Long before there was anything called Latvia, the land between the Daugava River and the sea was inhabited by several related but distinct peoples. The first human groups arrived when the ice of the last glaciation retreated, some ten or eleven thousand years ago, following reindeer across a tundra that was only just becoming forest. Over the millennia four Baltic tribes took shape, whose names still echo in today's regions: the Latgalians in the east, the Semigallians (zemgales) in the south-centre, the Curonians (kursi) in the west and the Selonians (sēļi) in the south-east. Alongside them lived a Finno-Ugric-speaking people, the Livonians, settled on the northern coast and at the mouth of the Daugava; from them comes the name Livonia, which Europe would use for centuries to refer to the whole region.
They were societies of farmers, fishers, beekeepers and warriors, organised into small kingdoms and wooden hillforts. The Baltic gave them a treasure coveted all over Europe since Antiquity: amber, the fossil resin the Romans called "the gold of the north", which travelled along trade routes all the way to the Mediterranean. The Curonians, skilled sailors, even had a reputation as pirates at sea. The name of the Latgalians, latgaļi, is ultimately the origin of the word "Latvia" (Latvija). These peoples left no stone cities or written chronicles: what we know about them comes from archaeology and, above all, from the chronicles of those who came to conquer them.
In the late 12th century, the Church of Rome directed its crusade not only at the Holy Land but also at the still-pagan eastern Baltic. The first missionary, the German monk Meinhard, began preaching among the Livonians of the Daugava in the 1180s and was made a bishop. But peaceful conversion failed, and his successors chose the sword. The decisive figure was Albert of Buxhoeveden, a bishop who arrived with ships and knights: in 1201 he founded Riga on the bank of the Daugava and made it the base of the conquest. The date marks the birth of what is today the capital and the largest city in the whole Baltic region.
To sustain the holy war, Albert created a military order in 1202, the Brothers of the Sword (or Sword Brothers), warrior monks who over the following decades subdued the Livonians, Latgalians, Selonians and a good part of the Curonians by fire and sword. The Semigallians, on the other hand, held out stubbornly for almost a century. The conquered territory was organised as Terra Mariana, the "Land of Mary", placed under papal protection in 1207. The crusade was documented by Henry of Livonia in his Latin chronicle, an extraordinary and at the same time brutal source: it describes massacres, forced baptisms and burned villages. Within a generation, the Baltic peoples lost their independence and were subjected to a German-Christian elite that would rule the region for the next seven hundred years.
In 1236, the Brothers of the Sword were crushed by Lithuanians and Semigallians at the Battle of Saule, and what was left of the order merged with the Teutonic Knights: this is how the Livonian Order was born, the Baltic branch of the Teutonic Order. For almost three centuries, old Livonia was a patchwork of powers in permanent tension: the Order, the Archbishopric of Riga, several bishoprics and the towns. That fragmentation also gave the cities some room for autonomy.
Riga joined the Hanseatic League in 1282 and became one of its great eastern ports, exporting grain, flax, hemp, wax, honey and timber to Western Europe and acting as a trading bridge to the Russian lands inland. Guilds, brick Gothic churches and merchants' houses rose along its streets, and they still define the old town, now a World Heritage Site. Economic and political power stayed in the hands of the Baltic Germans: a landowning nobility, clergy and urban burghers who spoke German and looked down on the Latvian-speaking peasant majority. That German elite would remain the ruling class for centuries, regardless of which empire was in charge above it. For Latvians, by contrast, the late Middle Ages brought the gradual tightening of serfdom: they were bound to the land and to their lord, with hardly any rights.
In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation caught on strongly in the towns of Livonia: Riga adopted Lutheranism around 1522 and the evangelical faith became the majority creed across most of the country, a mark that endures. Religion also strengthened written Latvian, because pastors needed catechisms and hymns in the people's language; the first printed books in Latvian date precisely from this period.
