Neringa Municipality

Neringa (pronunciation^ⓘ) or Neringa Municipality (Lithuanian: Neringos savivaldybė) is a municipality of Klaipėda County in westernmost Lithuania, comprising several villages in the Curonian Spit. In terms of population, it is the smallest municipality of the country. Nida is the seat of government and largest settlement in Neringa Municipality.

The name of the city is relatively new and is not found in old scriptures in this form. The name is derived from a German word Neringe, Nerunge, Nehrung which itself is a derivative of a curonian word nerija meaning a long peninsular spit.

Until the 2000 Lithuanian municipality reform,^{[clarification needed]} it was known as Neringa City, although there was never a true "city" there. It was made a city in the Soviet Union in 1961 by formally combining 4 settlements into one administrative unit.

Neringa is located south of Klaipėda, separated from the mainland Lithuania by Curonian Lagoon. It is accessible from the mainland Lithuania by ferry crossing the lagoon or overland through Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia.

The villages in Neringa municipality comprise:

They are tourist resorts and by then it was popular to grant more self-government to resorts. The municipality is the only one in Lithuania which is not called after a town or city. The name Neringa was created at Soviet time for the new city municipality.

Since 1252 the region was part of the State of the Teutonic Knights. In 1454, Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon incorporated the region to the Kingdom of Poland upon the request of the anti-Teutonic Prussian Confederation. After the subsequent Thirteen Years' War (1454–1466), it was a part of Poland as a fief held by the Teutonic Knights, and thus was located within the Polish–Lithuanian union, later elevated into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1701 onwards it was part of the Kingdom of Prussia, and from 1871 it was also part of Germany. Already in 1569 a "confusion of languages" was noticed: German, Lithuanian, Latvian-Curonian (Nehrungs-Kurisch) and Prussian. Nehrungs-kurisch was the language of the fishers.

Liudvikas Rėza, one of the most prominent Lithuanian language propagators and a linguist professor was born and living on the Curonian spit the 18th century, who added himself the second name – Gediminas in the honour of the Grand Duke of Lithuania.