KLAIPEDA CITY TOUR (2 HOURS)

City tour is focused on the Old Town of Klaipėda with its Theatre Square dominated by the statue of a girl Ann from Tharau, narrow alleyways with attractive courtyards, art galleries, cafes and small boutiques, blocks of lattice-work buildings, old warehouse reflecting the influence of Germanic architecture of the Hanseatic period.

Historians maintain that a settlement of ancient Balts, the ancestors of modern Lithuanians stood on the coats of the Kursiu Marios lagoon at the estuary of the Dane river as early as the 1st century A.D. That fishing village, often attacked by various invaders, had to fight off the Vikings as well as resisting the invasions of the Dutch merchants. In 1252 Klaipeda was captured by the Livonian Order. As a result, the brick castle of Memelburg was erected on the estuary of the Dane river. Although Lithuanians who were reluctant to reconcile with the loss of the town tried to recapture it, they failed to win it back. Even after the victory at Zalgiris in 1410, when Lithuanians managed to regain the greater part of Zemaitija (West Lithuania), Klaipeda remained under Germans. In the course of the following centuries the town of Klaipeda remained under the foreign yoke...

At the present time Klaipeda is not only one of the largest fishing ports on the Baltic Sea but also a major cultural centre of Lithuania.

            Optional:

• Clock and Watch Museum introduces the development of the construction of time measuring devices from older times until today; originals, models or reconstructed copies of ancient calendars, sun, water, fire and sand clocks, mechanical time measuring devices; exhibits which show the change of clock forms from Renaissance to modern styles. Together with the clocks from different countries, characteristic furniture and artistic works are selected and displayed according to particular periods.
• Maritime Museum and Aquarium. The museum collections include the sea fauna and insects, archaeological, ethnographic and iconographical items, coins, documents, ships and their equipment. Special stock of the Museum - animate exhibits: sea mammalians, birds, fishes - freshwater fishes of the Baltic sea and Lithuanian rivers and lakes, corralling fishes, tropic freshwater fishes, colony of penguins.

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