Battle of Orsha commemorated at the Lithuanian Embassy in London
On September 11, 2014 representatives of the British and Lithuanian communities as well as foreign diplomats residing in London gathered at the Lithuanian Embassy to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Orsha.
The panel discussion chaired by HE Simon Butt, former Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Lithuania, centered around the main question of the talk: ‘Can we consider the Battle of Orsha to be a clash of two distinct political entities of Central and Eastern Europe?’ The topic chosen for the commemorative evening was not accidental as historical parallels linked across centuries pointing to the current events in Eastern Ukraine.
“I am happy that we continue to introduce the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to our British friends. It is really fascinating how certain division lines drawn some 500 years ago could be resembled in geopolitical maps of today. As we could learn from our discussion tonight, the Westward orientation of Lithuania is not a phenomenon of the 20th century. Our aspiration to be in a ‘progressive’ world dates back to our medieval state but was not always an easy goal to achieve”, the Lithuanian Ambassador Asta Skaisgirytė Liauškienė noted.
Among the keynote speakers of the discussion were Prof Valdas Rakutis, General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania, Dr Darius Baronas, Lithuanian Institute of History, Prof Robert Frost, Aberdeen University, Giedrė Mickūnaitė, contributor to the Jagellonians: Dynasty, Memory & Identity in Central Europe project at Oxford University, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Andrii Kuzmenko, acting Ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom.
The Battle of Orsha was fought on 8 September 1514, between the allied forces of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, under the command of Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski. The Battle was part of a long series of Muscovite–Lithuanian Wars.
