Szczecin Lagoon Szczecin Lagoon Szczecin Lagoon, Stettin Lagoon, Bay of Szczecin, or Stettin Bay (, ), also Oder lagoon (), is a lagoon in the Oder estuary, shared by Germany and Poland. It is separated from the Pomeranian Bay of the Baltic Sea by the islands of Usedom and Wolin. The lagoon is subdivided into the "Kleines Haff" (, "small lagoon") in the West and the "Wielki Zalew" (, "great lagoon") in the East. An ambiguous historical German name was "Frisches Haff", which later exclusively referred to the Vistula Lagoon. From the South, the lagoon is fed by several arms of the
Vistula Lagoon The bordering administrative regions is Polish Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship and modern Russian Kaliningrad Oblast, which had name Königsberg Oblast during half of 1946. While today the Kursenieki, also known as Kuršininkai are a nearly extinct Baltic ethnic group living along the Curonian Spit, in 1649 Kuršininkai settlement spanned from Memel (Klaipėda) to Danzig (Gdańsk), including the area around the Vistula Lagoon. The Kuršininkai were eventually assimilated by the Germans, except along the Curonian Spit where some still live. The Kuršininkai were considered Latvians until after World War I when Latvia gained independence from the Russian Empire, a consideration based on linguistic