The old Livonian Confederation, weak and divided, did not survive the pressure from its neighbours. In 1558, Tsar Ivan the Terrible invaded the territory and unleashed the long and devastating Livonian War (1558-1583), in which Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and Denmark also took part. The Livonian Order collapsed: in 1561 it was formally dissolved and its lands were divided up. The last master, Gotthard Kettler, converted to Lutheranism, became a vassal of the Polish king and turned his western domains into a hereditary duchy. The rest of Livonia came under the Polish-Lithuanian crown. So ended, after three and a half centuries, the German crusader state, although the Baltic German nobility went on ruling over the land and its peasants as if nothing had changed.
That carve-up produced a historical oddity: the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (1562-1795), a small vassal state of Poland-Lithuania covering the west and south-centre of present-day Latvia, ruled by the Kettler dynasty from Mitau (today's Jelgava). Under Duke Jacob Kettler (Jēkabs), in the mid-17th century, this tiny duchy enjoyed a surprising boom. Jacob promoted the iron industry, shipyards and a merchant and naval fleet of its own, and launched a colonial venture that seems unbelievable for such a small territory: Courland went as far as founding a colony on the island of Tobago, in the Caribbean, and another at the mouth of the Gambia River, in West Africa, trading in sugar, tobacco and other goods.
The imperial fantasy was short-lived. The Swedish invasion during the Second Northern War (mid-17th century) ruined the economy, and the colonies were lost to the Dutch and the English. Already weakened, the duchy fell further and further into the Russian orbit until, in 1795, with the Third Partition of Poland, it was annexed outright by the Russian Empire. The towns of Kuldīga (Goldingen), the first ducal capital, and those of the Courland coast still keep the feel of that period. Courland's story is sometimes told in a picturesque key, but it's worth remembering that this trade also included taking part in the Atlantic slave trade, like that of the other colonial powers of the time.
While Courland went its own way, the north of present-day Latvia — the region of Vidzeme, together with Riga — passed from Poland to Sweden after the wars of the early 17th century. The Swedish period (1629-1721) left a good memory among the peasants: it's remembered as the "good Swedish times" because the crown brought some order to the administration, founded parish schools, promoted the translation of the Bible into Latvian and tried to curb the worst abuses of the landlords. Livonia was then called "the granary of Sweden" for its grain production.
Everything changed with the Great Northern War. Tsar Peter the Great took Riga in 1710, after a siege and a plague epidemic that decimated the city, and in 1721, under the Treaty of Nystad, Sweden ceded Vidzeme and Riga to the Russian Empire. With the annexation of Courland in 1795, all Latvian territory lay within Russia, divided among the governorates of Livonia, Courland and part of Vitebsk. The tsars kept the privileges of the Baltic German nobility, which remained the ruling class and supplied the Empire with generals and ministers. A decisive step came early: serfdom was abolished in Courland in 1817 and in Vidzeme in 1819, decades before Russia, although the peasants were freed "without land", that is, with nothing but their personal freedom, which left them at the mercy of the landowners for a long time to come.
In the mid-19th century, a generation of educated young Latvians — children of peasants who had made it to university — began to reject the idea that being Latvian was merely a peasant condition destined to dissolve into German or Russian culture. This was the so-called First National Awakening, driven by the Young Latvians movement (Jaunlatvieši). Figures such as Krišjānis Valdemārs, Juris Alunāns and Atis Kronvalds championed the value of the Latvian language, founded newspapers, promoted Latvians' own education and economy, and asserted that Latvians were a nation with a right to their culture.
The intellectual monument of that awakening was the collection of the dainas, the short traditional folk songs, compact and ancient quatrains that had passed down by word of mouth the worldview, mythology and everyday life of the people. Krišjānis Barons spent decades gathering and organising hundreds of thousands of them in his famous "Cabinet of Folksongs", a monumental work that is now part of UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Choral culture — the great song festivals, begun in 1873 — became the great collective ritual of Latvian identity and still is. On this cultural foundation, an increasingly bold politics was built in the early 20th century. The Revolution of 1905 shook Latvia hard: there were strikes, German manor houses set on fire and a harsh crackdown that left hundreds executed and deported, but that steeled a whole generation of future leaders.
