Sediment slices of 0.5 cm thickness were obtained from gravity core segments and of 1 cm thickness from the Vydrino piston core. Volumetric subsamples of 5 cm3 (10 cm3 in case of the lowermost samples from Continent core) were prepared according to standard procedures, including 7-μm ultrasonic fine-sieving (Cwynar et al., 1979, Fægri et al., 1989 K. Fægri, P.E. Kaland and K. Krzywinski, Textbook of Pollen Analysis (4th edition), John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1989) 328 pp..Fægri et al., 1989 and PALE Steering Committee, 1994). Two tablets of Lycopodium marker spores were added to each sample for calculating total pollen and spore concentrations (Stockmarr, 1971). Water-free glycerol was used for storage and preparation of microscopic slides. The palynological samples were counted at magnifications of 400–600×, applying 1000× for the identification of difficult pollen types, e.g., including Saxifragaceae, Crassulaceae, and Rosaceae.