Description

The map mainly focuses on the majority of Lithuanian (yellow colour) and Polish (pink colour) inhabitants in area around Vilnius and Kaunas. The detailed chart on the right-hand side lists the percentage of Polish, Belorussian, Lithuanians, Jewish and other inhabitants in various regions.

The author of this map Marian Świechowski (1882-1934) was a politician, a member of Constituent Assembly of Lithuania and a publisher, as well as a member of Provisional Political Committee of Kaunas Land, which supported the union of historical Lithuania with the reborn Republic of Poland through the military control of the entire Kaunas region.
The maps was made in 1921, in a turbulent time after World War I, when the future of the territories of Kaunas and Vilnius, squeezed between newly founded Poland and Soviet Union, were uncertain.

In 1920, Vilnius became a capital of a short-lived Republic of Central Lithuania and was only two years later annexed to Poland as a capital of Wilno Voivodeship. In that year Kaunas became the temporary capital of Lithuania, the status it held until the beginning of World War II.

The map was issued in Polish, French (Carte ethnographique et politique des territoires de l’ancien Grand Duché de Lithuanie, avec le tableau statistique) and English (The Ethnographical and Political Card of the Territories of the Great Duchy of Lithuania, issued by the Provisory Political Committee of the Kowno lands) versions.

Worldcat lists examples of the map in Polish institutions as well as in the British Library, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 110 Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung – Institut der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft and University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

References: OCLC 174843809, 249533831, 63573908, 233394088, 638487666,