The First World War hit Latvia head-on: the front between Germany and Russia ran through its territory, Courland was occupied by the Germans and hundreds of thousands of people fled as refugees. On the Russian side, the Latvian Riflemen (Latviešu strēlnieki) were formed, elite units that became famous for their courage and that later, for the most part, went over to the Bolshevik revolution. Amid the collapse of the empires, on 18 November 1918 the People's Council proclaimed the Republic of Latvia in Riga, with Kārlis Ulmanis as the first head of government.
Independence had to be won on the battlefield. The War of Independence (1918-1920) was a three-front chaos: the Russian Bolsheviks, who came to control almost the whole country and set up a short-lived Soviet government; German troops and Baltic German Freikorps, who tried to keep Latvia for Germany; and the Latvians themselves, backed by Estonia and the British fleet. The victory at the Battle of Cēsis (June 1919) against the German Landeswehr was decisive. In 1920, Soviet Russia recognised independence "forever" in the Treaty of Riga. The young republic carried out a radical land reform that divided the large estates of the German nobility among the peasants, and adopted a democratic constitution, the Satversme. But, as in so many European countries between the wars, parliamentary democracy faltered: in 1934, Ulmanis staged a coup, dissolved Parliament and the parties, and ruled in authoritarian fashion under the slogan of the "new Latvian", with a cult of personality, until the Soviets arrived.
Latvia's fate was decided in an office in Moscow. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union included a secret protocol assigning the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere. In June 1940, the USSR occupied Latvia and, after rigged elections, annexed it as a Soviet republic. The first year of Stalinist rule culminated on the night of 13-14 June 1941 with the deportation in cattle cars of more than fifteen thousand people to Siberia — entire families, children and elderly included — the episode Latvians remember as the "Year of Terror".
A few days later, as part of the German invasion of the USSR, the Wehrmacht occupied Latvia. Part of the population, traumatised by the Soviet year, welcomed the Germans as liberators, but what came with them was extermination. Of the roughly 93,000 Jews living in Latvia, some 70,000 were murdered, around three quarters of the community, one of the highest rates of annihilation in all of Europe. Riga's synagogues were burned in July 1941; the Riga Ghetto was established; and in the two Rumbula massacres, on 30 November and 8 December 1941, some 25,000 Jews were shot in the forest under the direction of SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln. It is a documented fact, with no mitigation, that Latvian units collaborated in the genocide: the notorious Arājs Kommando, made up of local volunteers, took part in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, from Latvia and from other countries. At the same time, there were Latvians who risked their lives to save their neighbours: Žanis Lipke, a Riga dockworker, hid and saved more than fifty Jews and is honoured as Righteous Among the Nations. Between 1943 and 1945, Germany also recruited tens of thousands of Latvians into the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, largely through forced conscription, a subject that still sparks legitimate and thorny historiographical and political debate.
In 1944-1945, the Red Army drove out the Germans and Latvia was annexed by the Soviet Union again, this time for almost half a century. Neither the United States nor most Western democracies ever recognised that annexation de jure, which would prove key in 1991. Thousands of Latvians fled into exile in the West as the Soviets returned. In the forests, an anti-communist guerrilla movement — the "forest brothers" (mežabrāļi) — fought on with weapons for years, until it was crushed.
Sovietisation was brutal. In March 1949, in Operation Priboi, around 42,000 people from Latvia — mostly peasants accused of being "kulaks" and families of the resistance — were deported en masse to Siberia to break opposition and force the collectivisation of land. The regime pushed through rapid industrialisation and moved hundreds of thousands of workers from other Soviet republics to Latvia, mainly Russians. The demographic effect was huge and lasting: the share of Latvians in their own land fell dramatically, and in Riga and other industrial cities Latvians became a minority. Russification policy put pressure on the language and culture. That transformation of the population during the Soviet period is the direct origin of the large Russian-speaking minority that still lives in Latvia today and of the tensions over citizenship and language that marked the decades that followed.
