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*** LATVIA 2011 - Weeks 9~10 *** |
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 CAMPING
IN LATVIA 2011
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Daugava Valley,
Latgale, Northern Latvia, Sigulda and Gauja National Park, and the Baltic coast:We left Rīga in busy city traffic, following the main road along the river embankment to begin the second stage of our travels in Latvia down the Daugava Valley to the country's second city Daugavpils and the eastern province of Latgale. For details of our route, click on the map right.
In the city's southern outskirts, what was once the dense forests of Rumbula had been one of two woodland sites around Rīga where in late 1941 the occupying Germans had systematically shot 1000s of Jews from the Rīga ghetto. Along the busy dual-carriageway, a modern steel sculpture resembling a dinosaur neck emerging from the trees indicates the site of the Rumbula mass murders memorial. What had 70 years ago been dense pine woodland, giving cover for the German crimes against humanity, is today a patchwork of post-war factories, shoddy housing and used car lots. Tucked away in the woods, amid raised grassy plots marking the mass graves of 25,000 Jews murdered here, the memorial takes the form of a giant menorah surrounded by stones engraved with the names of Jewish victims (Photo 1 - Memorial to Rīga Jews murdered in Rumbula Forests).
Lielvārde was also the birthplace of another of
Latvia's literary figures, Andrējs Pumpurs (1841~1902) best remembered for his
epic poem Lačplēsis, which wove together Latvian folktales into an
inspiration for Latvian nationalistic identity at a time when the country's
population was ruled over by Tsarist officialdom and its peasants held in serfdom
by Germanic aristocracy. Pumpurs created the heroic figure of Lačplēsis, the
Bear Slayer, a super-human Robin Hood character who battled through a series of
adventures championing the Latvian
Further along the valley, we turned off to see
the huge Soviet hydro-electric plant at Pļaviņas. It was the construction of
this dam by the totalitarian communist régime in the 1950s which caused so
much controversy in Latvia. The resultant reservoir flooded the section of
countryside further upstream most associated with the Lačplēsis epic adventures,
the massive rise in river level reducing the cliff where the hero met his death
to a low river bank. Dropping downhill towards the hydro-electric generating
station, the dam was of monumental scale with myriads of transmission lines radiating from it (Photo 5 - Pļaviņas hydro-electric
plant on River Daugava). The road continued downhill and
crossed the dam in a tunnel set into the dam wall and the hillside opposite gave
a panoramic view of the generating station. Aizkraukle had been built by the
Soviet authorities as a new town in the mid-1950s to house construction workers
and operatives for the Pļaviņas dam and hydro-electric plant, and had
since acquired the unofficial title of the ugliest town
Continuing on Route 6 along the valley, we turned off again at Koknese where a lane led along the river bank to the remains of a 13th century stone fortress built on a hillock above the river by German crusading (ie conquering) knights. The castle's cliff-top position was lost when water-levels rose after the dam's construction, so that the River Daugava now laps around the castle's footings (Photo 7 - 13th century Livonian Order stone-built fortress at Koknese). The castle had been built on the site of an earlier Latvian timber stockade such as the reconstruction seen earlier, and seeing the Germanic castle's substantial remains, we could have a ready understanding of how easily the Latvian tribes had been conquered.
We set off from Siveri to explore the rural lake-lands and borderlands of Latgale. Despite involving a further 20 kms of unsurfaced lanes, we took a minor road which led right along the Belarusian and Russian borders. Beyond the isolated hamlet of Šķaune, we reached a junction with a curious Cyrillic sign pointing along a narrow side-lane to a point where the 3 borders of Latvia, Belarus and the Russian Federation came together. We ventured hesitantly down the lane unsure of its status, and reached a barrier in a forest clearing, the meeting point of the 3 borders and most easterly point of the Baltic States (Photo 15 - Meeting-point of 3 borders - Latvia, Belarus and Russian Federation). Returning to the more secure but still unsurfaced and lonely stretch of road, we continued eastwards passing isolated Latgale farmsteads with their low wooden houses and outbuildings. The farming folk who lived and worked here were so far from any town or even larger village (Photo 16 - Isolated farmstead in eastern Latgale). The lane eventually led out onto the main Route 12, a major transport route which crossed the border control point into Russia in 4 kms. Lorries queued from at least 1 km back from the border-crossing awaiting the tediously lengthy and bureaucratic process of visas and customs controls. We turned back into Latvia and the EU leaving the truck drivers waiting patiently in the queue (Photo 17 - Lorries queuing at border-crossing from Latvia into Russian Federation).
