Their numbers in Birmingham may not be large, but the city's Lithuanian community is growing as the opening of a new venture yesterday highlighted. Tom Scotney reports

You would have struggled to find czeppelinai or Koldina on shop shelves across Birmingham. Until yesterday that is.

The city has welcomed immigrants from across the world over the decades, from Ireland to the Caribbean and the Asian sub-continent.

In recent years, it has been from former Eastern European states like Poland and Romania which have joined the EU.

Lithuania may not have figured prominently among that list, but the numbers who have left that country in search of new jobs and new lives is growing.

More than 3,000 have come to Birmingham from the former Soviet state, most of them since the country joined the EU in 2004.

And yesterday the city's Lord Mayor Coun Mike Sharpe joined community leaders to officially open the UK's largest dedicated Lithuanian shop.

Lituanica, which sells popular dishes like czeppelinai (breaded meat), Koldina (meatballs) and sweet cheese with chocolate, to Lithuanians (and interested Brummies) is hoping to benefit from the increasing number of Eastern European immigrants looking for work in Britain.

Linas Bagoras, the owner of the store in Livery Street, decided to open the shop after spending more than seven years working in construction in the UK and Ireland.

He said he had been impressed with how tolerant and accepting Birmingham had been to the different communities living in it, and how he loved to watch the reaction of Lithuanians as they came into the shop and saw things that reminded them of home.

Irena Hughes, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Association in the West Midlands, said: "There has been a huge change in the Lithuanian community in Birmingham since 2004, because it's now possible to get people together.

"Before, you couldn't get people together in large groups, because there might be people who were working illegally and worried about being found out."

Mrs Hughes, who married an English man in 1998 and moved to Birmingham, said it meant a lot to the community having a shop they could gather round, but she hoped it would bring in other people interested in Lithuanian food and culture.

"We want this to be our Bullring," she said.

In 2004, when Lithuania officially joined the European Union, immigration restrictions were removed, and thousands of Lithuanians moved to the UK.

But some Lithuanians have been in Birmingham for much longer. Peter Bieliauskas, 78, of Weoley Castle, has lived in the West Midlands since fleeing Lithuania to escape Soviet forces taking over the country after the Second World War.

He worked as a coal miner in Shropshire before moving to Birmingham to work at the Cadbury's factory in Bournville.

He said it had been "unbelievable" how much the city had changed, and how many more Lithuanians and other Eastern Europeans he had seen in the city in the last few years.

And Stan Jezekis, aged 87, of Erdington, said he had become so used to living in Birmingham that when he visited Lithuania for the first time in more than half a century in 2001 to visit his brothers, he could not settle, because he found the country so "messed up" by Communism.