Klaipėdos universitetas

Principles of State Protection of Ethnic Culture defines the ethnographic region as a historically formed part of the country in which a distinctive dialect, traditions and customs have been preserved, and the heritage of the Baltic tribes has been integrated, it is difficult to coordinate the data and attitudes of linguists, historians and ethnologists. The article shows the difference between ethnographic maps (which are based on the values of traditional culture), most of which attribute Vilnius to the ethnographic region of Dzūkija, and the view of the people living in these areas that the Vilnius area belongs to the ethnographic region of Aukštaitija.

In the article, based on ethnographic field research conducted between 1988 and 1996, using the historical comparative method, I aim to compare how the community customs of rural youth in the Klaipėda region differed from those in neighbouring areas of Lithuania, and how they changed when the Klaipėda region was a part of Lithuania from 1923 to 1939. In order to achieve this goal, I set the task of examining the community customs of young people (confirmation and birthdays, name days, parties, beekeeping and bee parties, wedding parties, gegužinė [outdoor parties] and entertainment in the garden, keeping watch over linen at night, and gatherings by the swing). The findings obtained show that during the research period, the community life of the youth of the Klaipėda region intensified, and some customs that existed in the Republic of Lithuania were adopted.

The aim of this article is to compare the leisure time of friends in different parts of the Vilnius area: a village, a town and the city. The study is based to a great extent on fieldwork, using the opportunities of semi-structured interviews. Comparing longer-term, travel-related forms of leisure, there are greater opportunities for such friends’ leisure time in the big town or city. Meanwhile, based on an analysis of short-term forms of friends’ leisure time, the article concludes that both in Soviet times and in recent years, there is no great difference between common leisure in different types of settlements. This is due to the short distance to Vilnius, the big city, of the areas studied. On the other hand, the leisure and entertainment infrastructure was created for tourism. These differences are further reduced by an increasing amount of free time being spent in cyberspace.