SATURDAY evening was falling across Riga’s cobbled Old Town, bacchanalia calling from every street corner. At Steiku Haoss, a classy steak joint, a saxophonist was working the floor with Big Easy abandon. Long-legged dancers balanced on tabletops at the Pupu Lounge. Across the packed floor of Nobody Writes to the Colonel, a perpetually hip warehouse club, 20-somethings were dancing up a frenzy to house music.
Temptations, temptations. But my plans took me elsewhere, on a foray into Riga’s dark and drama-filled past.
A few steps inside a massive room in the city center, and I was engrossed in paraphernalia from the city’s five decades under Soviet and Nazi rule: Secret listening devices taken from the walls of the Hotel Riga, dispatches from Latvians deported to Siberia, poignant photographs of the 370-mile human chain of protesters that snaked through Riga and across the Baltics in 1989. Admittedly, my evening tour of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia would not be everybody’s idea of a Saturday night thrill.
But I’d come to the Latvian capital to explore the city beyond the revelry, and it turned out to be like searching for cornfields in Kansas. There is so much here — art nouveau buildings with elaborate facades, music rippling through churches and concert halls almost nightly, and hearty Baltic fare in restaurants on nearly every block.
Riga is the rising star of European destinations. For the last half of the 20th century, this urban stronghold — in fact, all of Latvia and the neighboring Baltic nations, Estonia and Lithuania — were buried on the bleak side of the Iron Curtain. Riga’s relatively small size (population 727,000), far-flung location nippy climate (snow often covers the ground from November to March) kept all but a trickle of travelers at bay.
That changed when the Baltics gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and Riga’s stock began climbing. It hasn’t stopped. By the account of the Latvian Tourism Development Agency, travel to the seaside country has shot up 25 percent a year for the past four years.
Much of the fuss has been over the up-all-night festivities, especially on weekends, that consume the Old Town, an alluring quarter dominated by Baroque, Gothic and Romanesque buildings. In the past couple of years, stag groups and other youthful partyers have swooped in by the planeload and transformed the place into a kind of Mykonos. A plus for travelers: Most young Rigans have a good grasp of English.
Sounds like fun. But I knew there was much more to this place.
First, a brief history lesson.
The Baltics, free of foreign control for a brief period in the early 20th century, were placed in the Soviet sphere by a 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin. The Soviet troops and security agents who were deployed throughout Latvia after World War II brought home the country’s occupied status. In the late 1980s, dissidents started campaigning for Baltic independence, climaxing in an extraordinary human chain across the Baltics on Aug. 23, 1989. The collapse of the Soviet Union the next month freed Latvia to declare independence.
As a foreign correspondent in the 1980s, I’d visited Riga several times to cover demonstrations against Soviet occupation. In that period, many of its monuments and other historical locales were closed or inaccessible. Last fall, I took my first trip to independent Latvia. I wanted to use my five days there to see landmarks that had shaped the city’s character.
The House of Blackheads, near the Occupation Museum in the Old Town, is a replica of a landmark that did not survive. Crowned by a 92-foot-high gable, Riga’s most exalted mansion has more than a dozen rooms adorned with portraits of monarchs and landed gentry. After the original (built in the 1330s) was heavily damaged during a World War II bombing raid, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin condemned it as an example of bourgeois excess and had it destroyed.
Eight years ago, the replica was constructed in exacting detail, down to the oversize statue of St. George at the top, spinning slowly in the wind like a weather vane. “The destruction could be considered a defeat in our battle with the Soviets,” a guide, employed by the Blackheads, said. “The rebuilding is a symbol of our ultimate victory.”
A more poignant reminder sits on the northern edge of the Old Town. The Freedom Monument is a 138-foot-high granite column crowned by a 28-foot figure of a woman holding three golden stars overhead. It was dedicated in November 1935 to honor Latvia’s independence.
During the 50 years that the Soviets occupied Latvia, locals were forbidden to approach the structure. Protesters often attempted to gather at its base and were quickly arrested.
