Church island on the Daugava

It all began here. Here the outside world pierced the ice above the Baltic tribes’ timelessly flowing life, and from the dimness impenetrable to us, they emerged like bustling fish into the light of our history.

Here, on the banks of the Daugava River, the first Christian missionary in the Baltics, the Augustinian monk Meinhard of Holstein, met the pagan Livonians, our Finno-Ugric language relatives. Meinhard first heard about the pagan tribes of the Baltics from fur traders in Lübeck, and felt a calling to convert them. With the permission of his superior, he set off on a journey alone, and following the traders’ guidance, he reached the Livonians living in the village of Ikšķilā sometimes in the late 1170s. Some of the locals were inclined to the new faith, especially when Meinhard promised that if they become Christians, he would build them a fortress to protect them from attacks by hostile pagan tribes, especially the Lithuanians.

German masons called from Gotland built the castle in 1884, and the first church in the Baltics on a hilltop next to it. The fortress soon lost its importance when, in 1201, Meinhard’s successor, Bishop Albert, founded Riga on a better situated site nearby, and moved his seat there. Today, only a memorial stone stands on its site. The church, however, which was later rebuilt in the Gothic style, stood intact until September 1, 1917, when the Russian army defending Riga trenched in around it, and the German attackers shot the church into ruins. It was never rebuilt again.

The exterior and interior of the church before 1917

The Riga Dam, built in 1974, raised the level of the Daugava River so much that the hilltop became an island. The preserved ruins of the church still stand on it today, next to a memorial stone erected in 1864 by the Baron of Üxküll – because this was the German name for the village –, Boris (1793-1870), a heroic Russian officer in the Napoleonic Wars and the abductor of many women’s hearts, who summarized his exploits in his diary published under the title Arms and the Woman.

The German name may be familiar to some. The Barons of Üxküll included the biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), the founder of ethology, whom Konrad Lorenz often refers to. He was born in Tallinn, where his father was mayor, and moved permanently to Germany in 1924.

As we head inland from Riga, we definitely stop at this source of Baltic history. It is summer, the reservoir has dried up, and at this time a small path rises from the water, where you can walk across from the shore to the island. On both sides of it there are the stumps of old trees that have been cut down. The trees may have originally lined the path leading to the church, and they may have been cut down when the reservoir was filled.

Along the slightly curved path, the water of the river has remained in small ponds, covered by water lilies. Where the ponds have also dried up, dry blocks of river mussels cover the ground. Sometimes the pits are still wet, and a strong smell of decay emanates from them. Waterfowl flock everywhere to the shallow water of the reservoir in search of food. On the shore, one or two old fishermen are collecting easy prey.

The ruins of the church, built of irregular limestone, are covered with a tin roof. The double Gothic gate seems to have survived, as well as the pointed arch leading from the forecourt into the nave, with Gothic consoles and vault ribs behind it. The rest is gone. The remains are stabilized by red brick additions.

A path, haphazardly trodden through the knee-high vegetation, leads to the memorial stone, on both side of which is a worn Latin inscription. The side facing the shore – the arriving visitors – is barely legible:

IN MEMORIAM
MEINARDI EPISCOPI
LIVONUM APOSTOLI
HUJUS ECCLESIAE FUNDATORIS
ATQUE
CONRADI MEINDORPI
MILITIS YKESKOLA
FORTISSIMI FIDEI PROPUGNATORI
In memory of
Bishop Meinhard,
Apostle of the Livonians,
founder of this church
and of
Conrad Meindorp,
Knight of Ykeskola,
the brave defender of faith

Konrad Meindorp (later spelled Meyerdorff), as the term propugnator, “protector with a shield” shows, belonged to the generation that Bishop Albert called as crusaders from the late 1190s to Livonia, the new province that included the later Latvia and Estonia, to protect the already converted Baltic people from the unconverted, and the latter from their own pagan faith. In 1201, Konrad Meindorp received the fortress of Ikšķilā – in Latin Ykeskola, in German Üxküll, in later Latvian Ikšķile –, and thus became the ancestor of the von Uexkülls.

On the other side, the offspring says thanks:

HOC MONUMENTUM
DEDICAVIT
BORIS DE ÜXKÜLL
LIBER BARO
EQUESTRI IN ESTONIA ORDINI
ADSCRIPTUS
VIGGALIA IN MARITIMA HERES
1186 1201 1864
This monument
was dedicated
by Baron
Boris von Uexküll,
member
of the order of knights in Estonia,
heir of Vigāles at the sea
1186 1201 1864

The inscription is still clearly legible in the photograph taken before 1917. The church still stands behind it. The members of the apparently middle-class society no not yet know that they will die a violent death back home or will be killed by homesickness in emigration.

Today, neither the church nor the fortress stand. The Baltic Germans were sent to Germany by Hitler’s order in 1940, before Stalin annexed the Baltic states under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and exterminated a quarter to a third of their population. Of the Livonians there are perhaps 180 left in coastal fishing villages, and barely a fifth of them speak the Finno-Ugric language of their ancestors. Only this ruin stands here on a hilltop that has become an island, testifying to the determination of a single man who came here, into the unknown, to change history.

We continue inland, towards the still standing Crusader castles and the Estonian border. As we drive along the main street, the soaring apse of a modern church appears at the western end of the village.

We turn in. On the street named after Bishop Meinhard, there is a Carmelite monastery. The inscription on its door says that it was founded by the German Bonifatiuswerk, which supports the Scandinavian and Baltic Catholic diasporas.

