A river crossing that became a capital
Riga did not grow slowly from a village into a city. It was founded in 1201 by a German bishop — Albert of Buxhoeveden — as a deliberate act of colonial ambition, a fortified base from which to Christianize and control the indigenous tribes of what is now Latvia and Estonia. Albert brought the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a military order, to do the fighting, and he brought German merchants to do the trading, and within a generation a proper medieval city was taking shape on the left bank of the Daugava River, twelve kilometres upstream from where it meets the Baltic Sea.
The location was not accidental. The Daugava is one of the great trade arteries of eastern Europe, draining a watershed that extends deep into Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. Furs, timber, flax and wax came down the river from the forests of the interior; salt, cloth and metalwork went back up. The Baltic amber that washes ashore on the beaches to the northwest had been traded across Europe since the Bronze Age, and Riga's merchants positioned themselves as the brokers of the entire regional economy.
By the mid-thirteenth century, Riga was a member of the Hanseatic League — the great northern European merchant confederation that connected cities from London to Novgorod. At its commercial peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city that the indigenous Livs and Latvians had fished the Daugava from for generations was one of the most prosperous trading cities in the Baltic. The German merchant class who ran it built well: the House of the Blackheads, founded for unmarried foreign merchants, the cathedral on Dome Square, the guild halls on Long Street — these were not modest buildings.
The city that everyone owned except the Latvians
The history of Riga, like that of most Baltic cities, is largely a history of its ruling foreigners. After the Teutonic Orders came Poland-Lithuania, which took control in 1561 when the Livonian Confederation collapsed under pressure from Ivan the Terrible. Sweden took the city from Poland in 1621; Karl XI made it the second city of the Swedish Empire, and the Swedes built extensively in the areas north of the Old Town. Peter the Great took it from Sweden in 1710 during the Great Northern War, in a siege that the city's German-speaking population chose to survive by surrender rather than resistance.
The Russian period lasted two hundred years. The Baltic Germans — the merchant and noble families who had effectively run Riga since the thirteenth century — retained their privileges under the tsars, operating a kind of self-governing enclave within the empire. Latvians were serfs until 1861, legally forbidden from living in cities, owning property or getting an education for most of the Russian colonial period. The German names on the buildings, the Lutheran churches, the guild records — all of this was built without Latvian participation, in a Latvian landscape.
The National Awakening — Atmodas laiks — was led by writers, teachers and scholars who began collecting Latvian folk songs, translating literature into Latvian and arguing for the cultural worth of the Latvian language and people against the dominant German and Russian assumptions about Baltic civilization. The first Latvian Song Festival, held in 1873, was both a cultural event and a political statement: we exist, we have culture, we can organize. That festival became the template for all the ones that followed, including the one that helped end Soviet rule more than a century later.
The Art Nouveau city
Between roughly 1897 and 1913, Riga went through one of the most sustained architectural booms in European history, and almost all of it was done in the Art Nouveau style. The results are still there: Riga has the highest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings of any city in the world — more than 800 of them within the city limits, around 750 in the Quiet Centre district alone. Walking along Alberta, Elizabetes and Strēlnieku streets in the early morning, before the tour groups arrive, you are walking through an outdoor museum of a style at its most ambitious and strange.
Latvian Art Nouveau is not a single uniform thing. The earliest buildings — designed by German and Russian architects — tend toward the international Jugendstil: floral ornament, sinuous lines, female figures emerging from the facade. The later buildings, many of them designed by Latvian architects who had studied in Riga and Germany, fused the European style with Latvian national romantic elements: folk motifs, geometric abstraction, imagery drawn from Latvian mythology. The building at Alberta 13, designed by Mikhail Eisenstein — father of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who was born in Riga — is the most photographed in the neighbourhood: enormous screaming faces and caryatid figures on a facade that reads somewhere between beautiful and alarming.
The boom that produced these buildings was driven by industrialization. Riga became one of the major industrial cities of the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century — its factories produced railway carriages, rubber goods, chemical products and machinery. By 1913, Riga had a population of five hundred thousand, making it the third-largest city in the empire after St. Petersburg and Moscow. Money flowed into the city; the prosperous classes built in the fashionable style. Then the First World War began, Germany invaded, and everything stopped.
1918 and the first republic
Latvia declared independence on November 18, 1918, in a period of extraordinary chaos — the German Empire had just surrendered, the Russian Empire had dissolved into civil war, and no major power was paying close attention to what happened in the Baltic provinces. The declaration was made in the National Theatre on Kronvalda Boulevard, in the building that still bears a plaque marking the event, and it was followed by two years of intermittent warfare before Latvia's independence was internationally recognized in 1920.
The twenty years of the first republic — roughly 1920 to 1940 — produced the Latvian institutions that survive today in memory and in some cases in physical form. The Freedom Monument, unveiled in 1935 in the city centre, was designed by the sculptor Kārlis Zāle and represents the three historical regions of Latvia held aloft by a female Liberty figure. The monument survived Soviet occupation — the Soviets considered demolishing it but eventually decided that the risk of provoking protests was greater than the symbolic benefit — and it was guarded by the Latvian Honour Guard immediately after independence was restored. The guard has not left since.
