Daugavpils is the big city of eastern Latvia, the second-largest in the country and one of the most distinctive: multicultural, a little rough around the edges and full of history, on the banks of the wide Daugava River and a stone's throw from Lithuania and Belarus. Latvians, Russians, Poles, Belarusians and other communities have lived together here for centuries, and you can see that mix in the churches of different faiths, in the language spoken on the street and in the character of a city that looks both West and East.
Its gem is Daugavpils Fortress, an immense early 19th-century citadel built by the Russian Empire against Napoleon. It's the only bastion fortress from that period in Eastern Europe to survive practically intact, with its walls, moats, barracks and inner streets that people still live in. Its former arsenal houses the Mark Rothko Art Centre, dedicated to the great abstract expressionist painter, who was born in this city in 1903, and it's the only place in Eastern Europe where his original works are on display.
This guide takes a practical look at Daugavpils: what to see at the fortress and the Rothko Centre, how much admission costs, how to get there by train from Riga with Vivi, how to get around on its historic tram, and which other churches, museums and corners to discover. It's a destination with personality for anyone who wants to get to know the real Latvia, beyond the postcards of Riga.
Daugavpils began as Dinaburg Castle, founded around 1275 by the Livonian Order on the old Daugava trade route, close to the Russian and Lithuanian borders. In 1577 the army of Ivan IV 'the Terrible' captured and razed it, and a new stronghold was built downstream. The city changed hands and names many times (Dinaburg, Borisoglebsk, Dvinsk and, since 1920, Daugavpils), passing through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire. In 1810 Tsar Alexander I ordered the great fortress to be built in the face of the threat from Napoleon; it wasn't finished until 1878. In the 20th century it flourished as a multicultural industrial city, suffered Nazi occupation and the extermination of its huge Jewish community, and went through the long Soviet period. We cover all of this on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Semigallia of the warriors who held out for a century and its baroque palaces, alongside Catholic, Polish-influenced Latgale, the most distinctive region of Latvia.
Read the history of Zemgale and Latgale: palaces and the east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Daugavpils begins on the water. The Daugava River —known in Russian as the Dvina, which gives the city its name— was for centuries one of the great trade highways of northern Europe, part of the legendary 'from the Varangians to the Greeks' route that linked Scandinavia with Byzantium. Whoever controlled a key point on that river controlled trade, and so, around 1275, the master of the Livonian Order ordered a stone castle to be built on the banks of the Daugava: Dinaburg Castle (Naujene), in a strategic spot near the borders with Russian and Lithuanian lands.
Dinaburg was born, then, as a frontier fortress, an outpost of the crusading Order in south-eastern Livonia, in an area where the interests of the Order, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Russian principalities clashed. For almost three centuries, the castle kept watch over the river and the border, and a small settlement gradually grew up around it.
But its frontier position, which was its whole reason for being, also condemned it to be always on the front line of wars. That vulnerability was tragically proven in the 16th century, when the great storm of the Livonian War broke over the region.
In 1577, during the Livonian War, the army of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 'the Terrible', captured and destroyed Dinaburg Castle. Ivan then ordered a new fortified town to be built some 19 kilometres downstream, roughly where the present-day city stands. It was the first of many changes of ruler and name that would shape the city's shifting identity.
After the dissolution of the Livonian Order, the area passed to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Dinaburg became a town in the region of Inflanty (Polish Livonia), with a strong Catholic and Polish influence that can still be felt in Latgale. During a brief period of Russian occupation in the mid-17th century (1656-1667), the city was even called Borisoglebsk. With the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Dinaburg was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1772.
Under Russia, the city grew as an administrative, commercial and military centre. In 1893 it was renamed Dvinsk, the name by which Europe would know it in the early 20th century. Only in 1920, with Latvian independence, did it receive its definitive Latvian name: Daugavpils, 'the castle on the Daugava'. That pile-up of names —Dinaburg, Borisoglebsk, Dvinsk, Daugavpils— sums up, better than any account, a history made of shifting borders and successive rulers.
The monument that defines Daugavpils today was born out of fear of Napoleon. In the early 19th century, with tension rising with Napoleonic France and the threat of an invasion of the Russian Empire, Tsar Alexander I decided to strengthen the Daugava line. In 1810 the foundation stone of Dinaburg Fortress was laid: a large bastion-type citadel designed according to the most modern principles of military engineering of the day, with earth and brick ramparts, moats, ravelins and an inner town.
Construction was slow and troubled. Napoleon's own invasion in 1812 interrupted the works —the still unfinished fortress was attacked by French troops— and then came delays, severe flooding of the Daugava and technical difficulties. The fortress was not considered fully finished until 1878, almost seventy years after work began. By then, advances in artillery had made it largely obsolete as a defensive stronghold, but it went on serving military and garrison purposes.
What is extraordinary is that the fortress has survived almost intact: it is the only early 19th-century bastion fortress in all of Eastern Europe that has been preserved practically unchanged. Its inner streets, barracks and warehouses continued to be lived in and used throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, which saved it from complete ruin. Today it is the heritage heart of the city and, in its former arsenal, houses the Mark Rothko Art Centre.
In the second half of the 19th century, the arrival of the railway turned Dinaburg-Dvinsk into an important transport hub of the Russian Empire, a junction of lines towards Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, Riga and Oryol. The city industrialised and its population grew rapidly, drawing people from very different backgrounds. Dvinsk became deeply multicultural: Latvians, Russians, Poles, Belarusians, Germans and, above all, a very large Jewish community lived side by side. Jews came to make up nearly half the population and gave the city much of its commercial, craft and intellectual life. It was in this Jewish world of Dvinsk that Markus Rothkowitz, the future painter Mark Rothko, was born in 1903; his family emigrated to the United States in 1913.
The 20th century brought one tragedy after another. The First World War put the city close to the front line; then came Latvian independence in 1918-1920 and the interwar period. But the most terrible blow came with the Second World War. After the Soviet occupation of 1940, Nazi Germany occupied Daugavpils in 1941, and its Jewish community —one of the largest in Latvia— was almost entirely wiped out: thousands of people were murdered in the Daugavpils ghetto and in mass shootings in the surrounding area, above all in the Pogulanka forest and in the fortress itself, which was used as a prison camp. That genocide erased forever one of the defining features of the city.
The memory of that lost community lives on today in the restored synagogue in the centre and in the memorial sites, a sober testimony to a history that Daugavpils does not hide.
After the war, Daugavpils was once again incorporated into the Soviet Union, as part of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and spent almost half a century under communist rule. It was a period of heavy industrialisation and of workers arriving from other Soviet republics, mostly Russian speakers, which cemented the city's predominantly Russian-speaking character, very different from that of Riga or rural Latvia. Factories, housing-block districts and large infrastructure were built, while the historic centre and the fortress grew old.
When Latvia regained its independence in 1991, Daugavpils had to reinvent itself. The collapse of Soviet industry hit its economy hard, and the city faced the challenges of a diverse population within a new nation state. Little by little, it bet on its heritage and culture as a driver for the future: the restoration of the fortress and the opening in 2013 of the Mark Rothko Art Centre —the only one in Eastern Europe with original works by the painter— were decisive steps in putting the city on Europe's cultural map.
Today Daugavpils is Latvia's second city and the cultural capital of the east, a multicultural place where Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Old Believer churches stand side by side, where you hear both Latvian and Russian in the street, and where the huge imperial fortress and Rothko's art draw curious travellers. With its centuries of shifting borders, its many names and its mix of peoples, it remains one of the cities with the most character and history in all of Latvia.
