You can read Latvia’s history as a list of dates and ruling powers — the Livonian Order, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, the Russian Empire, the First Republic, the Soviets, the Nazis, the Soviets again, and finally independence in 1991. It’s a long list, and it’s accurate. But it is not what living through any of those centuries actually felt like.
So instead, here are eight voices. One for each chapter. None of them is a real person — but everything they describe really happened to someone like them.
I am a pagan, and the foreign men have come
Around the year 1200, on the banks of the Daugava river.
Our gods live in the trees. Pērkons in the oak, Māra in the running water, Saule who rises behind the pines every morning and remembers our names. We bury our dead with food and a small coin so they are not hungry on the journey. We sing at midsummer, and we sing at every funeral, and the songs are older than anyone remembers.
The foreign men have come up the river in boats. They wear iron and they carry a thin sign of two crossed sticks they say is their god. They say our gods are demons. They have built a stone house at the mouth of the Daugava and they call it Riga. Their priest says we must come and be washed in their water or we will burn in a fire after we die.
My uncle says they will take our land. My grandfather says no — they are only traders, like the Swedes before them. We will see who is right.
We did not see who was right for a long time. The foreign men brought more iron men. They built more stone houses. By the time my grandchildren were old, we were Christian whether we liked it or not, and we did not own the land we had farmed for a thousand years.
But the songs are still older than anyone remembers. We never stopped singing them.
I am a peasant, and the master is German
Around 1500, in a village somewhere in Vidzeme.
The master lives in the big stone house on the hill. He is German. His grandfather was German. His grandfather’s grandfather was German. He does not speak our language, and we do not speak his.
Three days a week, my husband and I work on his land. The other days we work on our own — what they let us call our own. The harvest is split: a portion for us, a portion for him, a portion for the church. In a good year there is bread. In a bad year there is not.
When my eldest son was born, I went to the church to baptise him. The priest is German too. He wrote my son’s name in his book — a German name, not the name we use at home. At home we call him by his real name, the one his grandfather had.
We are not slaves. They will tell you we are not slaves. But my son was born here, and he will die here, and he will work this same land for that same family in the stone house on the hill, and he will not be allowed to leave without their permission. Whatever you want to call that, that is what it is.
I am a peasant’s child, and the Swedes have given me a book
Around 1690, in northern Vidzeme, under Swedish rule.
The Swedes came thirty years before I was born. The old people say they are different from the Germans — fairer with the harvest, harder on the masters, and they do something none of the previous rulers ever did. They make us go to school.
Once a week, in the winter, the priest’s helper teaches us letters. He is a young man from a village like mine, and his Latvian is the same as ours. He says the king of Sweden has decided that every peasant child in this land must learn to read, because every peasant must be able to read the Bible in their own language.
In their own language. That is the part I remember.
My grandfather could not read. My father could not read. I am eight years old and I am holding a book that is written in my language — Latvian — and I can read the words on the page out loud, and they make sense.
I do not know yet that the Swedes will lose the great war and the Russians will come. I do not know that the master in the stone house will still be German for another two hundred years. I only know that I can read, and that this thing they have given me, no future master can take away.
I am a soldier, and the Tsar wants me
Around 1860, somewhere on the road south.
I am twenty-three years old. The conscription officer came to our village last spring and read out the names. Mine was on the list. Twenty-five years in the Russian army. They say it has been shortened recently to fifteen, but the old men in our village remember when it was twenty-five, and they remember the men who never came back.
I have been walking for six weeks. I do not know exactly where I am. The officers speak Russian, and I speak Latvian, and we manage with hand signals and with the few Russian words I have learned along the way. Da. Niet. Khleb. Yes. No. Bread.
There is a Polish boy from somewhere near Vilnius in the company next to mine. We cannot really speak to each other, but we sit together at meals because we are both far from home and we both miss our mothers. His mother makes a soup with sour cream that sounds very much like the soup my mother makes. We agreed on this with our hands.
I will fight for the Tsar somewhere — Crimea, the Caucasus, the Turkish frontier, I do not know yet. The empire is large, and they need bodies for all of it. If I live, I will come home to a village that has buried my parents while I was gone.
I am a young woman, and Latvia is a country
November 1918, in Riga.
