Restoration of the State Day (Lithuania) - 16 February 1918, the declaration of independence and one of Europe’s two state commemorations

Restoration of the State Day is Lithuania's founding holiday: 16 February 1918, the day the country declared itself independent at the end of the First World War. It is one of two days Lithuania keeps for state restoration, and the older of the pair.

The one-line summary

Lithuanian public holiday on 16 February, fixed. Federal category. Commemorates the 1918 Act of Independence, adopted unanimously by the Council of Lithuania. Not to be confused with the Restoration of Independence Day on 11 March, which marks the 1990 return from Soviet rule.

Origin

1918 is the strange year to be independent in. The First World War had driven Russian troops out of the Baltic and put German troops in their place. As the war collapsed, the two imperial regimes that had ruled Lithuania for over a century - the Tsars and then the Kaisers - were suddenly both withdrawing at once. On 16 February 1918 the Council of Lithuania, meeting as German troops left, adopted the Act of Independence and declared the country an independent state.

The declaration was immediate and unanimous. What followed was not a consolidation. Lithuania fought off the Bolsheviks in 1919, was occupied by Poland, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, German-occupied again during the Second World War, and re-occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944. It declared independence again in 1990. So 16 February is best understood not as the day Lithuania became free and stayed free, but as the first of several declarations, the one that started the sequence.

When it falls

16 February, fixed, and never moved. It does not shift to a nearby weekday if it lands on a weekend. Because the day walks through the week, some years it is absorbed into a Saturday or Sunday - 2028 it falls on a Wednesday, a standalone day off; 2030 it falls on a Saturday and simply joins the weekend. Lithuania does not operate the substitution mechanism found in some other European states, so the same nominal holiday can be a real day off or part of a long weekend depending on the year.

How it is observed

Lithuania marks the day formally in Vilnius. Ceremonies gather in the Square of Simon Daukantas, the poet and cleric associated with the 1918 declaration, and the signatories of the Act are honoured at the Rasos Cemetery, where many of them are buried. The Baltic three - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - mark their restoration days within days of one another in February and fly the national flag throughout, so mid-February reads as a quiet regional week of flags and remembrance rather than a single national celebration.

The day is also the anchor for the Lithuanian memorial calendar. It is one of only a handful of genuinely secular public days in a calendar otherwise built from Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish feasts. The others are the March restoration day, Labour Day, Statehood Day on 6 July and midsummer, Joninės on 24 June.

The other restoration day

Lithuania is unusual in keeping two restoration commemorations as public holidays. 16 February marks the 1918 declaration; 11 March, the Restoration of Independence Day, marks 1990, when the Supreme Council reasserted independence from the Soviet Union. Both are statutory. The March day is the more visible of the two in practice - it was the scene of the Singing Revolution - but keeping February on the books preserves the founding claim that 1990 restored rather than created the state. Both should be listed; a calendar that carries only one of them is missing a public holiday.

Sources

• Wikipedia - 16 February (the 1918 Act of Independence adopted unanimously by the Council of Lithuania on this date).
• Lithuanian public holidays (the statutory list, with 16 February Independence Day and 11 March Independence Restoration Day kept distinct).
• workwork.lt - Lithuanian public holidays planner (Labour Code Article 123 as the statutory basis and the explicit no-substitute-day rule).