Latvia: The Land of Giants?
How country #81 defied my unrealistic expectations
The first Latvian I ever met, until this weekend the only Latvian I’d ever met, was a colleague at the old Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. He worked on a job training program, and I ran an advocacy program, but as two of a very small number of men among a very large number of women, it was inevitable that we’d get to know each other at least a little. Konstantin was, for the most part, a regular guy, save for the fact that he believed in some wild conspiracy theories. This was in the mid-00’s, so his conspiracy theories weren’t particularly destructive—9-11 “truthers” had already emerged, but we had yet to enter the world of birthers, Q-Anon, or people who count the Minneapolis Lakers titles as L.A.Lakers championships. His conspiracies were more benign. I don’t remember most of them, but the one I recall was that he believed—he was absolutely convinced—that giants once walked the Earth.
“They were 11 feet tall,” he said, assuring me that he was not just talking about very tall regular people. “I know you think I’m crazy, but there’s a detailed archeological record.”
So between Konstantin’s comments, and having watched the Celtics’ 7’3’’ Latvian center Kristaps Porzingis for the last few years, I was prepared, at least a little, to be met at Riga’s international airport by towering gate agents and transported to town by colossal bus drivers.
I was not
So much for Konstantin’s giants. On the other hand, it’s not like I went to an archeological museum to make sure.
Instead, what I found in Riga was a population of thriving, normal-sized, dare I say it, “Western” people. Indeed, it was at times difficult to believe that Riga had ever been part of the Soviet Union. Maybe it’s that my only previous travel in the former U.S.S.R. came in 2002, and it was to Ukraine, maybe it was that the sun was shining, but Riga felt far more like Prague than it did, I don’t know, Stalingrad in 1943.
I realize that part of this is that I was mostly in the tourist district. On my bus out of town, one began to see some of the Brezhnev era apartment buildings, but the scars of communism just weren’t that evident. Even the obviously communist structures had a certain art deco elegance, like the Arts and Sciences building, or a modernist gleam like the television tower that mocks Gustav Eiffel’s work. Even the old KGB headquarters, now the site of a museum, was in an elegant, but tired art nouveau building.
And in the seaside suburb of Jurmala, the ghosts of Marx and Lenin were even further away. Elegant old wooden houses stood amidst green lawns, more evocative of Hingham, Mass than the Soviet Unions. The weathered houses had to have been there in the Soviet era, but were far too opulent for the proletarian masses, so I imagine they must have served as dachas for party nomenklatura unable to get or uninterested in getting a second residence on the Black Sea.
In my two days in Riga and environs I probably walked around 25 miles. That’s what I do when I’m traveling on my own. I walk. It remains the best way to see a city, especially a compact European one, but it becomes limiting when there are small children involved, which they are most of the time for me.
I like my trips alone. I seldom mistake being alone for being lonely, and my freedom to walk 15 miles a day or stop in at any obscure museum of naval history I want to often outweighs the value of having a someone to talk to at dinner. This is especially true as my preferred traveling partner, my beautiful wife, is unavailable for these sorts of trips as Swiss law requires someone to look after the children. Someday we will travel together again—alone—my love.
I will write a bit about what I did do in Latvia, but in some ways, the visit was more defined by what I did not do. At long last, as I visited my 81st country, I have finally learned a thing or two about what to skip.
First, I did not go inside any churches. I want to be clear that I am not opposed to going into churches in general. Many of Europe’s cathedrals hold extraordinary treasures of art and architecture… it’s just that many others… do not. At this point in my traveling life, I do not need to see the inside of a church unless I know that there is an artifact or architectural feature that is unique or of particular cultural importance. As such, I am particularly inclined to skip Protestant churches, as their reflexive, but not wholly illegitimate, dislike of Catholic ostentation created, perhaps a purer religion, but certainly a less visually striking worship space. I am not against austere worship spaces per se, I dig zen man, but I do understand, finally, that they make for less interesting tourist attractions.
