Kokle
The Latvian plucked box zither: a trapezoid soundbox with parallel strings over a flat board, carved from maple, ash or lime, played by strumming and plucking. A chronicle entry of 1225, when Henricus de Lettis wrote of a kokle played by Livonian youths, makes it the oldest documented psaltery in Europe, and Latvian folk songs call its strings 'silver war' and 'golden war'. The kokle accompanied the dainas, the great corpus of Latvian folksong, and in the twentieth century a larger concert kokle was developed; in 2008 the kokle and the art of koklēšana were placed in the Latvian Cultural Canon