We ring the bell. A cheerful, petite, middle-aged nun in white opens the door, and greets us in the name of Jesus in Latvian. I reply in Latin, then switch to German. She is very happy about this: “If you also speak German, you are doubly at home”, she says.

“We wold like to visit the church.” She introduces us, while I ask questions. The monastery was founded at the invitation of the Latvian government, who specifically wanted to establish a Catholic contemplative order in the country. They came to Ikšķile because they found a land here, but they were very happy to be able to settle in the cradle of Latvian Christianity. There are now eight sisters, from Essen. “How are your relations with the Lutheran majority in Latvia?” “Very good. Ecumenism is very strong in Latvia. The Lutheran bishop really likes us.” But now the Catholic bishop of Riga is visiting them, so she hurries back to the dining room. She shows us which door we will close behind us.

The church is a very clean, functional concrete and glass building, with a semicircular apse at one end and the sisters’ isolated chapel at the other, opening from the cloister.

Both the apse and the chapel have a beautiful medieval German wooden statue, obviously copies. The third figurative ornament is the neo-Romanesque relief depicting Bishop Meinhard on the lectern. The fourth one is outside, on the outer wall of the church: the Virgin Mary holding the child Jesus in the beautiful garden around the apse. This is also an island, an island of peace opposite of Meinhard’s church island.

Feast in Riga

No matter how carefully you prepare for a trip, the coincidences will be the most memorable: the challenges you conquer, the unexpected encounters, the celebrations you stumble into. Like this festive weekend in Riga.

The fact that it’s a weekend and a holiday is indicated by wedding photography sessions all over the city. Below: Guests are greeted by the cat from last year’s Oscar-winning Latvian animation movie Flow

Every second Saturday in Riga, a flea market is held in the Wöhrmann Garden (since the Baltic Germans left, Vermanes dārzs) next to Berga Bazārs. Along all the paths of the park’s labyrinth, open stalls are offering the products of artisans, jewelers, metalworkers, textile weavers, dressmakers, wood and bone carvers working with ancient Baltic motifs. A bit like the Tallinn fair, although somehow more rational, serious and reserved. Latvians are more German than Estonians.

In a tent set up on one of the wider paths, a craft workshop is teaching weaving, basket weaving and plasticine for children.

And of course, the market kitchens. At the entrance to the park, meat is being grilled on a stove and over open fire, potatoes cooked between hot stones, and cabbage stewed over embers. Both comers and goers sit down at long tables next to the kitchen. Excited seagulls are squawking in concert all around. The Latvians sweep the leftovers into a large, closed garbage tank, not caring about the seagull jumping on the top and his desires. I put the abundant leftovers of the knuckle on top of the tank, let him have a good day too.

On Sunday, at eight in the morning, we wake up to a brass band concert in Riga’s old town. We don’t know the Latvian anthem, but they seem like playing something like that. Then a mass of young people shouting, and then more music. Boy scouts? Demonstration? Political rally?

When we go down to the street around ten, the music and shouting are still going on. Then we see the first flags that look like church flags, and behind the flag bearer, children dressed in festive attire. A Catholic procession in a Lutheran town? But then more and more flag bearers come, with the names of towns and schools on their flags. And after the flag bearers, children or young people, not that much in national costumes, but rather in dresses based on them, with wreaths of flowers on their heads, and bouquets in their hands. They keep coming and coming, just as they have been for the previous two hours, without a break, from the main square, and continuing towards the Freedom Monument.

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“What is it today, a national holiday?” we ask a spectator. “No, a choir meeting.” It happens every five years, so that every generation can experience it at least once. We were just lucky to come now. Latvians are not a smiling people, but here and now they fulfill their five-year smiling plan.

To enhance the folk identity, many marchers hold old Latvian runes attached to sticks, which we later see in every shop in the city on clothes, jewelry, mugs and souvenirs. Or a rattle – called, as we later learn, a trejsdeksnis –, with a few discs attached to the handle, and metal plates hanging from their rims. “What is this, does it have any symbolic meaning?” we ask a gothic-looking girl with black dress and make-up. “I don’t know, I don’t have much affinity for folk music. Ask me about Nirvana instead.”

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Ten minutes from the three and a half hour parade

At noon, when the last marchers have left, and only flower petals remain on the square’s pavement, a beautiful young woman sits down opposite the House of the Blackheads, the formar company house of unmarried merchants, named after their patron saint, the black Saint Maurus, which – after the Germans bombed it, the Soviets bulldozed the rest, and then the Latvians faihtfully reconstructed it – is considered a symbol of Latvian rebirth. She unwraps a large, archaic instrument from soft textiles, a bandura, which has been a symbol of Ukrainian rebirth since Shevchenko, and begins to play it. Fascinated, we stay in front of her for an hour, listening to and sometimes filming her. She came from Nikolaev/Mykolaiv near Odessa, and the beautiful songs are well-known Ukrainian folk songs and chansons. I hope Irina can identify them.

“Ой під вишнею, під черешнею” (Тріо Мареничів)

“Ой у вишневому саду” (folk song)

“Місяць на небі, зіронькі сяють” (folk song)

“Закувала зозуленька в лузі”

“Я піду в далекі гори” (Володимир Івасюк)

“Рідна мати моя” (folk song)

“Ніч яка місячна” (folk song)

“Цвіте терен” (folk song)