Moving on westwards we reached Līgatne, a village
clustered in a narrow sandstone cliff-lined valley. Līgatne was the site of
Latvia's oldest paper mills with rows of 19th century wooden cottages built to
house its workers. Just beyond the village stand the dreary 1960s buildings of
the Līgatne Rehabilitation Centre. This had once served as a holiday
retreat for members of the Latvian communist party elite, and now apparently
functions as a genuine rehabilitation hospital whose leaflet promoted all its
medical and beauty therapy services. We had telephoned earlier to make an appointment.
Why, you might ask? Were we in need of physiotherapy? No, this was no ordinary
county sanatorium. Hidden 9m beneath its bland exterior, a top-secret
underground bunker-complex was created in the 1960s to which the military and
political top-ranking heads of the Latvian Soviet Republic would have
We parked in the 'hospital' car park where
patients and visitors came and went seemingly as normal. The receptionists
displayed the sort of arrogance and indifference you might have expected
from the Soviet era; we were dismissively instructed to wait in the hospital
lobby for the 3-00pm visit guide. Other visitors arrived, 3-00pm came and went,
and eventually at 3-20 an imperious dame appeared over-brimming with
self-importance, and instructed the group to follow. She led us over to an
anonymous-looking stairwell in the corner of the foyer; no security doors, just
what appeared a fire escape staircase. But 2 storeys down, we entered the
Leaving Līgatne,
we drove along to the main Route 2 to Sigulda to find Camping Siguldas Pludmale,
set on the banks of the River Gauja in the Gauja National Park. It was
inevitable that after all the
rain the riverside site would be muddy and midgy, but for a popular
national park campsite, the facilities were hopelessly inadequate. The
spectacular woodland surroundings of the Gauja Valley provided us with 2 good
days' walking. We followed the river, scrambling up through the trees to
look-out points for views across the river's sweeping meanders and the densely
wooded lower slopes
Our second day walking in Gauja National Park
linked the 3 medieval castles which still stand high above the thickly wooded,
steep sided river valley around Sigulda. These castles represent the 2 rival
power blocs of the medieval Baltics, the Germanic Knights of the Livonia Order
and the Catholic Church, with the poor Latvian peasantry working in serfdom for
both. Sigulda and Krimulda castles set on prominent rocky bluffs facing one
another on opposite sides of the steep-sided Gauja Valley were built by the
Livonian Order to control their land-holdings. Turaida castle was built further
along the valley in 1214 to protect the estates of the powerful Bishop of Rīga.
Our route today took us from Sigulda bridge with a scramble up to the remains of
Sigulda castle, then across by the cable car which wheezes across the valley
high above the bridge. From Krimulda castle we could see in the distance Turaida
castle, our third object further along the forested valley. Dropping back down
to the valley floor, a footpath led through the woods up to Turaida. The
brick-built stronghold survived the many wars of the 15~17th centuries until
finally reduced to ruins when lightening struck its gunpowder store. During the
1950s the heritage conscious Soviet Latvian régime restored parts of the castle
structure which now houses the Turaida Museum. Climbing the spiral stairs of the
4 storey gave a wonderful panorama down across the restored
Our time in Latvia was drawing to a close after a fascinating if midge-ridden month of travels through the county. This year's young storks, now fully grown, were busy hunting for final food in the roadside fields in readiness for their migration, and in the continuing pouring rain who could blame them for seeking warmer climates. We drove from Sigulda across dismal, boggy forested terrain and occasional villages, though the town of Limbaži to reach the Via Baltica, the well-surfaced highway leading along the Baltic coast towards Estonia. After our final night's camp in Latvia at Camping Rakavi, a well-appointed staging point just before Salacgrīva, we should be crossing the Estonia border tomorrow morning. That evening, the euros were taken out again since in January 2011, Estonia joined the euro-zone. Join us again shortly to follow our travels through our third host county.
