Nida

The Curonians, a Baltic people, had a settlement called nida here when the Teutonic Knights first recorded it in 1385. The original village stood on the road along the spit from Königsberg to Memel, about 5 km south of today's site near the High Dune at Cape Grobštas. It passed with the region to Ducal Prussia, lost nearly all its people to plague in 1709, and in the 1730s, threatened by drifting sand, moved north to its present position. In the 19th century the dunes that had buried villages were fixed by planting forest, and a lighthouse was built on Urbas hill in 1874. By 1878 Nida had 655 people, the largest village on the spit, living mostly from fish sold in Klaipėda and other coastal towns.

From the late 19th century the dunes drew painters from the Königsberg art academy. Herman Blode's inn became the centre of an expressionist artists' colony visited by Lovis Corinth, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others. Nida passed to Lithuania with the Klaipėda Region in 1923 but stayed mostly German, and in 1929 Thomas Mann built a summer house above the lagoon, where he spent the summers of 1930–32 and wrote part of Joseph and His Brothers. After Germany retook the region in 1939 the house was seized at Hermann Göring's order for Luftwaffe officers.

The war and the flight and expulsion of the German population left the spit almost empty. Under Soviet rule Nida became a little-visited fishing village and later a controlled-entry resort reserved for party officials, which kept its old buildings largely intact. Since 1990 it has been open to all, tourism has flourished, and Mann's cottage was restored in 1995–96 as a cultural centre.

The artists' colony set the tone for what Nida became: a place people come to for the light, the sand and the quiet. The Thomas Mann Culture Centre keeps the writer's house as a memorial and holds an annual festival, and the Nida Jazz Festival has run every year since 2001. Holidays here are low-key and family-centred, though in recent years the village has also become known for electronic music and modern art events at a forest retreat.

Local heritage is Curonian and Prussian. The Nidden Kurenwimpel, or Curonian pennants, are ornate carved flags once particular to local families, with animal and human figures that recall a pagan pictographic tradition; replicas stand around the village. In the cemetery, krikštai, pagan-style wooden burial markers, still stand in place of tombstones, and the red-brick Lutheran church of 1888 recalls the time when services were held in both Lithuanian and German.

Visitors are mostly Lithuanians, Germans, Latvians and Russians — between 200,000 and 300,000 each summer, many times the population. Because the spit is a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, building and behaviour are closely regulated to protect the dunes and the look of the village, and residents are protective of both.

About 1,500 people live in Nida all year. It is the administrative centre of Neringa, the municipality that covers most of the Lithuanian part of the spit. Life revolves around the lagoon side, where the houses, the port, the shops and the pier are sheltered from the sea winds by the forested dune ridge.

Tourism is the economy. In summer the village fills with holidaymakers, the restaurants and bicycle hire kiosks around the pier stay busy into the evening, and boats leave the marina for the lagoon; the port also serves fishing boats. Out of season the population shrinks back to the permanent residents, buses are fewer, and many places close. A local radio station, Neringa FM, broadcasts on air and online.

The single road along the spit, linking Smiltynė with Zelenogradsk in Russia, passes the edge of the village, and an hourly bus connects Nida with the ferry at Smiltynė. Nida's small airfield takes only light aircraft. The closeness of the border, and the protection rules of the park, shape what can be built and where people may go.

In Nida, the food is fish. Smoked eel and bream are the classic starters across the Baltic coast and especially on the Curonian Spit, and the places around the ferry pier serve them smoke-dried, alongside other fish from the lagoon and the sea. The cooking of Lithuania Minor, the old Prussian borderland the village belonged to, was known for freshwater fish that was smoked, salted, roasted and dried, and for the country's best-known fish soup.

Herring is eaten marinated, baked, fried or in aspic, and crayfish are a summer delicacy served with beer. Bars offer kepta duona — black bread fried in oil and rubbed with garlic — and piršteliai prie alaus, thin rolled puff pastries, as beer snacks. Lithuanian beer, alus, is the everyday drink.

Restaurants also serve the national dishes found across Lithuania, such as cepelinai, potato dumplings stuffed with meat, mushrooms or cheese and often served with sour cream, and the pink cold beetroot soup šaltibarščiai in summer. About a dozen places to eat are clustered around the pier, with pizza and beach bars on the sea side of the spit.