The Wolf’s Call

The wolf pack scattered across the peninsula which, since the days of Zeus, has been named after the princess – Europe. It soaked into the souls of many, becoming the foundation myth for more than one city.

On the Amber Coast, it was Gediminas who heard the wolf’s howl. And in the very place where he encountered the Iron Wolf, the city of Vilnius was born. Ever since, the wolf has been bound to these lands, reminding the world of its presence from time to time.

The Iron Wolf has witnessed much.

He saw the city with which he made an alliance captured for the very first time. In 1655, after a three-day massacre of its inhabitants, thousands of those who remained were bound in chains and made into slaves. He saw half the city’s population perish in 1710 amidst the marches of foreign armies and plagues.

The Iron Wolf also witnessed the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the birth of modern states at the dawn of the 20th century. He saw the greed of the Poles in 1920, who, taking advantage of the wolf pack’s weakness, tore their wolf city away from them, trampling upon everything they had endured together until then…

Until the darkest era in the history of the Amber Coast and its people arrived.

Between 1940 and 1953, the Iron Wolf watched the ruthless roller of two totalitarian regimes. He witnessed the deportations to Siberia, the annihilation of his Jewish neighbours, and the renewed Soviet terror that stripped Lithuania of over 15% of its population, turning social elites and farmers into slaves of the gulags. Yet, he also witnessed the pride of his children – tens of thousands of young people who fled into the forests to wage a desperate, bloody battle for freedom against the NKVD machinery as the „Forest Brothers”. They fought the way the Wolf had taught them: in hiding, with unyielding resistance, to the very last drop of blood, until 1965 when the last of them fell.

The spirit of the Iron Wolf, however, could not be locked in a cage. It endured through the layers of time to awaken in the singing of free people and in the roar of new generations who will never allow themselves to be chained again.

[Full historical data, archival sources, and statistics regarding population losses and the partisan movement can be found in the section: The Amber Coast]