The Sahara of Lithuania

The people of the Curonian spit (Kursiu spit) have won their fight against the shifting sands, but now the battle is on to save the dunes themselves. The same dunes that swallowed 14 villages since their relentless advancement during the 18th and 19th centuries are now in danger of disappearing into the Baltic Sea. A massive forestation program in the middle of the last century pinned most of the territory of the spit in place and provided a windbreak for the villages there, but the height of the uninhabited littoral dunes near Nida is decreasing. Could this spectacular natural treasure be lost in just a few centuries?
Life on the spit is both precarious and young. Its formation began only 10,000 years ago, with the retreat of the last glacier, and was more or less completed 5000 years ago, when the first peaks of sand arose from the water. Local legend attributes this work to the giantess Neringa (whose name is now given to the current municipality). She carried sand, they say, in her apron to build the spit, creating a safe port for the fishermen and protecting them from the stormy Baltic Sea.

In a poetic way, this is more or less true. Instead of a benevolent goddess, however, an underwater river of sand carried the materials to make the spit. The sand originated on the cliffs of the Sambian peninsula to the south and was carried northward by a deep sea current. Hills on the sea floor arrested the current, changed its course and forced it to leave some of its cargo behind. Thus the Kursiu spit grew, roughly north to south.

It was the wind, however, not the waves, that expanded the spit from west to east. When the sand first emerged from the sea, the wind began its work, carrying the loose top layer of sand eastward and shaping it into neat, even rows of parabolic dunes cutting the spit crosswise. These are preserved today only near Juodkrante, but protective fences and forests hide the unique shape.
Even in this early, arid stage life began to take root on the unfriendly surface of the dunes. Sea grasses blew in, set down shallow roots and took advantage of the strong cross winds to distribute their seeds. Not long after, a forest of lindens and other deciduous trees began to carpet the dunes. That is the environment the Aistians, ancestors of the Old Prussians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Curonians, found when they came to the spit in the Neolithic age, roughly 3000BC.

These first settlers lived off the sea and considered the forest sacred, as if sensing that its shallow root system alone formed a safety net securing the dunes and the ecosystem there. Foreign invaders disrupted this existence, with attacks from the Vikings in the 8th century and the Teutonic Order in the 13th century. With the advent of the crusaders, the area gradually became Germanised and forestry supplemented the fishing industry. As the forest was exploited for timber and tar, the spit reverted to its earlier desert-like stage and the sands were on the move again. The drifting dunes took their first village in the 16th century.
The advancing sand moved at a pace of up to 20 metres per year; hills appeared overnight where the land had once been smooth and flat. For two hundred years the sand and the dustbowl conditions it created dominated life on the spit. The villagers adapted ingeniously - building Dutch doors, for example, so that if the sand blocked the bottom half overnight they could crawl out through the top half in the morning - until they could adapt no more and were forced to move on. Some villages moved dozens of times.
As early as 1768, an international commission based in Gdansk undertook to solve the crisis, settling on a proposal from a professor at Wittenburg University to reforest the dunes. His efforts were followed by other individuals who, moved by devotion to their homeland, worked to restore the forests. The most beloved and fondly remembered of these are David Kuwert and his son George David Kuwert who planted trees by hand outside the Nida post office. Only in the beginning of the 20th century, less than one hundred years ago, the advancing dunes were halted and the landscape of the spit took on its present appearance.

In 1961 the towns of Juodkrante, Pervalka, Preila and Nida - were no longer on the run - but united into the municipality of Neringa. Most of the Lithuanian territory of the spit (from Kopgalis to Nida) was declared a national park in 1991, enacting protective restrictions on the activities permitted in the forests and on the dunes. But measures taken so far are for the most part passive: efforts are being made to inform the public of the perilous situation of the dunes, but little active research or restoration is being done. The unstoppable flow of holiday traffic that supports the area's economy is on the rise, and age-old habits - such as picking mushrooms and berries in the forests, even in restricted areas - die hard. As a result of traffic the Nida dunes, said to have once reached a height of 50m above the water, are decreasing with every year.

As a testament to the fragile ecosystem of the spit, just note the oddly consistent tilt of the pine trees as you drive down the main road to Nida, caused by a persistent west wind and a shallow layer of topsoil (1cm in some places) on the loose sand. But the tenacious villages of Neringa themselves have survived and have set down deep roots in the area once known as "the Sahara of Lithuania". That name belongs only to history now.