I was twenty-five when the announcement came. We had been ruled by Germans, then Russians, then Germans again during the war. And now, in a theatre on Romanova iela, a group of men signed a piece of paper that said this country is ours.
Latvia. Latvija. The word felt strange in my mouth, the way a new dress feels the first time you wear it. We had been a people for a thousand years. We had never been a country before.
My father cried when he read the newspaper. He was sixty years old and he had spent his entire life calling himself a subject of someone — first the Tsar, then the Kaiser. Now he was a citizen. He did not know what to do with the word. He had to practise it.
The next twenty years were not easy. We had to build a country with our hands — schools, ministries, an army, a currency, an opera, a football league. We had to do it while the Germans across the border were turning into something terrible and the Russians next door were turning into something worse. We did our best. We almost made it.
I am a child, and we are leaving in the night
June 14, 1941. A village in Latgale.
The men in uniforms came at three in the morning. My mother had one hour to pack. She put bread and warm clothes and my grandmother’s photograph into a sheet and tied the corners. My father was not there — they had taken him a week earlier and we did not know where.
There were trains at the station. Long ones. Wooden cars meant for cattle. They put us inside with sixty other people from villages near ours and they locked the door from the outside. There was a hole cut in the corner of the floor for what we needed. There was no light.
The train moved east for three weeks. When we stopped, we stopped in a place I had no name for. They told us later it was Siberia. The cold was a different kind of cold than the cold at home — drier, sharper, without forgiveness.
My mother survived. My grandmother did not. My father, we learned forty years later, had been shot within two months of his arrest. I came home to Latvia in 1956 with my mother. The house we had lived in had other people in it. They were not bad people. They had been told the house was empty.
There would be another deportation in 1949 — forty-three thousand people from Latvia, in a single week. My cousin’s family was in that one.
We were the lucky ones. We came back.
I am a citizen of the Soviet Union, and I am tired
Around 1985, in a Riga apartment block.
I was born in Soviet Latvia and I have lived all forty-one years of my life in it. I work in a state factory. I queue for sausage. I have a small apartment in a building that looks exactly like ten thousand other buildings between here and Vladivostok. The plumbing leaks. The neighbours hear everything.
We sing in choirs. This is allowed, because singing is a folk tradition and the Party tolerates folk traditions. So we sing — and the songs we sing are the same songs my pagan ancestor on the Daugava sang, the same songs the peasant child with the Swedish Bible sang, the same songs my mother sang quietly to herself in Siberia. The Party does not understand what these songs are doing. They think they are folklore. They are a country, hiding in plain sight.
In four years, two million of us — Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians — will join hands across all three countries in a chain six hundred kilometres long. It will be called the Baltic Way. The Soviet Union will not recover from it.
I do not know any of this yet. Tonight I am queuing for sausage.
I am a citizen of the European Union
Today, in Riga.
I was born after independence. I have a Latvian passport and a European Union passport, and they are the same document. I have studied in Germany. I have worked in Spain. I came home because I wanted to. My grandparents could not have imagined any of this.
Latvia is a small country. Two million people, give or take. We are members of the European Union and of NATO. Our democracy is younger than I am, and like anyone in their thirties, it is sometimes wise and sometimes a mess. We argue, loudly, about our own politics — which is not nothing, when you remember that for most of our history we were not allowed to argue about politics at all.
We watch the news from Ukraine with a quiet that is hard to explain to people who have not been us. We know what those tanks look like. Our grandparents knew. Our great-grandparents knew. We hope, genuinely, that our children will not have to know.
For now, we have something none of the voices above this one ever had. We have our country, our language, our songs, our schools, our courts, our parliament, our borders, and the freedom to leave them and come back. We have made a real life out of all of this, in less than thirty-five years.
We hope to keep it. We hope it will be ours forever.
We are aware, more than most Europeans, of what forever really means. But we hope.
If you visit Latvia and want to understand any of this in more depth, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia covers 1940 to 1991 with extraordinary care, and the Latvian Ethnographic Open-Air Museum shows you the houses these voices lived in. Both are an easy day from the centre of Riga.
This story is the spine of every walk we lead. If you want it told as you stand in front of the buildings — the Freedom Monument, the Occupation Museum, the Riflemen Square — get in touch and we'll build it into your Riga days.
