VILNIUS—A professor said on Thursday he had found the only known copy of Lithuania’s declaration of independence languishing in a German archive - a discovery hailed by authorities as the discovery of the nation’s “birth certificate”.
Liudas Mazylis, political science professor at Lithuania’s Vytautas Magnus University, told Reuters his find on Wednesday was the culmination of an eight-month search, funded by himself.
The discovery of the 1918 document, a year short of its centenary, triggered celebrations in the Baltic state.
Lithuania was already planning to mark the 100th anniversary, keen to assert its independence in the face of what it sees as renewed aggression from its neighbor Russia. Memories are still fresh of Lithuania’s emergence from Soviet occupation in the 1990s.
