exclave of Russia. Lithuania, Germany, and Poland lay no official claims to the region at this time. Gołdap (), the seat of Gołdap County, a transitional county between Lithuania Minor and Masuria, is the largest municipality of the region within Poland, making it the de facto capital of Polish Lithuania Minor, however, it is also considered part of Masuria and is not inhabited by an autochthonous Lithuanian population. Ethnic history Descent of Lietuvininkai Historiography Originally it was thought that Prussian Lithuanians were autochthones to Prussia. The base for it was A. Bezzenberger's line of Prussian-Lithuanian language limit. The theory proposed that Nadruvians and Scalovians were western Lithuanians and the ancestors of Lietuvininks. It was prevalent until 1919. The second theory proposed that the first Lithuanian inhabitants of the territory which later became Lithuania Minor appeared only after the war had ended. The theory was started by G. Mortensen in 1919. She stated, that Scalovians, Nadruvians and Sudovians were Prussians before the German invasion and Lithuanians were colonists of the 15–16th centuries from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – Samogitia and Suvalkija. G. Mortensen created a conception of the wilderness, according to which the vicinities of both sides of the Neman up to Kaunas had become desolate in the 13–14th centuries. According to G. Mortensen's husband H. Mortensen Lithuanian resettlement began in the last quarter of the 15th century. Lithuanian historian K. Jablonskis etc., archaeologist P. Kulikauskas etc. denied the idea of desolate land, uninhabited forests (Old German wildnis, wiltnis) and mass Lithuanian migration. The idea of Lithuanian immigration was accepted by Antanas Salys, Zenonas Ivinskis. J. Jurginis had studied the descriptions of the war roads into Lithuania and found where the word wildnis was used in the political sense. He deduced that wildnis was that part of Lithuania which belonged to the Order juridically, by the grants of the popes and emperors of Holy Roman Empire, but was not subordinate to it due to the resistance of the residents. The theory of desolate land was also criticized by Z. Zinkevičius, who has thought that old Baltic toponymy could be only preserved by the remaining local people. H. Łowmiański thought that Nadruvian and Scalovian tribes had changed ethnically due to Lithuanian colonization as early as times of tribal social order. Linguist Z. Zinkevičius has presumed that Nadruvians and Skalovians were transitive tribes between Lithuanians and Prussians since much earlier times than