Our music this week is a traditional song from
Latgale sung by the Latvian folk music group Laiksne (see right).
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A little further out, just off the
dual-carriageway, a lane leads across the railway tracks to another notorious
WW2 site, the memorial to the Salaspils concentration camp. Salaspils, under its
official German designation of 'Police Prison and Work-Education Camp', was set
up in October 1941 under the control of SS Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, a
ruthless and experienced butcher who had commanded the Einsatzgruppe killing
squads. Although
Jews were used in the camp's construction, it remained
primarily a forced labour camp for Latvian political prisoners. The primitive
hutted accommodation was totally inadequate for the severity of Latvian winters,
sanitary conditions were appalling, and the treatment régime brutal in the
extreme. 12,000 prisoners were incarcerated here during the 3 years of the
camp's existence and of these some 3,000 died from malnutrition, disease,
brutality and extreme cold. From 1943, large numbers of Latvian orphaned
children were imprisoned at Salaspils where disease and starvation caused 100s
of deaths. The first sight to greet modern day visitors on approaching the area
of the concentration camp is a massively long and upwardly sloping concrete
bunker, part of the memorial erected by the Soviets in 1967, which under usual
communist ideology was termed the 'Salaspils Memorial, a remembrance place of
fascist victims 1941~44' (Photo 2 - Soviet-era memorial
at Salaspils concentration camp). The square concrete
tubular structure bears the inscription in Latvian Behind this gate, the
earth groans, a quotation from the Latvian writer Eizens Veveris, himself a
surviving prisoner from Salaspils. Inside the bunker, a stairway slopes upwards
symbolising the passage from life to death, and at the far end, stairs drop down
into a small museum with displays of gruesome illustrations recalling the camp's
brutality. Across the lawns, an ensemble of comically heroic square-jawed giant
statues, intended to represent the uncrushable human spirit, simply appears
tastelessly Soviet; as if resistance to German barbarism was the sole preserve
of communists who could any day outdo even Germans in the barbarity stakes.
Another feature of the memorial, a long black marble slab and focus of
wreath-laying ceremonies, formerly contained an embedded slowly ticking
metronome. But almost symbolically, like the USSR that placed it there, the
metronome is no more, and the slab now stands silent.
Turning off onto the main Route 5, we crossed
the Rīga dam which traps a huge reservoir of the River Daugava, used as a
hydro-electric station. On the far side, we were grateful to turn off again onto
a quiet minor road, away from the busy traffic, and that night we camped on the
river's southern bank opposite the small industrial town of Ogre. That evening,
after a day of seeing memorials to gruesome mid-20th century brutality, we were
rewarded with the splendid sight of the sun setting across the wide River
Daugava (Photo 3 - Sunset over River
Daugava at Camping Sniedzes). The following day's
journey would take us down the Daugava Valley to Latvia's second city
Daugavpils. Rising in the same part of Western Russia as the Volga and Dnieper,
the 1,020km long River Daugava flows through Belarus and Latvia into the Bay of
Rīga. For centuries, the river had been Latvia's main transport corridor, busy
with rafts and barges carrying timber, hemp, flax and hides down-stream to the
export markets of Rīga. Nowadays goods travel by lorry and rail along the valley,
since a series of 20th century hydro-electric dams providing most of the
country's electricity needs made the river unnavigable. The dam at Kegums
built in 1937 was the symbol of the first Latvian Republic's technological
achievement. Later Soviet-era projects however proved far more controversial: further
upstream, the major hydro-electric project of the Pļaviņas dam flooded the most
picturesque part of the Daugava Valley, a landscape important in Latvian culture
and mythology. It only went ahead after patriotic-minded politicians were purged
from the Latvian communist party in the late 1950s. An HEP project planned close
to Daugavpils provoked one of the USSR's first environmental protests in 1986,
when the Latvians successfully demanded its cancellation.