Second, I did not go into the KGB museum. I get the allure of such a museum, heck, I felt it. But now in my 49th year, I have concluded that sometimes you do not need to stare the horrors of the world straight in the eye. I’ve done that. I visited Auschwitz, I’ve toured the great and terrible plantations of the antebellum South, I’ve seen the skulls stacked high in Rwanda’s darkest places. People can be and are awful to each other, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of lust for power, sometimes out of plain, simple, evil. I get it. And I get that staring directly into the eye of inhumanity presents both a reckoning with the moral failings of our species and a chance for voyeurism, a chance to brush up against evil’s alluring tresses without fear of being forever ensnared. But I think I’m done with that.
There used to be a crime museum in DC’s Chinatown and the feature piece, right in the window visible from the street, was Ted Bundy’s VW. It always offended me. He raped and murdered women in that car, and here it is as a showpiece amid restaurants and bars. If someone dear to me had been one of his victims I’d have burned that place to the ground. I am not saying that museums highlighting history’s great evils are the same as that infernal Beetle—presumably we have more to learn by remembering crimes of politics than crimes of sexual perversion—but I am saying they’re not that different. The morbid lure of evil is as much a soul-rotting attraction, as it is an educational experience.
Third, I have not made a pig of myself. Spain was rough on me, in the sense that it was awesome. With tapas, you feel like you aren’t eating as much (note: the plates are so little!) so you eat even more. And with my parents in tow, I walked less than I might otherwise. So I’ve followed the trip with weeks of good eating and physical fitness. It’s been paying off, in the sense that I have more energy and look better. It has not in the sense that my right knee and my left foot are killing me. I resolved not to lose my progress on this trip. Among the dangers of solo travel is that if you want to sample the local cuisine, you only get to try what you have ordered—no tastes off your spouse’s plate. For me, this often leads to three course meals, wherein none of the courses is a dessert. I didn’t do that this time. Well, I did, but I didn’t finish everything. When my pork and cabbage soup came in an entire loaf of dark rye bread, I only ate half the bread!
Even stranger, I left a glass of alcohol two-thirds full. Alcohol is expensive, and that makes me want to finish it. I am not an alcoholic, but I am cheap! However, the medicinal-tasting digestif, Riga Black Balsam, was so foul, so potent, so lingering in taste and feel that I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. It’s the national drink, and I respect that, but it ranked up with Hungarian Unicum—a drink so foul that in Lesotho we’d make people do shots of it as a penalty for misdealing in poker games—for foulness.
But for all of the things I didn’t do— I did still do a lot of things.
House of the Blackheads: Despite the name, this is not a museum of 14-year-olds. Rather, it is the guildhall for unmarried men in certain trades. More accurately, it is the superb reconstruction of said hall, as the original was largely destroyed in the multiple bombardments that rocked Riga in WWII. I didn’t pay to go inside though. I don’t like paying for replicas, and besides, a ticket came with a glass of black balsam; so pass.
Site of the first Christmas tree: Just outside of the House of the Blackheads, there is a small monument commemorating the erection of the world’s first decorated Christmas tree in 1510. I am deeply suspicious of this claim. First, Estonia claims they had the first one, and so does Germany. But I think they’re both wrong, I believe that Mary and Joseph dangled gold and frankincense and myrrh off a palm in Bethlehem just like it says in the Bible
The Cat House: This is not what it sounds like. Rather, it is a building with two statues of cats, backs arched, on the roof. Wait, that is what it sounds like to you? In that case, I’d like to welcome my many new faithful Christian readers, who came to this blog via
mentioning , who mentions me. Welcome, and I am so, so sorry. But if you’re still not put off, or you just really love Latvia, please subscribe at the link below.
