AFR, October 5 2023
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Take a look at a map of Lithuania. On its west side you’ll see a thin ribbon of land draped languidly across the Baltic Sea, arranging a lagoon behind it. It looks like a bit of the country has peeled off, shedding its skin.
This is the Curonian Spit, and it’s an overlooked gem. It’s a skinny 98-kilometre belt of sand dunes and fir trees, in places only 400 metres wide. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a national park and a place beloved of Lithuanian holidaymakers.
It combines beaches, a pretty lagoon and a thriving arts scene including a popular annual jazz festival. And, incongruous amid the beauty and the art, it’s bisected by an unlikely border that has got a whole lot more geopolitically sensitive in the last few years. Not a bad set of interests for a spit.
In local folk mythology, the spit was made by a giantess called Neringa to help fishermen. She scooped up great mounds of sand and placed them in a way to make tranquil fishing grounds. In the more prosaic geological explanation, it formed off a glacial moraine about 5,000 years ago and gradually accumulated enough sand through winds and sea currents to rise into its modern form. It might not be with us forever: vulnerable to sea level rises, it’s also in a perpetual state of motion given the natural movement of sand, a process that centuries ago used to bury entire villages.
For the moment, though, it’s an idyllic geographical quirk, visited in droves in the summer on a regular car ferry from the city of Klaipeda (Eu20.50 return, paid outbound, plus a Eu30 entry fee to the national park). It’s got a lot to recommend it. Within a one mile radius you can be bathing in the bracing waters of the Baltic (even when I visit in July, it’s cold enough to cause a squawk when you go in), enjoying a glass of wine overlooking a 10pm sunset on the lagoon, walking and cycling in beautiful scented pine forests or hauling yourself up a mighty sand dune.
The heart of the spit is a place called Nida, an orderly community dotted with brightly painted houses. It has long been beloved of the literati, including German Nobel laureate and author Thomas Mann, whose summer house is today a museum. Clean and green, in the days it is filled with people walking the lagoon waterfront and getting around on bikes. In the evening it hums with activity in bars and restaurants.
One local institution is Tik Pas Jona, which has an old smoking rack from which carp and mackerel hang. I place my order, select my chosen fish off the rack, and eat it on rye bread overlooking the lagoon. A little further along is Nidos Seklycia, also known as été, a high end place where I eat oysters and sole amid a canopy of pines which reach right to the water. Favoured bars include Faksas, a rustic place of wooden crate seats where live bands entertain the drinkers, and Kaslonas, with a similar vibe right on the water.
In late July or early August, the Jazz Marathon rolls into town; the 2023 crop includes the Alexander Beets Quintet. But there is always something on, from rock covers bands to exhibitions by Lithuanian artists, and throughout the summer there is a lively, feelgood mood, with people drinking from outdoor cabins on the marina, enjoying the pink skies that don’t fade until 11 at night.
Nida is also full of museums, for everything from amber to fishing. An ethnographic cemetery, filled with wooden carved markings amid a peaceful patch of woodland, harks back to the spit’s pagan past. Most sights in Nida are signed in English, which is surprisingly widely spoken (but not by the owner of my guesthouse, who spends her days trying to convey some instruction to me about keys which never becomes apparent, nor the parking attendants with whom I am in constant strife for being in the wrong place. Top tip: check if your guesthouse has parking, for you will need it.)
Everyone who comes here should make the pilgrimage to the last remaining great shifting dune on the spit, the Parnidis Dune, which reaches about 50m. It’s in constant flux, martialled by woven stick fences that keep the drift under control, and the authorities implore visitors to stick to the paths so as not to hasten its erosion.
The Parnidis Dune is also a good vista from which to see something interesting.
From up there, looking south, you’re staring straight in to Russia. It’s not easy to see where the border is: it goes right through the middle of a massive dune. But it’s there. And that brings us to a quirk of the spit.
Go back to your map of Lithuania and you’ll see that its southern border neighbours an odd pocket of Russia called Kaliningrad, a province cut off from the motherland by Lithuania and Poland. But it’s very much part of Russia, and the border is one of the places where the European Union and Russia meet. Always an uneasy frontier, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine it has become downright sinister.
There is a road along the spit which links Lithuania with Kaliningrad, but when I start to drive to the border just south of Nida, the road is blocked. A local ranger tells me this is nothing to do with geopolitics so much as an extreme effort at conservation whereby the area around the border, called the Grobsto Gamtos Rezervatas, is off-limits for all access: cars, bikes, walkers, the works. Perhaps that’s just a convenient way of cutting off the border: certainly, nobody wants to be crossing it right now.
From the road you can walk to the beach on the Baltic side, and to the south, past a roped section and an assortment of almost exclusively naked Lithuanian sunbathers (it is very much in your interests to learn which signs mean nudist beach and which ones clothed), is Russia. You can’t see the border but it runs right through the middle of the beach.
Lithuania is complex but proudly independent. The first former Soviet republic to declare independence in April 1990, only 5% of its people identify as Russian, and it has watched events in Ukraine with alarm, declaring a state of emergency in 2021. When you arrive at the airport in Lithuania, in my case in the city of Kaunas on a non-stop Wizz Air flight from London Luton, there are signs everywhere, in Ukrainian colours, for a campaign called Call Russia, aimed at informing Russians about activities in Ukraine. Many Lithuanians fear something similar could one day happen to them, which makes this incongruous border through a peaceful beach somewhat darker than it used to be.
Borders are frequently arbitrary, but this one seems particularly obtuse. The spit is one natural geographical oddity, but is unbridgeable now because of an invisible line.
I find myself thinking that the sky is equally blue, the pines equally scented and the water equally freezing on each side of the line. I can only speak to the Lithuanian side, from which I conclude that this is a place far more people should have heard of, and that I’m privileged to have seen.
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