Meriküla
Coordinates: 59 ° 25 ' N , 27 ° 58' E
Meriküla ( German Merreküll ) is a village ( Estonian küla ) in the rural municipality of Vaivara ( Vaivara vald ). It is located in Ida-Viru County ( East Wierland ) in northeast Estonia .
description
The village has 17 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2012). It is located on the Baltic Sea , 37 kilometers from the city of Jõhvi . The Laagna stream ( Laagna oja ) flows through the village .
Summer retreat
The village was founded after 1653. The Lutheran chapel had the councilor William Richard Gendt from Narva built in 1863 . It was called the forest chapel because of its location . Services were held there only in summer.
On Gendt's initiative, Mereküla developed into a place where Estonians and Russians like to enjoy the summer freshness . The seaside resort of Bad Merrekküll enjoyed great popularity at the end of the 19th century. In addition to around ninety summer houses, a health resort, a boarding house, a post office, a telegraph office and - in summer - a pharmacy and a hydrotherapy institute were built in Meriküla.
The place was particularly popular with Russian nobles and Baltic German citizens. It also attracted numerous artists from the Russian capital Saint Petersburg .
In 1877, a monument was erected near the chapel in Gendt's honor, commemorating the founder of the spa. It has been preserved to this day. The chapel was remodeled as the Narva-Jõesuu Orthodox church in the 1960s .
First World War
During the First World War , the tsarist army built a sea fortress on the nearby Klint . The battery was used to protect the port of Narva-Jõesuu . It was connected to the Auvere station by a small railway line . Cannons were not installed during the World War, however. Only with the Estonian War of Independence between Estonia and Soviet Russia did the beach battery acquire a new military significance. However, the two cannons were never used in combat. After the armistice of January 1920 and the Tartu peace treaty signed a month later , they were decommissioned and a few years later placed in an arms depot.
Second World War
On February 14, 1944, around 500 Red Army marines landed near Meriküla from the island of Bolshoi Tjuters . The arriving soldiers were immediately put under heavy fire by the Wehrmacht . Nevertheless, they succeeded in conquering Meriküla with heavy losses. However, on the morning of February 15, the place was retaken by the German reinforcements. Almost all Soviet soldiers were captured or killed.
In the 1970s, a memorial was erected in the place to commemorate the Soviet military operation.
