Kaliningrad Maritime Canal
The Kaliningrad maritime channel ( Russian Калининградский морской судоходный канал / Kaliningradski Morskoi sudochodny channel ; originally Konigsberg Seekanal ) is a 43 km long channel between the port Kaliningrad (to 1946 Konigsberg (Prussia) ) and the Baltic Sea in Baltijsk (to 1946 pillau ).
Course and general
The canal begins at the moles at the entrance to the port of Baltijsk ( Pillau ) and runs along the northern coast of the Fresh Lagoon in an easterly to north-easterly direction. It crosses the Fischhausen or Schöne Wiek (Primorsk Bay) and leads past the harbor facilities of Swetly , the former fishing village of Zimmerbude , to the mouth of the Pregel . The length of this section is 34 km; it follows 9 km to the Königsberg harbor , where the Pregel is canalized. The usable width of the canal is 50 to 80 m, the depth 9-10.5 m.
On the largest part of its course by the freshness Haff - with the exception of approximately 5 km long section through the fish Hausen Wiek - the channel is on the Haffseite by a dam in front of the Zuschwemmen the fairway protected. The dam was built from two rows of driven round piles with a bed of stone blocks and its strength was increased by excavated material from the canal. The dam was planted with willows and alders . The accumulations grew into larger areas of land, the so-called hooks: Pokaiter Haken, Kapornerstein, Lithauens Sand, Marschener Sand, Peyser Haken, Kamstigaller Haken and Heerd. This prevented the canal from being constantly filled with new sludge. The dam has eight openings, for example to enable fishing vessels to quickly reach the open lagoon from the ports on the northern bank. Natural sand deposits mean that the dam has widened in sections to up to 200 m, and southwest of Swetly to a maximum of 500 m.
The canal can now be navigated by ships up to a maximum of 170 m in length and 8.0 m draft along its entire length to Kaliningrad. On 22.6 km to the port facilities of Swetly with an oil terminal from Lukoil , the maximum length is 200 m and the draft 9.4 m, which enables the entry of tankers up to 20,000 GRT .
The canal is navigable all year round. Usually between January and the end of March it can be covered by a thin layer of ice; if necessary, it is kept free of icebreakers .
A car ferry runs from Baltiysk to the Fresh Spit (Vistula Spit , Baltic Spit, Baltiysk Spit) with the Baltiysk district of Kossa (Neutief) . At the entrance to the canal in Baltijsk there is an equestrian statue of Tsarina Elisabeth (Russia) (1709–1762), under which Russian troops temporarily conquered East Prussia during the Seven Years' War . Before that there was the statue of the Great Elector, which has been standing in Eckernförde for decades.
history
At the end of the 19th century, when seagoing ships became bigger and bigger and their draft began to exceed 4 m, the port of Königsberg lost its importance behind the other Baltic Sea ports. The reloading of the goods in Pillau on smaller vehicles made their price more expensive by increasing transport costs. On the other hand, deepening the fairway through the silt and sand of the open Fresh Lagoon was practically impossible. That is why the Königsberger Seekanal was built between 1890 and 1901 with an average depth of 6.7 m and a width of up to 30 m. At three points on the canal, passing points of up to 60 m width have been provided for larger seagoing vessels. The canal was officially opened on November 15, 1901. Compared to the 7.3 million gold marks according to the project, the construction of the canal had cost 12.3 million marks. Various repair work on the completed canal continued until 1912.
modernization
The canal gained new importance after the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles separated East Prussia not only from the Reich, but also from the Soviet Union, the centuries-old Russian hinterland. That is why the new port facilities for the "Island of East Prussia" were built in the 1920s . Accordingly, the sea canal was widened from 1924 and the fairway deepened to 8.5 m. The lights , which were completed at the end of 1929, made it possible to drive at night and thus increase traffic. The tight Pregel kink near Kosse (Königsberg) was eliminated by the Cosser puncture . The city of Königsberg provided the site. A floor width of 70 m at a depth of 8 m was excavated. The extracted soil was washed up on the south bank of the Samland, on the lagoon bank of the canal dam and on low-lying meadows on the lower Pregel and secured by packing works from being washed away. In this way new fertile land was created and extensive areas made flood-free. A dam on the open lagoon protected the fairway from being flooded. On July 29, 1921, the administrative responsibility for the waterways of the German Reich passed from the states to the Reich; The Königsberger Seekanal also became the "Reichswasserstraße". The local authority responsible for maintenance and expansion until 1945 was the Pillau waterways office of the Königsberg waterways directorate, which employed 200 to 400 people depending on the season. During this time, bidirectional operation was organized for the first time, also for larger ships, using six passing points. The use of the Soviet icebreaker Yermak in the harsh winter of 1928/29 with temperatures below −40 ° C on the canal, which usually only freezes over, is remarkable .
post war period
After northern East Prussia was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1945, the canal continued to be operated and expanded. The port of Königsberg resumed operations on June 20, 1945. After the renaming of Königsberg in Kaliningrad in 1946, the Königsberg Sea Canal was renamed to "Kaliningrad Sea Canal" in 1947 at the same time as the official renaming of the Fresh Lagoon to "Kaliningrad Bay". In 1947 canal deepening work was carried out for the first time in connection with the ongoing salvage of ships sunk during the Second World War . By 1975, 65 million rubles , equivalent to 13.7% of the operating costs of the Kaliningrad port, had been spent on maintaining and expanding the canal. A new project for the reconstruction of the canal started with an order of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on September 3, 1979. 16.4 million rubles had been invested by 1986 (about 50 million German marks at the prices at the time ). In 1986 the financing ended prematurely with the beginning of the economic crisis in the last years of the existence of the Soviet Union ; the projected reconstruction of the canal was not completed.
The Kaliningrad Maritime Canal was initially subordinated to the main sea route administration of the USSR Merchant Fleet Ministry. In 1953 it was transferred to the Kaunas regional administration of the main waterway administration, and in 1955 to the Riga Baltic Sea Administration . Since 1961 it has been subordinate to the Kaliningrad seaport.
Until the 1990s, the canal could not be used by foreign ships, as one of the large bases of the Baltic Fleet of the Soviet Navy was in Baltiysk and the entire Kaliningrad Oblast was closed to foreigners due to the large number of restricted military areas.
In the 1990s to 2000s, the canal was deepened further, in particular to allow larger tankers to access the Lukoil oil terminal at Swetly. Due to the relatively small width of the canal, however, simultaneous traffic in both directions is still not possible; there are fixed times for entering the canal in land and sea direction. In order to increase the passage capacity, the logistically more complicated bilateral operation with the use of the alternative points in the canal was resumed on an experimental basis.
literature
- Robert Albinus: Königsberg Lexicon. City and surroundings . Flechsig, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-88189-441-1 .
- Richard Armstedt: history of the royal. Capital and residence city of Königsberg in Prussia . Reprint of the original edition, Stuttgart 1899
- Cornelius Kutschke : Königsberg as a port city . Koenigsberg 1930.
- Fritz Gause : The history of the city of Königsberg in Prussia . 3 volumes. Böhlau, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-412-08896-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Information ( Memento of April 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Kaliningrad Port Authority (English, Russian)
- ^ C. Kutschke: Königsberg as a port city . Königsberg 1930, p. 48.
Coordinates: 54 ° 40 ′ N , 20 ° 11 ′ E