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The Return of the Kurenas -
part of the INTERREG project
Nika Puteikiene
Director of PR of the Lithuania Maritime Museum
 Kurenas - the historic Curonian flat bottom
sailing boat - took part in the international ex-pedition in the Szczecin Lagoon.
Until the middle of the 20th century it was common to see flat sailing boats with small
gauges now known as Kurenai.
The Lithuania Maritime Museum was the first to initiate the reconstruction of
this means of navigation, and to use it for ethnocultural tourism and education. In July
of 2001 the first kurenas was lowered into the Curonian Lagoon. Since then the
ethnocultural project has begun.
The Return of the Kurenas has the goal of encouraging society to learn about,
protect, and wisely use the ethnocultural heritage of the Curonian Lagoon region.
Every year expeditions that enhance new geographic regions are being organized.
The Return of the Kurenas is presented as an ethnocultural project of living
history, supported by Lagomar, a project of the EU program INTERREG III B. The goal of
Lagomar is to explore the heritage of nature and culture of the southern shore of the
Baltic Sea. This scientific expedition, in which other reconstructed historical ships from
Germany, Poland and Lithuania participated, is one of the most significant events of the
Lagomar project.
The team of the kurenas, under the command of Romaldas Adomavicius, head of the history
department of the Lithuania Maritime Museum, spent sixteen days under the
kurenas' sails, advocating cultural tourism and sharing the experience of how to
restore historic flat sailing boats. The German historian Maik Jens Otto Springman, along
with specialists of navigation from Gdansk Maritime Museum and students from
Germany's Rostock and Greifwald universities, were also on the team.
The historic kurenas visited many cities in Poland and Germany on the shores of the
Szczecin Lagoon. R.Adomavicius noted that for their visit each city organized a festival.
People were very interested in the kurenas as it carried the portable exposition The
Return of the Kurenas. It wasn't easy to sail in the Szczecin Lagoon since it is
deeper than the Curonian Lagoon and keel-type, not flat-type, boats are built there.
The specialists of the museum have presented the kurenas at the international scientific
exposition The Problems of Restoring Old Ships that took place in Torgelov,
Germany. After that, three historic boats - the kurenas, an old Slavic boat rebuilt
in Germany, and the cesbotas (historic boat of Szczecin Lagoon) - sailed along the
route of Christian missionary Bishop Otto-von-Bamberg.
"Our experience shows that this is the best way to introduce Lithuanian navigation
traditions," commented Olga Zaliene, director of the museum.
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