad enough to take in the Dzūkians and Suvalkians of the south and southwest, who count as separate ethnographic groups but speak its southern and western varieties. When Jonas Jablonskis shaped standard Lithuanian around 1900, he drew largely on West Aukštaitian speech. As a result, the language of every Lithuanian classroom and newsroom leans toward this side of the dialect line. Lithuanian belongs to the Baltic branch of Indo-European, with Latvian as its closest living relative, and its old-fashioned grammar has long drawn historical linguists.

Aukštaitija was formally Christianized in 1387, twenty-six years before Samogitia. It is still mostly Roman Catholic, with carved wayside crosses and small roofed shrines on poles at farm gates and crossroads. The main exception is Biržai in the north, where the local branch of the Radziwiłł family backed the Reformation, and a Reformed Protestant congregation survives there today. The same northern corner is Lithuania's beer country, where farmhouse brewing around Biržai and Pasvalys long predates commercial breweries. The region's most distinctive tradition is the sutartinė, a song form from the northeast. Singers, mostly women, weave short melodic lines together so that they clash on purpose in close intervals. The same patterns were also played on panpipes called skudučiai. UNESCO recognized the tradition in 2010. Like the rest of Lithuania, the region has become more urban and has lost many young people to emigration. The rural northeast has thinned out, but folklore ensembles keep the old songs alive.