Mažeikiai

Mažeikiai lies by the Venta River in northern Samogitia. A village of this name is recorded in the middle of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and after 1795, it belonged to the Viekšniai estate. The Lithuanian encyclopedia suggests that the name may be connected with the Samogitian noble Mažeika, mentioned in the late thirteenth century, but this association is uncertain.

In these centuries Mažeikiai was a village within an estate, not a town with urban institutions, its fields and farmsteads lying along the Venta.