Villa Crell was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and belonged to a well-known lawyer and notary in the city, Max Crell. It is of architectural value, and inside the house, there is an interesting exposition of the Local History Museum.
Max Krell was mayor of the Prussian city of Memel, and after retiring moved with his family to Cranz. Here he built a Villa for himself in the architectural style of a mixture of Russian Baroque and German Gothic. The roof is covered with beautiful glazed tiles.
After the World War II, the building was used for several decades as a children`s library, and in 2014, a Local History Museum was opened here. It is very popular, as it tells about the times of East Prussia, when Zelenogradsk was the famous Baltic resort of Cranz.
One hall is dedicated to the medieval period, when there was no resort, and in the 13th century, there was a fishing village. The Teutonic knights built on this site a fortified tavern Kranta-Krug, where travelers could rest after a hard crossing through the Sands of the Curonian spit. Its length is 98 kilometers. In the Middle Ages, the onset of sand dunes was a huge problem of the Curonian spit. The sand covered the villages there.
In the fishing village, they caught the famous flounder, known throughout Prussia, and there were so many moose on the Curonian spit that they very often came to the houses of the inhabitants of Cranz. That is why, when Cranz in 1937 received the right to its own coat of arms, it depicted a flounder in the lower part and elk horns in the upper part.
