Antanas Poška

Antanas Poška
Antanas Poška in 1967
Born	(1903-03-24)March 24, 1903 Pasvalys, Lithuania
Died	October 16, 1992(1992-10-16) (aged 89) Vilnius, Lithuania
Resting place	Antakalnis Cemetery
Nationality	Lithuanian
Other names	Antanas Paškevičius
Occupation	Anthropologist, journalist
Known for	Motorbike journey to India (1929–36) Member of the Esperanto movement in Lithuania
Notable work	From the Baltic Sea to the Bay of Bengal

Antanas Paškevičius – Poška (24 March [O.S. 10 March] 1903 – 16 October 1992) was a prominent Lithuanian traveler and anthropologist, as well as an active member of the Esperanto movement in Lithuania. He is best known for his journey to India in 1929–36. In India, he studied Sanskrit and received bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Bombay and wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Calcutta on the Shina-speaking people but was unable to defend it. He interacted with India's intellectual elite and participated in anthropological expeditions. He met with Rabindranath Tagore and translated some of his works into Lithuanian. Poška returned to Lithuania in 1936 and worked as a journalist. He was recognized as the Righteous Among the Nations for hiding three Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania. After the Soviet takeover in 1945, he refused to destroy books deemed unacceptable to the Soviet regime and was imprisoned in a Gulag. Unable to return to Lithuania, Poška later worked at several museums in Central Asia. He was allowed to return to Lithuania in 1959 and worked as a lecturer and journalist and continued his anthropological studies, but his past as a political prisoner prevented him from taking a more prominent position. By age 60, he had visited 75 countries and 120 nations. Poška was a prolific writer contributing articles to Lithuanian and foreign press. His bibliography, published in 2006, has 3,756 entries, but his main work, the eight-volume Nuo Baltijos iki Bengalijos (From the Baltic Sea to the Bay of Bengal) on his experiences in India, was published only in 2002–12, a decade after his death.