When Mikhail Gorbachev opened up a space for freedom with perestroika, Latvia seized it by singing. In the late 1980s, the independence movement that swept the three Baltic states became known as the "Singing Revolution", because its form of protest was huge gatherings of choral singing, effectively banned for decades. In 1988 the Popular Front of Latvia (Latvijas Tautas fronte) was founded, channelling hundreds of thousands of people.
The most striking gesture came on 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: around two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands to form an unbroken human chain some 675 kilometres long linking Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, the Baltic Way. The image went around the world and laid bare for everyone that the 1940 annexation had been a crime the Baltic peoples did not accept. On 4 May 1990, the Latvian Supreme Soviet declared the restoration of independence. Moscow responded with pressure and, in January 1991, with violence: during the "Barricades", Riga's citizens put up barricades to protect key buildings, and Soviet special units (OMON) killed several people. The outcome came with the failure of the hardline communists' coup in Moscow: on 21 August 1991, Latvia proclaimed full independence, quickly recognised by the world and, shortly afterwards, by the USSR itself before it dissolved.
From day one, independent Latvia set out to "return to Europe" and anchor itself in the West so as not to repeat the 20th century. The path included a tough economic transition, with hyperinflation and industrial restructuring in the nineties, and the restoration of citizenship based on the legal continuity of the pre-1940 state, which for years left many residents of Soviet-era origin out as "non-citizens", a sensitive issue the European Union followed closely and that was gradually resolved.
In 2004, Latvia completed its historic turn by joining both the European Union and NATO. In 2014 it adopted the euro as its currency, and in 2016 it joined the OECD. One of the countries hit hardest by the 2008-2009 financial crisis, it later returned to growth and today is a services and technology economy with a capital, Riga, that is home to a large share of the population and activity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 strengthened its commitment to collective defence and to Ukraine, and revived debates about security, historical memory and the integration of the Russian-speaking minority. With fewer than two million inhabitants, an ancient Baltic language and a choral tradition that still fills stadiums every five years, Latvia keeps alive the same identity that for centuries resisted every empire that ruled it.
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Kurzeme is Latvia's western peninsula, the old Courland (Kurland). It takes its name from the Curonians (kursi), the Baltic tribe of seafarers and warriors who lived there and were known as pirates at sea. The Curonians held out against the German crusaders longer than other peoples, but were finally subdued in the 13th century. After the Livonian Order was dissolved in 1561, the region became the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (1562-1795), a vassal state of Poland-Lithuania ruled by the Kettler dynasty.
Under Duke Jacob Kettler, in the mid-17th century, this small duchy enjoyed a remarkable boom. It developed an iron industry, shipyards and its own fleet, and even founded colonies on the Caribbean island of Tobago and at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa. It was one of the strangest colonial stories in Europe: a tiny Baltic duchy competing, for a moment, with the Dutch and the English on tropical seas. The adventure faded with the wars of the 17th century, and in 1795 Courland was annexed by the Russian Empire.
Kuldīga (Goldingen in German) was one of the capitals of the Duchy of Courland and has one of the best-preserved historic centres of wood and brick in the Baltic region, added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. Its cobbled streets, 17th- and 18th-century houses and the feel of a town frozen in time make it one of the gems of western Latvia.
Its natural emblem is the waterfall on the Venta river, the Ventas rumba. It isn't high, but at almost 250 metres wide it is considered the widest waterfall in Europe. For centuries, in spring and autumn, locals caught the fish trying to leap the falls using baskets, an image that made the town famous. Next to the waterfall stands an old 19th-century brick bridge, one of the longest of its kind in Europe. Kuldīga sums up the quiet, heritage-rich charm of old Courland.
