Last week, the PAScapes team of historians explored the landscapes of the Curonian Spit, a unique region of summer resorts nestled between the Curonian Lagoon and the Baltic Sea. The vacationers are charmed by Nida’s forested dunes and its unique identity intertwined with the old fishermen’s dwellings. However, such a sight and perception of this place is less than a century old, thus the expedition explored how and why the Curonian Spit’s landscapes changed in the 20th century and when did it become what it is today?
The desire to gain a historical understanding of these landscapes, through the collection and study of archival material and literature, and a closer look at architecture and space, was particularly enriched by conversing with locals. One of the most important elements of the landscapes of Nida and the Curonian Spit are the forests, which were planted on the shifting dunes as early as the nineteenth century, but this process was particularly intensive during the Soviet period. Gediminas Dikšas, a former long-time forester of Nida, together with his daughter, sociologist Sigita Kraniauskienė, guided the participants through the forests and the professional behind-the-scenes of the expedition. Gediminas talked about the specifics of the resort, which had been living under the conditions of a tightened regime until the independence, and about the everyday life of the town. Another member of the Dikša family, Lina Dikšaitė, the head of the Curonian Spit National Park Directorate, was met at a conference in Juodkrante. Here she gave a presentation on landscape aesthetics in Curonian Spit forest management, relevant for PAScapes research.
The conversation with Vitalija Teresa Jonušienė, the first head of the Thomas Mann Memorial Museum and Thomas Mann Cultural Centre, brought us closer to a different storyline of Nida’s life at that time. She recalled the development of Nida’s cultural life in the late Soviet era and showed archival documents of the museum’s activities, reflecting the way in which the local identity was created.
The transformations of the Curonian Spit landscapes require more research, but the complexity and paradoxes of this process are already becoming apparent. The post-war landscapes of Nida, as well as those of the neighbouring fishing villages, which were later merged into a single administrative unit (the town of Neringa), were first and foremost affected by the destruction of the German heritage and cultural signs (e.g. the wood of the old villas was used as fuel). Nida was designed as a fishery centre and a fishermen’s collective was established there, which led to its new architecture and a changed relationship with its environment. Later, it was developed as a resort town, but its development was unusual, as it operated in a border area during the Cold War.
The control of people’s movements was intertwined with the desire to adapt the landscapes to the industrial, military and aesthetic needs of the resort, by reforesting the dunes and then restricting the growth of those forests. This attention to forests contrasted sharply with the polluted and completely neglected lagoon, which had been sacrificed for the sake of industrial needs. The relationship with water was represented only by the fishermen’s homesteads which began to be built in the late 1960s in Nida to imitate the ethnographic tradition. In this sense, the entire Curonian Spit perfectly reflects the authoritarian transformation of landscapes and the authoritarian logic of the process.
“We see oppositions – on the one hand, the curbing of the dunes and the creation of a forest city, and on the other hand, a wasteland, turning away from the lagoon, from the Nemunas. <…> I would see a kind of double irony here: recreational infrastructure is emerging, and we have, finally, a waterfront culture. The whole of Neringa, where people live, goes along the waterfront, and a strange kind of reclaiming of the lagoon takes place. There is no marine civilisation, but this one is distinct. A dead lagoon, extinct fishery, absent recreational infrastructure – unexpected results,” historian Nerijus Šepetys shared his insights during the discussion.
During the expedition, a lot of time was devoted to the researchers’ discussions regarding the direction in which the ongoing study of the Nemunas river region and its landscapes should be developed, including also landscape transformations of the Curonian Spit. This was the second such expedition for the PAScapes team – in the summer of 2024, part of the team visited Smalininkai, whose transformations are also being explored as a part of the “Nemunas Land”.
One week in a space of sand, pine forests, cormorants and multi-layered culture, framed by lagoons and the sea, has brought to the (Post)Authoritarian Landscapes Research Centre a great wealth of images, memories and stories that will be unpacked, explored and, in the future, told in a much greater detail.
