The Baltic States are a territory in Northern Europe on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Kaliningrad region of Russia are located. The Baltic peoples are called the nations of the indigenous inhabitants of this area: they are Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians.
Baltics
The Baltic Sea is a sea in the north of Europe, jutting deep into the mainland and entering the Atlantic Ocean basin. On its shores are countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Finland, as well as Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but the Baltic states, that is, the area "near the Baltic" includes only the last states.
Peter the Great conquered the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, as a result of which Sweden ceased to control all the shores. The sea, which the Russians used to call Varangian or Sveisky, has ceased to be a stranger. Russia has begun the process of de-marking the eastern coast of the Baltic States, liberating the national language and culture. In 1884, the sea was given the name Baltic, and all the provinces on its shores, which were included in Russia, began to be called Baltic. This name was also preserved in the Soviet Union: the Baltic States officially included the Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian SSR and the Kaliningrad region. In 1990 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent states.
Peoples of the Baltic
The first people on the territory of the Baltic States appeared in the X millennium BC, but only a few thousand years later rather large cultures and developed tribes began to appear here. Representatives of the Volosov culture are considered the ancestors of the modern Baltic people. Some tribes descended from Slavic or Germanic peoples. For many millennia, they lived mixed, did not have separate territories, exchanged among the tribes of the Black Sea region and other territories. Only in the middle of the first millennium BC did the division begin: Finnish tribes settled in the north, Baltic tribes in the south. But it is still impossible to call them peoples, they were scattered tribes under the names Curonians, Lithuania, Semigallians, Yatvingians, Latgalians, villages and others.
The Great Migration of Peoples did not have a significant impact on the population of the Baltic States: most of the tribes remained in place, the peoples moving from the Scandinavian Peninsula stayed here. The Baltic peoples continued to evolve, their community is now called the Balts. They were divided into western (mazur, curonian, yatvyagi) and eastern balts (lithuania, villages, latgalians). Many of them were destroyed during the invasions of the German orders of knights. The modern Balts are Lithuanians and Latvians, the descendants of those tribes. Estonians, on the other hand, are a Baltic-Finnish people, among whose ancestors there are also Finnish tribes.
