I have readInga Ābele, Duna | The Year the River Froze Twice (2017)
To read: Anna Lācis |
Vertical Divider
|
I have written... nothing ...
|
my travel to Latvia |
|
Vertical Divider
|
August 2021.
I used to think about going there for years, when I was living in Poland. So relatively close, and yet so exotic, and strangely invisible. I never went. Other destinations always seemed to attract me more. Latvia seemed a sort of void, blending with the remaining Baltic countries. Why are they three, instead of one? Well, now I know the answer. Each of them participates in a separate cultural area. Lithuania is related to Poland, to Eastern Europe. Latvia and its capital is a Hanseatic, maritime little Amsterdam immersed in a forest of pine and beech. Estonia is swampy and almost-Scandinavian, and closely connected with Finland, at least by its language and what might roughly and imprecisely be called its ethnic origins. In Latvia's past, there was a bishop by the name of Albert, and Livonian Brothers of the Sword. They were Germans and, even if they were hardly ever more than just a hundred, they connected the country to trans-Baltic, West European contexts. This is how I explain things to myself. I felt so much like in Amsterdam that I happened to say "dank u wel", two or three times, to people bringing me food and local beers. Especially that Riga seems to reinvent itself as a place of very similar kind of tourism (at a competitive price). I imagined Latvia as a mysterious place at the frontier of the world, facing Russia, the deep East, the deep North. Swampy, full of mists, and scarcely populated. In fact, the country is full of forests, in many places reaching the sea directly, without any interval of dunes or beaches. I had constantly those Livonian knights in front of my eyes, penetrating Europe's primordial forest. And in a company of less than a hundred, barely tens of them, ready to launch a country's history. I imagine they succeeded, because the place was so lonely. The present-day Republic of Latvia gained its independence in 1918, after centuries of German, Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian, Russian rule. Shortly speaking, one of those "peoples without history", in the original assertion of the expression as it was coined by Marx. Yes, we had been one country once, but it was in the Middle Ages, and it is very difficult to know anything about Latvia in Poland. Even about Lithuania. There are histories that fell apart long ago in this part of the world. Recovered independencies of 1918 were lived in rather hostile indifference. They were Baltic Germans much more than us. In 1934, the autocratic regime of Kārlis Ulmanis was established, soon interrupted by the incorporation of the country into the Soviet Union at the beginning of the ww2. In 1941, there was a Nazi occupation; the Germans must have felt so much at home in this part of Europe that the hangars for zeppelins they built still serve as Riga's bazar halls today. But in 1944, there was a re-occupation by the Soviet Union again, where Latvia remained for the next 45 years. The independence movement started with the so called Singing Revolution in 1987, and led to 1991 independence. Finally, in 2004, Latvia joined the NATO and the European Union, and lived happily ever after. 
|
Riga's Old Town
Riga's Jugendstil
Nazi zeppelin hangars, transformed into market halls.
