Curonian Spit
— — a coast the wind keeps redrawing.
Not only on a wall.
“A long thin run of sand between the Baltic Sea and the Curonian Lagoon. The dunes drift slow enough to bury a village and slow enough to outlive one. Pines hold what they can. Fishermen in Nida hang painted weather-vanes on their gables. A single road runs the length of it, mostly empty.
Curonian Spit, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
A 98-kilometre sand peninsula split between Lithuania and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, separating the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The Lithuanian half is a national park; the whole spit was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, for the long human work of holding the dunes in place. Four small villages — Nida, Preila, Pervalka, and Juodkrantė — sit on the inland side. The northern entry is a short car ferry from Klaipėda; there is no bridge.
The Parnidis dune above Nida rises to about 52 metres, among the highest active dunes in Europe. The Great Dune Ridge migrated east through the 18th and 19th centuries and buried several villages; replanting with mountain pine began in 1825 under the forester Georg David Kuwert and continues today. The wind off the Baltic is steady enough that the sundial obelisk on Parnidis, set up in 1995, was rebuilt after a 1999 hurricane shifted its alignment.
Outside the short July-August window the spit empties. Nida has a year-round population near 1,600; in winter the ferry runs a shorter timetable and the lagoon freezes along the shore. The Hill of Witches at Juodkrantė — a wooded path with about 80 carved oak figures, set up in 1979 by Lithuanian folk sculptors — stays open and is best walked without other people on it. Thomas Mann's summer cottage on the dune above Nida is a museum from May to October.