Banknotes of Lithuania 5 Litu banknote 1993
Bank of Lithuania - Lietuvos Bankas
Obverse: Portrait of Jonas Jablonskis (December 30, 1860, Kubilėliai, Šakiai district – February 23, 1930, Kaunas) was a distinguished Lithuanian linguist and one of the founders of the standard Lithuanian language. He used the pseudonym Rygiškių Jonas, taken from the small town named Rygiškiai where he spent his childhood.
Reverse: "Lithuanian School" by Petras Rimša ("Lietuvos mokykla" also "Vargo mokykla")
Symbol of resistance against the prohibition of the Lithuanian press by the Russian Tsar from 1864 to 1904. Books in Lithuanian language had to be read secretly in the schools. Here a mother reads with her child whilst she is spinning.
Banknotes of the Lithuanian litas
Bank of Lithuania - Lietuvos Bankas
1991 Issue
10 Litu 20 Litu 50 Litu 100 Litu
1993-1994 Issue
1997-2000 Issue
2001-2007 Issue
During the summer of 1863 Tsar Alexander II, issued Temporary Rules for State Junior Schools of the Northwestern Krai, ruling that only Russian-language education would be allowed there. In 1864, the Governor General of the Vilnius Governorate, Mikhail Muravyov, ordered that Lithuanian language primers were to be printed only in the Cyrillic alphabet. Muravyov's successor, Konstantin Kaufman, in 1865 banned all Lithuanian-language use of the Latin alphabet. In 1866, the Tsar issued an oral ban on the printing or importing of printed matter in Lithuanian. Although formally, the order had no legal force, it was executed de facto until 1904.
Book smugglers transported Lithuanian language books printed in the Latin alphabet into Lithuanian-speaking areas of the Russian Empire, defying the ban. Opposing imperial Russian authorities' efforts to replace the traditional Latin orthography with Cyrillic, and transporting printed matter from as far away as the United States to do so, the book smugglers became a symbol of Lithuanians' resistance to Russification.
With help of these books the children were teached the Lithuanan language by their mothers at home.
35 years after the withdrawal of the ban, in 1935, the city of Kaunas created a memoral yard to commemorate the ban: a wall with the names of the known book smugglers and the book disseminators and three free standing sculptures:
1 - The Book Smuggler, by Juozas Zikaras, 1928.
2 - Lithunian schooling, by Petras Rimša, 1940
3 - The Parable of the Sower, by Bernardas Bučas, 1939.
The Lithuanian schooling sculpture and the wall were removed by the Soviets in the 1950s and re-placed in 1994 and the 90th anniversary of the withdrawal of the ban. The two other sculptures stayed during the Soviet period.