Klaipėda
— a port that has lived under many names.
Not only on a wall.
“A Baltic seaport in western Lithuania, at the narrow channel where the Curonian Lagoon meets the open sea. Founded in 1252 as Memel by the Teutonic Order, the city wore German, Prussian, and Soviet names before it kept the Lithuanian one. Half-timbered Fachwerk houses and the rebuilt Theater Square hold the old quarter; the Curonian Spit lies a short ferry across the channel.
Klaipėda, 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.
Klaipėda is Lithuania's third-largest city and its only deep-water seaport, sitting at the strait between the Baltic Sea and the Curonian Lagoon. The current population is roughly 150,000. The Teutonic Order founded the settlement as Memelburg in 1252; the city stayed in German and Prussian hands for most of seven centuries before joining independent Lithuania in 1923. It returned to Lithuania for good in 1990. The Old Town sits on the south bank of the Danė River, with the new town and the port spreading north along the coast.
The Curonian Lagoon is the largest brackish lagoon on the Baltic, separated from the open sea by the 98-kilometre Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage dune chain shared with Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast. The strait at Klaipėda is the only outlet. Ferries cross from Old Town and Smiltynė to the spit village of Nida in summer, the run taking about ten minutes. The Baltic on the open side runs cold even in August, rarely above sixteen degrees Celsius; amber still washes up along the spit after winter storms.
The Old Town keeps the half-timbered Fachwerk architecture that traveled from Hanseatic ports along the Baltic: red brick infill, dark cross-timbering, steep tiled roofs. Theater Square holds the rebuilt 1818 Drama Theatre and a copy of the Ännchen von Tharau fountain, the original lost during the Second World War. Klaipėda Castle, founded in 1252 and demolished and rebuilt many times since, survives as foundation ruins beside the cruise port. Restoration of the Old Town has been steady since independence in 1990, with the Friedricho passažas the most-walked block.