Lithuania is marking the Day of Mourning and Hope on Sunday, the 79th anniversary of the beginning of Soviet mass deportations.
On June 14, 1941, the Soviet authorities started rounding up people in Lithuania and sending them to exile or labour camps in Siberia. Around 18,500 people fell victim to the deportations, including the country's former president Aleksandras Stulginskis.
The biggest wave of deportations would come later, when in 1948 the Soviets launched operation Vesna (Spring) to deport 40,000 Lithuanians, including families of anti-Soviet partisans, their supporters, and farmers who resisted collectivisation. Around a quarter of the deportees were children.
To mark the Day of Mourning and Hope, a mass will take place in Vilnius Cathedral at 10:00, followed by a minute of silence at 11:59.
At 12:00, a flag raising ceremony will take place at Nepriklausomybės (Independence) Square in Vilnius, followed at 12:30 by the traditional reading of names of deportees and prisoners at the Occupation and Freedom Fights Museum .
The full list of events can be found here.
After the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania during World War Two, around 130,000 people were deported from the country in 1940-1953 and another 156,000 were imprisoned.
In all, about 10 percent of the entire adult Baltic population were deported or sent to labour camps.
Read more: New book documents lives of Lithuanians in Soviet gulags
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