Dating from 1888, this classic red brick Gothic beauty functioned as a museum during Soviet times and was handed back to the Church exactly a century after its construction. Inside are a relatively new organ, some fine stained glass and a lot of iconography relating to the local fishing industry. Of most interest however are the graves in the attached ethnographic cemetery. Known in the local parlance plural as krikštai (christenings), these peculiar graves feature markers at the foot of the graves rather than the usual headstone arrangement. Using masculine-named wood for deceased males and vice-versa and carved with horses’ heads, plants and birds, the footstones, for want of a better word, are placed thus to help the deceased rise up on Judgement Day.

Evangelical-Lutheran Church comments

• 20
  Sep
  2009
  Letitia - USA, Vermont, Brattleboro
  Check around for a schedule of summer concerts in this church if you are staying in Nida for more than a couple of days. Some local history interest inside the church, but of much greater interest value is the cemetery next to the church and those krikstai. Some of these markers disprove the official version of post-WWII history that all the Germans left after the war.