The Kurzeme coast is defined by two port cities with eventful histories. Ventspils (Windau) was a Hanseatic port and a seat of the Order. Today it is a neat, attractive town with a Blue Flag beach and one of the country's most important cargo ports. Liepāja (Libau), further south, was a major port of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and one of the main departure points for the huge wave of emigration across the Atlantic to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of people passed through its docks on their way to the United States: Latvians, Jews, Russians and Lithuanians.
In the late 19th century the Tsar had a large naval base built in Liepāja: Karosta ("the war port"), with its imposing Orthodox St Nicholas Cathedral and an entire military district. In the Soviet era, Karosta was a closed, secret military zone, off-limits even to most of the city's own residents. Liepāja is also known as the "city of music" and of wind, with long sandy beaches and dunes. Both cities show how the Baltic has been, depending on the era, a window for trade, a gateway for emigration and a militarised frontier.
At the northern tip of Kurzeme, where the Gulf of Riga meets the open Baltic Sea, lies Cape Kolka (Kolkasrags), a wild spot of empty beaches, sandbanks and wind-swept pine forest. Off the point, underwater, stretches a dangerous shoal that has caused countless shipwrecks over the centuries. It is one of the most remote and evocative corners of the country.
This stretch of coast between Kolka and Ventspils is the historic "Livonian coast" (Līvõd rānda), the last stronghold of the Livonians, the Finno-Ugric people who gave their name to all of Livonia. In a dozen fishing villages along this coast, the Livonian language survived for centuries. It is one of the most endangered languages in Europe. Soviet deportations, the military closure of the coast and assimilation pushed it to the brink of extinction: the last native speaker who had learned it as a child in the community died in 2013. Today there are efforts to revive the language and preserve Livonian culture, and the Livonians are officially recognised as an indigenous people of Latvia. Cape Kolka is both an impressive natural landscape and the setting for the slow disappearance of an ancient people.
Kurzeme has a particular place in the Second World War. When the Red Army advanced on the Baltic in late 1944, a large force of German troops (Army Group North, later renamed Army Group Courland) was trapped against the sea on the western peninsula, in what became known as the "Courland Pocket" (Kurland-Kessel). Six major defensive battles were fought there over several months, and the garrison only surrendered on 8-9 May 1945, practically at the same time as Germany's general capitulation. It was one of the last active fronts of the war in Europe.
Latvian conscripts also fought in those German units, many of them in the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, caught up in the tragedy of a people forced to fight in other countries' armies. Thousands of people from Kurzeme used the pocket to escape by boat to Germany and Sweden before the Soviets returned, swelling the Latvian exile community in the West. The region's forests later became one of the hideouts of the "Forest Brothers", the anti-communist guerrillas who held out for years. Beneath the calm of its beaches and villages today lies the memory of one of the century's harshest chapters.
Riga was founded in 1201 as the base for Bishop Albert's crusade on the Daugava, and within a few decades it had become the largest and richest city in the entire eastern Baltic. Joining the Hanseatic League in 1282 turned it into a first-rate port and a trading bridge between the Russian interior and Western Europe. Wax, honey, flax, hemp, furs and grain came down the Daugava; salt, cloth and metals came in exchange. That medieval prosperity left behind the Gothic brick churches, merchants' warehouses and guild halls that still make up the old town, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
For centuries the city was run by its German patrician class, which kept a remarkable degree of municipal autonomy whatever the ruling power of the day: the Order, Poland, Sweden or Russia. The Latvian majority was confined to crafts and labour, with no access to public office. That long German dominance explains why Latvian took so long to become a language of the city, and why Riga was both the great stage and the great adversary of the 19th-century national awakening.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Riga went through a spectacular industrial and population boom. It became one of the great ports and manufacturing centres of the Russian Empire, and its population multiplied. That growth was written in stone and stucco. Between 1900 and 1914 the city filled with Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) buildings, their lavish façades covered in faces, flowers, masks and mythological figures. Today Riga has the largest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the world: roughly a third of the buildings in the centre are thought to be in this style, and Alberta Street is its most famous showcase. Many of these buildings were designed by Mihails Eizenšteins (Mikhail Eisenstein), father of the celebrated filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
The same period was also the city's most socially and politically turbulent. Riga was a hotbed of the 1905 Revolution and of workers' and national movements. The splendour of the architecture sits alongside the memory of a tense, multi-ethnic city in full ferment, home to Latvians, Baltic Germans, Russians and a large Jewish community.