The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia: This is a very fine museum that covers Latvia’s triple occupation, by the Soviets, following the Molotov-Reibentrob Pact, Nazi Germany, following the collapse of that pact, and again the Soviets, following the collapse of Nazi Germany. The museum was carefully curated and was in a modern space with a superb exhibit flow. I do wish to note, however, that this museum suffered from the same problem that most museums of national suffering do; it lacked nuance about the Latvian people. Over and over again, I wanted to get some sense of Latvian collaboration—for some reason I am very interested in quislings and collaborators these days—and it was largely absent. In the museum’s narrative, Soviet structures were generally led by ethnic Russian imports (note: probably true or at least true-ish) and many Latvians only regarded the Nazis as liberators briefly, before deciding they were just as bad (note: probably not true.). I don’t really believe in collective guilt, least of all over generations, but I do believe in historical Truth, and I don’t like it when countries fail to grapple with the dark parts of their own past. Every country, every people, has done some bad things, often really bad things. We can remember them, confront them, and learn from them without dwelling on them. That’s why everyone needs to go to every museum of historical horrors that exists, not because of a morbid fascination with evil. (Note: This is what happens when I go past about 1,500 words: I start contradicting myself.)
The Baltic Sea: Apparently, what I stepped in after taking the train to Jurmala was technically the Gulf of Riga, rather than the Baltic Sea, though I’m not totally sure that it isn’t technically both. Also, I think it’s weird that it’s the Gulf of Riga, given that Riga is, in fact, a slightly inland city but not nearly as weird as the fact that the Baltic Sea, or at least the Gulf of Riga is warm. It’s not Gulf of Mexico warm, but it was warm enough that on a 73 degree day, it would absolutely be pleasant to swim in it. I didn’t swim in it, I just walked barefoot in the shallows for three miles along the waveless coast, but I thought about swimming in it. I probably would have if either a) I’d brought a bathing suit, but I didn’t expect to swim in the sea when I was North of Moscow or b) the nude beach hadn’t just consisted of two naked dudes with backpacks. Somehow, it felt like it would be weirder swimming naked with just a couple strangers than at a beach that had a proper gaggle of weirdos. Apparently it’s warm, because it’s well-sheltered and not that deep. I’m not sure if I buy it though. I know a few politicians who are well-sheltered and not that deep, and I don’t find them warm at all.
Whether it’s that historically they were always more West than East, that the country is plurality Lutheran, that ethnic Germans were the majority or at least a large minority for centuries, that the population is not-slavic, or something else entirely, Latvians are clearly more West than East now. There is a large ethnically Russian population, especially in the East and in Riga, due to Soviet-era population transfers, and that population does not have language or cultural equality. That can lead to unrest and instability, though with Moscow acting as it does these days, giving them full rights might also lead to unrest and instability. But the Latvians seem to have no doubt about where their future lies—in the West, in Europe. And it seems clear that they’d like other peoples to have their future in Europe too. Ukrainian flags fly all over Riga—on bridges, on government buildings, on construction sites. Latvia’s Europeanism is not the Europeanism of “We got ours, now let’s build the wall.”
I overheard an English speaking tour guide near the cat house explaining “you see Ukrainian flags flying everywhere, because we understand. They are fighting for us. They are us.” Noble sentiments, and let us hope that the Ukrainians are indeed the next Latvians, and not, as I write on a bus headed for Lithuania and full of Ukrainians, most of whom I presume are refugees, that Latvia is the next Ukraine.
Riga is historically a very international city. As one of the cities in the Hanseatic League it was a trading power and cultural melting pot from the 14th century on (hence the architectural riches).
I hope you went to the market in the old zeppelin hangars.
Fun fact: quite a lot of the ethnic Russians in Riga itself were not resettled Soviets, but Russian Jews who were there either a) since Hanseatic times or b) settled there in the 19th-early 20th century for cultural freedom. When I lived there in the 1990s, I knew a lot of Russian-speaking Latvians whose families had lived there for generations, but they were caught up in the (understandable) anti-Russian sentiment.
Thank you for letting me wax nostalgic. Great city. And loooove Jurmala, agree on the New England vibe!
When I first saw the “8,” my immediate reaction was, “Why do they have an Antoine Walker jersey?”
Love it.