Duration: 8 hours.
Group size: up to 4 people.
Guide: Mikhail.
Car: Škoda Roomster.
Phone: 8(906)217-39-69.
Polessk
Here we will focus on three sites. The local Kreishaus has long been used almost for its original purpose: it houses a branch of the St. Petersburg Agrarian University. Labiau Castle and the Blankenstein brewery are only just beginning to return to full life. The castle is interesting to see right now, so as to compare it with how it will look in three or four years' time, once everything superfluous has been cleared out of it.
Labiau Castle in the first half of the 20th century.
Labiau is one of the two Teutonic Order castles in the Kaliningrad Region that have kept all four of their walls-wings (the other is Ragnit in Neman).
The Blankenstein brewery in Labiau (Polessk).
The Rural Tourism Resource Centre of the Kaliningrad Region has found a roof over its head in the Blankenstein brewery, but nobody here intends to stop there. The team working on the site plans to revive the production of the famous local pale "Labiau March" beer.
Zalivino
For decades the lighthouse in the village of Zalivino was, to put it mildly, falling into decline, but a few years ago the Kaliningrad Museum of the World Ocean took it under its wing. From that moment on, the fate of the little brick tower on the shore of the Curonian Lagoon gained a second wind.
The Rinderort lighthouse in Zalivino.
Within a matter of months, the area around the lighthouse was turned into a pleasant promenade, and the lighthouse itself into a local landmark that draws hundreds of tourists to Zalivino.
In the classroom of the Old German School of Waldwinkel.
Ilyichyovo
At the Old German School of Waldwinkel, travellers can immerse themselves in the atmosphere of local pre-war school life. It is very interesting to compare it with what today's Russian schools are like and with the Soviet schools of the second half of the 20th century, where we all studied. Besides a fully equipped classroom with a blackboard, a teacher's desk and school desks, the school building has a small local history museum, where you can learn a great deal about the life of the first Soviet settlers who came after the Second World War to build their new lives in East Prussia.
Photos by Mikhail Ogorodnikov.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