The Republic of Latvia was proclaimed in Riga on 18 November 1918, and the city was the heart of the first independence. It was also a stage for the terror of the 20th century. Under Nazi occupation it held the Riga Ghetto, and it was from here that columns were marched to the Rumbula forest, where about 25,000 Jews were murdered over two days in 1941. The Soviet deportations of 1941 and 1949 also passed through its streets. The city's Jewish community, once large and flourishing, was almost entirely wiped out.
Riga also played a leading role in the national revival at the end of the Soviet period. In January 1991, during "the Barricades", residents built barriers in the old town to protect key buildings from Soviet special forces, who killed several people. Today the capital is home to about a third of the country's population. It is Latvia's political, economic and cultural centre and the largest city in the three Baltic States.
A few kilometres from Riga, on the gulf, lies Jūrmala, a strip of white sandy beach more than twenty kilometres long, backed by dunes and pine forest. Its history as a resort began in the early 19th century, when Russian officers returning from the Napoleonic Wars discovered its beaches, and took off once the railway linked it to Riga in the middle of that century. The elite of the Russian Empire began to spend their summers there, and the typical Baltic-style wooden houses went up, with their towers, verandas and carvings. Many of them still stand.
In the Soviet era, Jūrmala became one of the great holiday and "health tourism" destinations of the entire USSR. Sanatoriums, spas and rest homes welcomed workers and officials from every republic, drawn by the waters, the therapeutic mud and the pine-scented air. That past left an unusual mix of 19th-century wooden architecture and Soviet-era resorts. Today Jūrmala is still the Latvians' favourite seaside resort and a spa destination with retro charm.
Riga has always been a city on cultural fault lines. For centuries it was home to the German of the ruling elite, the Latvian of ordinary people, the Russian of the imperial administration and the Yiddish of a large Jewish community. That diversity was both its wealth and its tragedy. The two catastrophes of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the deportations, erased entire communities, while Soviet industrialisation brought in hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking workers.
Today Riga is still the most multi-ethnic city in the country, with a large share of residents of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian origin alongside the Latvian majority. Questions of language, citizenship and historical memory are felt especially strongly in the capital, which is both the country's economic engine and the centre of debates about identity in today's Latvia. To understand Riga is to understand the whole country's history in miniature: centuries of foreign rule, an identity that held on, and a society still working out how to live with its past.
Vidzeme is the large region in north-central Latvia and in many ways the country's historic heart. In the Middle Ages it was the core of the Order's Livonia and of the Archbishopric of Riga, dotted with brick castles that controlled the rivers and roads. Its name literally means "the middle land". After the Livonian War it passed to Poland and then to Sweden. The Swedish period (17th century) was remembered fondly by its peasants for the parish schools and a certain administrative order, and Vidzeme and Riga were known as "Sweden's granary".
After the Great Northern War, the region fell to the Russian Empire in 1721 and formed the core of the Governorate of Livonia. It was in Vidzeme that serfdom was abolished early, in 1819, and where the Latvian national awakening took deep root among a peasantry that was learning to read. The region's landscape of forests, gentle hills and the winding Gauja river valley also made it the country's great natural retreat.
Over thousands of years, the Gauja river carved out a broad, wooded valley of red sandstone cliffs, caves and meanders that is now one of Latvia's best-loved landscapes. Gauja National Park was created here in 1973. It is the country's oldest and largest national park, protecting forests, sandstone formations, caves and a high concentration of historic castles and churches. The area around Sigulda is often called "the Switzerland of Latvia" because its terrain is unusually steep for such a flat country.