Since 1991, the monument has become a pilgrimage site. Now guarded by Latvian soldiers who change stations every hour, it is at once a solemn and euphoric scene. On this sunny October afternoon, several locals approached and left bouquets of red and white flowers — the colors of the Latvian flag — at the base.
On a spin through the city with Ojars Kalnins, a former Latvian ambassador to Washington and an old friend of mine, it quickly became clear that there was a more alluring aspect to Riga’s history than its sobering years of occupation.
The city, Kalnins told me, was founded in 1201 and quickly became the object of tugs of war involving Russia, Germany and other major powers in the region that recognized its value as a key shipping port on the Baltic Sea. From the mid-1800s to the early 20th century, a landed class of merchants and shippers transformed it into one of northern Europe’s most prosperous trading centers.
The legacy of that era — opulent mansions and quaint wooden estates — is the source of Riga’s splendor. The art nouveau style, characterized by elaborate animal, shell, flower and human-body motifs, accounts for about 40 percent of the buildings in Riga’s center, according to Kalnins, director of the Latvian Institute, which promotes Latvian culture.
The Old Town and adjacent New Town, separated by a canal, are the two neighborhoods that attract travelers. Both are smack in the city center and are easily walkable.
Intricately designed wooden homes dating to the 1800s are sprinkled throughout. Until World War II, wood was used for much of the city’s construction, and although many of the earliest structures are decaying, dozens remain. We stopped at the Blok estate, a two-story mansion on Vienibas Street built in the early 1800s; with its rustic, weathered facade, it could have been plucked out of the Latvian countryside. Next came the grand Jesus Church, just east of the central market. The largest wooden building in the Baltics, it has a white-painted facade that made it stand out amid the decaying timbered buildings on surrounding streets.
An excursion to the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum rounded out my tour. For this outing I went solo, on a shaky half-hour bus ride north of the city. The museum is a cluster of nearly 100 buildings — farmhouses, windmills, churches — sprawled over 240 acres. Like a Latvian Williamsburg, it includes structures that were taken from all corners of the country and reassembled here.
There was a lot to take in: A small 18th-century church, a working pub, an early-19th-century bathhouse, a 19th-century fishing village. Then it struck me. I was in a Latvia where the clock had stopped.
In a city whose residents have worked hard at preserving a culture their grandparents would recognize, the affection for culinary traditions is particularly strong.
Soothing music could often be heard wafting across courtyards and side streets. One evening as I passed the Doma Cathedral, a massive red-brick structure in the Old Town, I was drawn inside by music from the organ, said to be one of Europe’s largest. The free performance of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos, before a packed house, was a reminder that the classics — and music in particular — are a deep-seated part of the culture in these northern stretches of Europe.
But the hot ticket these days is the Latvian National Opera. A major institution in Soviet times, it has become one of the few Riga cultural icons whose following envelops a cross-section of locals, including ethnic Russians, senior citizens and 20-somethings, grandmothers in white gloves and teen-agers with spiked hair. The innovative performances are the handiwork of Andrejs Zagars, the opera’s imaginative general director. In the current, ongoing production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, the preferred appear as Mozart and other German cultural figures.
“One of my goals is to take classical works and make them relevant to modern audiences,” Zagars said. This approach seems to be working magically for Zagars’ productions. Indeed, the whole city seems to have found rare success in adding contemporary touches to venues steeped in tradition.
But no city is all dazzle.
With only a day left to explore, I hopped a public bus through some of Riga’s less-touristed neighborhoods. A few blocks from the center, historic buildings quickly gave way to newer, high-rise apartments and office buildings. Bolderja, a Russian-speaking enclave of Soviet-style apartments to the northwest of the city center, could easily have been a section of Moscow. On the brighter side, broad expanses of parkland, covered with trees and other flora, stretched through nearly every neighborhood I passed.
Back in the Old Town, the party was just warming up. The scene was vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street. Edging away from the crowd, I took a moment to behold the attractive cityscape and began to imagine neon lights covering the baroque facades, and nightclubs overtaking the quiet cafes and restaurants. Perhaps I’m wrong; maybe Riga will hold on to its special Old World splendor. Authorities have already taken steps to rein in the revelry a bit.
But just in case, my recommendation: Go now.
