India–Lithuania Friendship Award presented to the people of Goa
Updated 2026-07-20
The annual India–Lithuania Friendship Award was presented in Rusnė on Saturday for the eighth time, honouring Goa’s Christian community for its role in preserving the memory of Lithuanian pilgrim and missionary Andrius Rudamina.
On 18 July, the annual India–Lithuania Friendship Award was presented in Rusnė for the eighth time, honouring Goa’s Christian community for its role in preserving the memory of Lithuanian pilgrim and missionary Andrius Rudamina.
Rudamina is the first Lithuanian known from historical sources to have reached India. He landed in Goa on 22 August 1625 and remained there for more than a year.
A commemorative stone dedicated to Rudamina was unveiled in 2015 in the churchyard of the Sé Cathedral of Old Goa. Last year, the cathedral’s collection of sacred art received a sculpture of Rudamina, carved from Lithuanian oak by folk artist Juozas Kalinauskas, to mark the 400th anniversary of Rudamina’s arrival in India.
The initiatives were carried out with support from the Archdiocese of Goa and members of the local Christian community, who maintain the monuments and present them to visitors. Goa has nearly 400,000 Christians, most of them Roman Catholics.
The award was accepted by Natasha Fernandes, curator of the Museum of Christian Art in Goa, who will take it to India and hand it over to the Archdiocese of Goa for safekeeping.
The ceremony was attended by India’s Ambassador to Lithuania, Devesh Uttam; Lithuania’s Ambassador to India, Diana Mickevičienė; Lithuania’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Sigita Maslauskaitė-Mažylienė; the President of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Faina Kukliansky; and Šilutė District Mayor Vytautas Laurinaitis.
Ambassador Diana Mickevičienė presented the events of the People-to-People Year 2025 – 2026 between Lithuania and India, emphasizing the groundbreaking achievements in literary translations.
The programme included readings by Lithuanian poet Eugenijus Ališanka, winner of the 2012 Poetry Spring and the 2016 Jotvingiai Prize. He read his own poems and his Lithuanian translations of works by contemporary Indian poet Sarabjeet Garcha. Ališanka’s poems, translated into Hindi by Garcha, were also read in Hindi by an Indian diplomat.
Assam-born singer Songeeta Mitra, a participant in the television show The Voice of Lithuania, performed classical and contemporary Indian songs, as well as a Lithuanian version of Džordana Butkutė’s 1990s hit “Nemylėjau tavęs”.
The India–Lithuania Friendship Award was established in 2019 to promote ties between the two countries. Laureates receive a miniature replica of the monument in Rusnė to Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi’s close associate, who was born in the town. The monument was created by Lithuanian sculptor Romualdas Kvintas. Previous recipients have come from Lithuania, India and Israel.
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