Among the valley's curiosities is Gūtmanis Cave (Gūtmaņala), the largest in the Baltics, covered in inscriptions left by visitors over the centuries. The park combines nature and heritage: trails, caves and viewpoints sit alongside ruins and castles from the days of the Livonian Order. That makes the Gauja both an outdoor destination and an open-air history book.
On the most spectacular stretch of the valley, two castles face each other across the Gauja and sum up the Livonian Middle Ages. Sigulda Castle was built by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the 13th century. Turaida Castle was built in red brick by the Archbishopric of Riga from 1214 onwards, on the site of an old Livonian hill fort. The name Turaida comes from the Livonian language and is thought to mean something like "Thor's garden". Today Turaida is a large open-air museum that brings together the restored tower, the wooden church and a sculpture park.
Turaida is also the setting for the country's most famous legend, the "Rose of Turaida". It tells the story of Maija, a young woman in the early 17th century who, according to tradition, tricked a suitor into killing her rather than be dishonoured, in order to stay faithful. The legend is based on a real event recorded in court documents of the time. It made Maija a symbol of love and loyalty, and her grave on Turaida hill is still a place of pilgrimage. Stories like this show how the Gauja valley blends the stone of the conquerors with the oral memory of the Latvian and Livonian people.
Cēsis (Wenden in German) is one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Latvia, and its historical weight far exceeds its size. Its imposing castle, founded in the early 13th century, was for a long time the residence of the Master of the Livonian Order, making it one of the centres of power in the whole region. In 1577, during the Livonian War, the garrison besieged by Ivan the Terrible's troops blew up the castle with its own gunpowder rather than surrender, an episode that left a lasting mark on local memory.
Cēsis is also linked to two national symbols. Tradition holds that the Latvian flag, red with a white stripe, comes from a medieval chronicle that mentions a banner in those colours carried by warriors from the Cēsis area in the 13th century, which makes the town a sort of birthplace of the national emblem. And in June 1919, near Cēsis, Latvian and Estonian forces defeated the Baltic German Landeswehr at the Battle of Cēsis, a decisive victory in securing the newly declared independence. Medieval history and the founding of the nation meet in its cobbled streets.
Beyond its castles, Vidzeme is the region where the Latvian peasant culture that sustained national identity took deepest root. The early abolition of serfdom (1819) and the spread of parish schools produced a literate and, by the standards of the time, fairly prosperous peasantry, which gave rise to many of the leading figures of the 19th-century national awakening. It was in this rural world that thousands of dainas were collected: the traditional folk songs that Krišjānis Barons organised in his famous archive.
The region keeps alive the choral tradition that is the Latvians' great collective ritual. The song festivals, held since 1873, bring together thousands of singers from all over the country in a secular celebration of national identity that UNESCO has recognised as intangible heritage. In Vidzeme, a land of forests, scattered farms and old castles, that heritage is especially easy to sense. It is the landscape where the Latvian people, ruled by others for centuries, held on to their language and music until the moment came to claim a country of their own.
Zemgale is the fertile plain of south-central Latvia, on the banks of the Lielupe river. It takes its name from the Semigallians (zemgaļi), the Baltic tribe that lived there. The Semigallians put up the longest and most stubborn resistance to the German crusade. Other peoples fell within a few decades, but they fought on for almost a century under leaders such as the legendary duke Nameisis (Namejs). Around 1290, beaten and exhausted, many of them burned their own strongholds and moved to Lithuania rather than submit. That resistance made the Semigallians a symbol of an unbreakable spirit in Latvian national memory. The ring of Nameisis, with its distinctive braided design, became one of the country's emblematic pieces of jewellery.
Centuries later, Zemgale became part of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, whose capital, Mītava (today's Jelgava), lay right in this region. The Zemgale plain is good farming land. It was the duchy's breadbasket and is still one of the richest agricultural areas in the country.
