Res Humanitariae

The instrumental music-making tradition of Lithuania Minor was officially recognised as a valuable part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and included in the national register in 2022. In the 20th century, the way of preserving the instrumental music-making of the Lietuvininkai (the inhabitants of Lithuania Minor) typically used for folklore was not followed, and it would have ceased to exist. However, the folklore revival movement that emerged in the 1960s, along with the determined efforts of Antanas Butkus, a master instrument maker, to restore the folk music instruments of Lithuania Minor, and other favourable circumstances, gave rise to renewed interest and new directions for the development of the tradition. The purpose of this article is to explore the forms and development of this folklore tradition, and to identify the factors that had the most important impact on its decline, restoration and continuity.

In terms of date of recording the earlier and most interesting Lithuanian musical folklore material, the 64 songs of Prussian Lithuanians collected in the 19th century and preserved in the L. Rėza archival legacy, have more or less never been considered in terms of influences from a multicultural environment. The aim of this article is to discover and reveal the Lithuanian and/or German/European relationship in the songs. Analysis of the songs showed the archaity of the melodies in the L. Rėza legacy, traditionally associated with the spiritual culture of the ancient Prussian or Lithuanian tribes, is highly suspect and a matter open to debate. Many of the rare individual songs turned out to have “foreign melodies”, i.e., local variations arose based upon direct or indirect influence by German or common European melodies.

The goal of the article is to examine chronologically the specific nature of the Easter holiday in

The purpose of this article is to answer the questions raised in the course of the research on the development of textile pocket of the national costume of Lithuania Minor in relation to the motivation for production and wearing of pockets, the choice in decoration characteristics, the symbolism of ornamentation and colour combinations. The analysis of the accomplished field research reveals the manifestations of the expression of the ethnocultural identity through production and wearing of textile pockets. The analysis of the symbolic meanings traditionally attributed and newly assigned to the chosen decorative elements of pockets reveals the cases of the continuity and change of a symbol. The act of wearing a pocket not only with the national costume of Lithuania Minor demonstrates the expression of one’s identity through wearing the chosen parts of clothing. The growing demand stimulates the production of textile pockets. The research analyses the material collected from the well-informed presenters (makers and wearers of textile pockets) based on the questionnaires compiled by the author of the present article.

The article is devoted to present the results of ethnomusicological research on parallels in folk song melodies of the Prussian ethnic minorities: Lietuvininkai, Masurians, Kashubians. In the history of ethnic groups of the south part of the West Prussia and East Prussia speaking dialects of the Polish language – Kashubs and Masurs – you may distinguish quite a lot of parallels with the history of the lietuvininkai (residents of Lithuania Minor). A more detailed analysis of the melodies of investigated ethnic groups permits to state that the melodies of the lietuvininkai evidently differ from Polish melodies by the character of intonation, rhythm and performance. Nevertheless, they have intonation complexes, rhythmic elements that are alien to the melodic lines of the lietuvininkai folk songs and could be absorbed from the Polish ethnic music.