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)

The first victim

The Museum of Occupation in Riga – which is characteristically located on Riga’s main square, just as 20th-century terror plays a central role in Latvia’s history and identity – evokes with cruelly many photographs and documents the Russian, German and again Russian occupation of the country between 1940 and 1944, the extermination of the Jews, the deportation of Latvians and their conscription into the armies of both sides to then fight against each other, the escape of survivors, the struggle of forced laborers and prisoners of war in Germany and those taken to the Gulag, the emigration, the repression in Soviet Latvia, the executions, the destruction of villages and of Latvian agriculture, the twelve-year anti-Soviet partisan war and its cruel crushing. I don’t want to post any more pictures about this than this one, the first victim of the Soviet occupation of independent Latvia in 1940, the twenty-seven-year-old border guard Jānis Macītis, who was massacred along with his wife and young son by Soviet squads that attacked without a declaration of war, only to accuse Latvia the next day of violating the border and to demand the resignation of the government and the admission of the Red Army within 9 hours.

With such a history, it is no coincidence that Latvians know exactly which side to stand on and what to expect if their former oppressors prevail again.

Four hundred tons of secret maps

While wandering through Riga, we stumble upon a map shop tucked inside the former Berga Bazārs arcade. At first glance, it looks simply like a good shop, offering a solid selection of international maps and travel guides.

But then we discover the shelf of Russian maps, which seem to chart worlds that barely exist. An atlas of the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s “anti-Israel” along the Amur River, where today only one percent of the population is Jewish, yet a Yiddish newspaper is still published and Yiddish remains a mandatory subject in elementary schools. A map for navigating around Lake Ladoga, where just reaching it feels harder than getting to the Moon. An atlas for the residents of Murmansk, where during World War I even Hungarians could easily reach on free train tickets – they only needed to build the railway first.

Prokudin-Gorsky: Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the construction of the Murmansk railway (the “Murmelbahn”)

The real surprise, however, comes afterward. It isn’t until we reach the counter to pay that we notice the piles of map sheets stacked from floor to ceiling behind the clerk – and the trilingual sign declaring them strictly confidential topographic maps of the Soviet Army.

We take a closer look. Four 1:500,000 sheets cover Hungary, but there are 1:25,000 sheets for the major cities. Written in Cyrillic, the city names sound exactly like the way old Red Army veterans I once met across the former USSR pronounced them. Curiosity leads me to search for the former Soviet military airfield in Mátyásföld, which I knew during its operational days, and which turned out to have been staffed by Georgian officers after the Soviets withdrew. Yet the detailed Будапешт map still hides the airfield even from their own officers – it’s marked as farmland.

The shop clerk, enjoying our enthusiasm, shows us a detailed map sheet of Washington, D.C., with the Pentagon and the White House, where every facility is color-coded by function and by population density. It turns out that the Soviet Army had produced and updated similarly detailed maps of every part of the world that interested them, at least once a decade.

“How did you lay hands on this material?” I ask, tactlessly, but the clerk answers eagerly. He explains that the shop owner had been a civilian employee in the Soviet Army in Latvia in 1992, during their withdrawal, and learned that the top-secret maps were to be handed over to a paper mill for destruction by higher orders. He immediately began negotiating with the responsible officer to purchase at least the most interesting sheets. The army initially refused, but a week later they demanded $14,000 for the material. The owner obtained the money – “don’t ask how,” the clerk adds – and went to the warehouse for the shipment. The warehouse workers were too lazy to sort the sheets and told him to take it all. He shipped four hundred tons of map sheets in several train cars – and still has plenty of each. Except for San Francisco, the clerk adds, because someone from there once discovered the shop and wrote an article about it. Locals bought up the sheets like candy, and now even Washington sheets are scarce.

As a final flourish, a group of six or seven young Americans enters the shop. They are looking for a map sheet of South Carolina, the city of Greenville. When they get it, their jaws drop. “Oh my God, here’s our lake house!” screams one girl. “And here’s our church!” They immediately buy two copies. “Shouldn’t it be four? How many more do you have?” “Seventy-one more.”

The group leader explains that they volunteer at a local Latvian scout camp; the others are first-timers, he has been there multiple times. “And how did you find this shop?” “A friend told me I absolutely had to come here, because OMG, you wouldn’t believe the material!”

It is truly astonishing, bizarre, and slightly oppressive to see so plainly how avidly the Soviet Army – and by extension the state that controlled it – kept track of the parts of the world they cared about. It provides a tiny psychological footnote to the Russian state’s current insatiable appetite for information.

Just for the souvenir, we buy the 1989 Hungarian sheet including Budapest (yes, even at that time, before the withdrawal, it was still updated!) along with a solid reference book: The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world, 2017. Only after leaving the shop do I realize I never checked how they represented, if at all, the Soviet barracks at Hajmáskér and the surrounding training grounds in the Bakony hills, where I trained on tanks. I will have to go back for that.