memories of riga
Last month I went to Latvia for a few days, and these are some things I wrote in my notes app while I was there with some 35mm I shot on my pocket Yashica T5. Many of my memories are blurred because, as it later transpired, I caught COVID on the plane.
We get only one really sunny day, which is what happens when you take a holiday to a Baltic state in February. Shadows of birds against the bright walls of the old town, bare trees bowing down low out over the cobbles and vases of dried flowers in lace-curtained windows. We climb Stalin’s Birthday Cake for the view, all clear blue skies and city smoothed out around the hulking UFO of the television tower across the river. Strangely translated signage lays claim to the tallest tower in the Baltic states, which we were under the impression we had climbed in Tallinn last summer, but we do not attempt to verify.
In the emergency stairwell we’re greeted by weak light through unexpectedly beautiful stained glass. There’s a strange painting exhibition on the second floor - by a city bureaucrat? Unclear - and someone turns the lights on for us and says something encouraging in Latvian before slipping back into a sun-drenched office full of chatting colleagues. Almost immediately someone else emerges from the silent office next door and turns them off.
In the orthodox cathedral on the corner several old women are mopping and polishing and dusting and everything that can shine is blinding.
In the market our hunger is aroused and dampened in revolving successions by vats of pickled garlic bulbs, literal bouquets of whole smoked fish, containers of radioactive-looking roe and glossily dripping honeycomb. We ignore it all as we have bookmarked a Georgian restaurant and been dreaming of aubergine rolls with walnut paste. We eat khachapuri and heavy dumplings while an ancient dog weaves underfoot between tables, letting out tiny barks as waiters ruffle its ears without breaking their stride. We plough through a litre of pear lemonade. The Swiss woman next to us ask if they can return for dinner, and when told it’s booked up for Valentine’s Day looks accusatorily at her husband.
The National Library is full of loud school groups, bug eye windows looking out on river views shrouded in February fog. We’re not allowed into the reading rooms without a library card, but outside them are sofas that are too big for one but not quite big enough for two. We buy a magnet at the gift shop and the woman behind the counter raises an eyebrow and asks if we need two or do we plan to share it? which is really the only experience we have around Latvia being not quite au fait with the gays.
In the Soviet-style canteen for a lunch left too late we pile our trays with eyes bigger than stomachs. Mounds of sauerkraut, giant pickles, potatoes five ways, rye bread soup with cream and a pancake with lingonberry dipping sauce. It’s nearing naptime, and we’re surrounded by toddlers mid-meltdown. We feel a bit like toddlers mid-meltdown.
Attendants in the halls of the national gallery wear heavy navy workmen’s jackets that would not look out of place in a bar in Camberwell, and there are more of them than visitors in most rooms. There is an extensive and eerily religious retrospective of a contemporary Latvian painter in the basement, featuring Bosch-ish interpretations of the Ukraine war and 21st century interpretations of the crucifixion. I do not like it. I do like that there are windows into the dimly-lit storage areas for unloved paintings, and the strange winter landscapes of the second floor.
We take a taxi to the open-air ethnographic village. We did not Google it ahead of time and it is almost fully closed for the winter. A long tree-flanked path leads into a forest, snow still thick on the ground and a dense silence hanging below the trees. I peer into the first thatched building, full of dust-sheet covered humps that look almost humanoid in the gloom and frighten me too much to go inside.
We pick through ice further into this surreal environment: a cavernous locked chapel; a towering windmill; a frozen village pond. We step into a building with a cheerfully smoking chimney, and we turn around straight into a woman in period costume and scream involuntarily. We all apologise and she opens a door into a bedroom with a crackling stove and hanging wicker figures - a welcome break from whatever vibe is pervading the rest of this ethnographic village, but the warmth is escaping through the door and we do not speak Latvian and so we all smile at each other again and we leave. A cat slips into the house and a shadow passes over the view out onto snow-covered thatch.
A short time after this we lose each other. I pick between shuttered timber buildings to the edge of a vast lake, still hidden beneath a thick sheet of ice with a deep crack running out towards the centre. I turn back into the treeline, wondering whether we are following each other in circles. There’s an occasional flicker of movement in the periphery of my vision - a worker with a litter picker, another lone visitor obscured by a huge scarf. When I tentatively call out my voice is deadened by the trees and the silence; the only sound is the crunch of my boots on ice-packed snow and a distant intermittent booming on whose provenance I do not dwell.
I think about all the people who have moved through these many wooden buildings that have been transported from various corners of Latvia, how many people have died in them and been born in them and told horrible stories in them. I think about the rich potential for a horror film set around a couple losing each other in an ethnographic village in winter. I think about all the possible ways one might slip and fall in an ethnographic village in winter, about how many hours it’s possible to survive in these temperatures trapped in a drainage ditch.
Eventually the spell is broken by my phone ringing, which seems like a very obvious solution from my desk in London but seemingly ungraspable from the ethnographic village in winter, and we leave. Outside the gates is a vending machine that sells “irish cream white hot chocolate” in polystyrene cups that burns my throat in a comfortingly everyday way.
The morning of our flight I step into the Latvian photography museum alone, hidden behind a heavy oak door down a sidestreet. An unassuming set of spiral stairs leads into a 16th century merchant house, where it costs two euros to look at two rooms of tiny framed polaroids and large monochrome prints by Dorothy Bowman. They are thoughtful and crisp, from glass ornaments in her Hampstead flat to children on the streets of Jerusalem. Two older women who work there are the only others in the building, and they turn the gallery lights on just for me; when I step back out into the sharp cold it feels like stepping out of a dream. Which looking back, was probably a high fever.
There seem to be too many memories for a 3 day trip, all blurring together. Sickly sweet cocktails in the crowded sky bar, where a woman I meet taking pictures of the city view from the loo that none of us booked the window tables for grew up two towns over from the tiny German village I lived in age 20. Stuffed dogs at the medical museum, one that had been to space and back and two sutured together for five days of miserable existence. Fried rye garlic bread by the fire at a medieval folk restaurant, and the bookshop with the coded queer sex room. A florist who sold us roses on Valentine’s Day and introduced us to her four cats (three with flower names and one called Moritz), the bright moquette of the city trams, opening the door of the art nouveau centre onto five women gossiping in period dress and huge hats.
We bring home a fridge magnet and a beautiful tile and a botanical print and COVID.
