In the beautiful Baltic nation of Lithuania’s southeast, you can see small panhandle or a bump surrounded by Belarus. That is not only the cool site. In the border between Belarus and Lithuania, you can see weird things such as previously-mentioned bump, strange country-dividing railroad…and so on… Then, let’s go a trip to beautiful and weird border of Belarus and Lithuania.
-Dieveniškių National Park
After 1 hour drive from Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, we finally arrived the town of Stakų Ūta, a small village located between Lithuanian Mainland and panhandle. At there, Lithuania is only 2.7 km or 1.7 miles wide. And if you go inside that panhandle, you can get to Dieveniškių National Park. (This panhandle is 24 km long, and 19 km wide.) Not only there is a national park, but also you can find many villages like Dieveniškių, Jurgelionys, Kreivoji…and plus, weirdly most of the residents are Polish, not Lithuanian nor Belarusian… Interesting… But question is why does Lithuania has this weird shape bump? In 1945, Soviet Union or USSR gave this land to Belarusian Republic which is current Belarus. However, at that time, the majority of Dieveniškių’s population was in fact Lithuanians, so Lithuanians living in Dieveniškių requested and protested Belarusian government to hand over to Lithuania. Finally, Belarus voluntarily gave up their claims and handed over to Lithuanian Republic in 1956. Because both Belarus and Lithuania were part of USSR, it wasn’t matter. However, after Lithuania’s independence from USSR in 1990, this came to the surface.
-Adutiškis Railroad
After 2 hours and 40 minutes car-ride from Dieveniškių to Adutiškis, a town with only over 600 people, we finally arrived to Adutiškis Train Station. This train station is special, because… by this train track the countries are divided, which means the train track or railroad is the international border between Belarus and Lithuania. The railroad becomes border for 3 miles after meeting with Kamaja river. There is no clear reason behind why the divided with train track, however, people are guessing that after USSR occupied Lithuania, they would divide border between the two with this road, because this place don’t have any natural boundary such as rivers, lakes, forests or streams.
Today, we learned about big and small weird places in Belarusian-Lithuanian Border. I’ll come back with more interesting story, so stay tuned!!!