The first republic ended in June 1940, when the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Latvia and occupied the country without significant military resistance. By August, Latvia had been incorporated into the USSR. The German-speaking population — some of whom had lived in Riga for generations, going back to the Hanseatic merchants of the thirteenth century — was repatriated to Germany under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the previous year. Seven hundred years of Baltic German urban history ended in a few months.
The occupation years
The German invasion in June 1941 brought the Holocaust to Latvia with brutal speed. Within weeks of the German arrival, most of Riga's Jewish community — approximately 35,000 people, one of the largest and most culturally rich Jewish communities in the Baltic — had been murdered. The Rumbula forest massacre, on November 30 and December 8, 1941, killed around 25,000 people in two days: the largest single mass murder of Jews by German forces up to that point in the war. The Jews of the Riga Ghetto, and later tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews transported to Latvia, were killed in Rumbula and the nearby Biķernieki forest. There are memorials at both sites. They are worth visiting.
The second Soviet occupation, beginning in 1944, lasted forty-seven years. The Soviet period brought large-scale immigration of Russian-speaking workers to staff the factories and administrative apparatus, fundamentally altering the city's demographic composition. By 1990, ethnic Latvians were a minority in their own capital city — around 36% of Riga's population. This demographic fact underlies much of Latvian politics today, including ongoing debates about language policy, citizenship and the rights of the Russian-speaking minority.
The second singing revolution
The National Awakening of the 1850s had a direct structural parallel in the late 1980s. When Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies loosened restrictions on public life, Latvia experienced what became known as the Third Awakening — a broad cultural and political movement that used the tools of the first awakening, especially song, to press for independence.
On August 23, 1989 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact — two million people formed a human chain that stretched six hundred and seventy-five kilometres from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. The Baltic Way passed directly through the centre of Riga, along Brīvības iela, and demonstrators held hands at the Freedom Monument. It was the largest single political demonstration in Baltic history, and it was entirely peaceful. Latvia restored independence on August 21, 1991, during the failed coup against Gorbachev in Moscow. Soviet tanks had briefly occupied the city centre; by the time the coup collapsed, they were gone.
The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, near the Freedom Monument, documents the Soviet and German occupation periods in extensive detail. It is not an easy museum to visit, but it is an honest one, and it provides context for almost everything else in the city.
Black Balsam, rye and amber
Three material things define Riga in the way that few cities are defined by their products: a herbal liqueur, a bread and a fossilized resin.
Riga Black Balsam was formulated in 1752 by Abraham Kunze, a local pharmacist who claimed medicinal properties for his blend of 24 botanical ingredients — valerian root, ginger, galangal, wormwood, bitter orange peel, oak bark and others kept secret — in a 45% alcohol base. Catherine the Great tried it during a visit and is said to have recovered from a stomach ailment, which provided useful royal endorsement. The liqueur is still produced in Riga, still at 45%, still in the same matte black ceramic bottle that has been its packaging since the nineteenth century. It is served as a digestif, mixed into black currant juice as the classic Latvian after-dinner drink, or stirred into coffee. It tastes like medicine, which is the point.
Dark rye bread — rupjmaize — is the national food in a way that goes beyond recipe. Made from rye sourdough with caraway seeds and baked slowly at low temperature, it is dense, sour, slightly sweet and almost nothing like the bread most visitors are used to. It keeps for weeks without going stale. Latvian households traditionally keep it on the table the way French households keep baguettes. The Central Market is where to buy it fresh: look for loaves that are dark brown nearly to black, heavy for their size, with the crust slightly cracked.
Baltic amber is not metaphorically precious — it is the oldest material of substantial value traded in northern Europe. The amber that washes up on the shores of Latvia and Lithuania is around 44 million years old, formed from the resin of ancient pine forests and preserved in the amber-rich deposits of the Baltic Sea. Riga has been a centre of amber trade and craftsmanship since the medieval period; the amber sold in Old Town today comes from local beaches and from the major deposits in the Kaliningrad region. The quality and price vary widely, and the tourist market includes reconstituted amber — small pieces melted and pressed together — which looks similar to the genuine article but has none of the same inclusions or translucency. Reputable shops display certifications; the Central Market amber vendors are generally reliable.
What you'll carry away
Riga is a city that rewards a certain kind of attention: the willingness to look at buildings as if they're telling you something, and to ask why a city that was run by foreign occupiers for most of its recorded history still feels so distinctly, confidently itself. The answer has something to do with the song festivals that kept Latvian culture alive through centuries of suppression, something to do with the rye bread and the amber and the balsam that maintained material continuity, and something to do with the Art Nouveau facades that a generation of Latvian architects built at the precise historical moment when they were first allowed to make something in their own name.
Walk slowly along the canal that traces the edge of the Old Town, through Bastejkalns Park, in the late afternoon when the light is horizontal. The history of this city is complicated and not always comfortable. The walk is beautiful. Both things are true.