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.

“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.”

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)