Zemgale's most splendid monument is Rundāle Palace, the masterpiece of baroque and rococo in Latvia. It was designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli as a summer residence for Ernst Johann von Biron, Duke of Courland. Rastrelli was the Italian architect serving the Russian court who also built the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg (now the Hermitage). The palace went up in two phases between 1736 and 1768. With its gilded halls, its stucco work and its French-style gardens, Rundāle is one of the country's must-see sights and a reminder of the duchy's late splendour.
A few kilometres away is Bauska, with its double castle. One part is a medieval core built by the Livonian Order in the 15th century, and the other is a Renaissance palace added by the Dukes of Courland. It all stands where two rivers meet to form the Lielupe. Together, Rundāle and Bauska show the other side of the region's history. This is not the resistance of the Semigallians but the courtly, European world of the nobility who ruled these lands in the early modern period, with their Italian architects and French-style gardens.
Latgale, in the far east of the country, is the most distinctive region of Latvia, and the reason lies in its history. After the Livonian War, the rest of the territory went to Sweden or to the Duchy of Courland. Latgale, however, came under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Inflanty Voivodeship (or "Polish Livonia"). It stayed there longer than any other part of Latvia, until the first partition of Poland in 1772. That century and a half of Polish rule left a deep mark. The rest of the country became Lutheran, but Latgale stayed mostly Catholic and still is today. It is one of the northernmost Catholic regions in Europe.
This historical separation also shaped the language. Latgalian developed in Latgale, with its own written tradition in the Latin alphabet. Some consider it a dialect of Latvian and others a language in its own right. After the Polish uprising of 1863, the Russian imperial authorities banned printing in Latin letters from 1865 to 1904. It was a very hard blow to Latgalian culture, and it was only reversed in the early 20th century with a cultural revival of its own. On top of all this, there is a large Russian community of Old Believers (starovery). They are Orthodox Christians who fled the reforms of the Russian Church in the 17th century and found refuge in these forests and lakes. For all these reasons, Latgale is a mosaic of Latvians, Poles, Russians, Belarusians and Jews, the most diverse in the country.
Daugavpils, on the banks of the Daugava, is Latvia's second city and the big urban centre of the east. The Livonian Order founded it as Dünaburg in the 13th century. It changed hands and names many times, and under the Russian Empire it was called Dvinsk. It grew into a strongly multi-ethnic city, with Russian, Polish, Belarusian and Latvian residents. Its Jewish community became the majority in the early 20th century. That Jewish past was almost completely wiped out during the Nazi occupation, when most of the Jews of Daugavpils were murdered in the massacres of 1941-1942.
Its most unusual monument is Daugavpils Fortress, a huge military citadel built by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. It is one of the best-preserved fortified complexes of its kind in Europe. One of its buildings now houses the Mark Rothko Art Centre, dedicated to the American abstract expressionist painter. Rothko was born in Daugavpils in 1903, when the city was still Dvinsk, before emigrating with his family to the United States. Most people in the city still speak Russian today. That makes it a particularly sensitive place in the debates over language, citizenship and identity in today's Latvia.
In the heart of Latgale, among hills and lakes, stands Aglona Basilica, the main Catholic shrine in Latvia. The present church, with its white façade and two towers, was completed around 1780 next to a former Dominican monastery. It holds an icon of the Virgin Mary believed to be miraculous. Every 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, tens of thousands of pilgrims from Latvia and neighbouring countries come to Aglona. It is the largest religious gathering in the country, and Pope John Paul II visited in 1993. The shrine is the great symbol of Catholic Latgale and of its separate identity within a Latvia that is mostly Lutheran or secular.
All around it lies what is often called "the land of blue lakes". It is the country's lake district, with hundreds of lakes scattered among forests and fields. The region has traditionally been poorer and more rural than the rest of Latvia, and emigration has hit it hard in recent decades. It is also the richest in cultural and religious diversity. Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, Old Believer prayer houses and old synagogues stand side by side in a landscape where Latvian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian and Latgalian cultures meet. Aglona and its lakes capture the particular soul of this eastern corner of the country.
Hardly anything that happened to Latvia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