Crossing back to the river's north bank at the
Kegums dam, we joined the busy Route 6 trunk road, and a short distance south in
the outskirts of the small town of Lielvārde, we found the reconstruction of
a 12th century Latvian timber-built stockade-fort, a general representation of
Latvian tribal chieftains' strongholds of that period prior to the German
conquest. The small enclosure surrounded by a low ditch was protected by huge
log-built ramparts reinforced by sharpened stakes (Photo
4 - Reconstructed 12th century Latvian tribal stockade-fort at Lielvārde).
In peacetime the fort would accommodate the chieftain, his family and small band
of warriors. In times of war, the stockade would fill up with families from
surrounding farmsteads. Information panels illustrated the 12th century Latvian
tribal society which occupied such stockade-forts. Iron working was clearly an
established skill with warriors armed with swords and iron-tipped spears, and
horses fully equipped with saddles, stirrups, bit and bridle. But lacking body
armour, such a culture would have been no match for the advanced military
technology of the invading German Knights. This reconstructed stockade-fort
gave a fascinating insight into a tribal society which so quickly was subjugated
by the Teutonic invaders, reducing the Latvians to peasantry and serfdom for the
next 700 years.
underdog. Latvians would identify with their
action-man hero in their forthcoming struggle for independence from the
Baltic-German aristocracy. Lačplēsis' greatest enemy with whom the bear-slaying
hero battles is the unmistakably Teutonic Black Knight; the story ends with
Lačplēsis making the ultimate sacrifice, dragging the filthy Hun with
him over a cliff to
drown in the flowing waters of the Daugava. Lačplēsis' statue now stands in
a niche over the entrance to the Latvian parliament building in Rīga
and is also the name of one of the country's favourite beers.
in Latvia with its
rows of apartment blocks. Again we had to see this to form our own judgement.
But on a sunny summer's afternoon with roadsides and window boxes planted with
brightly coloured dahlias, we had to disagree with the town's poor image; we had
seen a lot worse in our travels (Photo 6 - Aizkraukle Soviet-built town for Pļaviņas Hydro-electric
plant workers). Ever champions of the underdog, we had to counter Aizkraukle's undeserved
epithet.
Jēkabpils further south along the Daugava was
said to be an interesting historic town, but frustratingly the entire centre was
totally inaccessible because of road works. Extricating ourselves from a maze of
diversions, we were forced to bypass the town to follow minor roads and
avoid Route 6's heavy traffic. But a few kms further, the tarmac ran out and we
bumped along at slow speed on an unsurfaced dusty gravel road for some 40
kms, passing tiny farming hamlets. Despite the impoverished appearance of the
farmsteads, harvesting of the cereal crops was in full swing with modern
combines. On and on went the wearying and dusty road until we reached Ilūkste
where the lane merged into Route 13 which came up from the Lithuanian
border at Zarasai where we had been 3 weeks ago. There was no time today to stop
at Daugavpils after delays on the long gravel road drive, and we passed through
into Latgale's rolling countryside to reach Camping Siveri in a glorious
position on the shores of the lake of that name. At the gate, we were greeted by
the lady-owner with the single word 'welcome'; it was the best thing we had
heard all day. We pitched down by the lake risking the midges, and the evening
sunshine bathed our supper table with a golden light (Photo 8 - Evening sunlight at
lakeside Camping Siveri), and later that evening the sun
set across the lake with a glorious salmon-pink glow (Photo 9 - Sunset over Lake Siveri
at peaceful Camping Siveri).
The following morning, after early mist had
cleared the lake, the sky was filled with cotton-wool puff-balls of clouds
reflected in the still surface of the lake (Photo
10 - Morning cloud
reflections at Lake Siveri). We drove back into
Daugavpils to visit the city and managed to park close to the central square of
Vienības laukums. Despite being Latvia's second city, Daugavpils is now an
economically depressed backwater compared with Rīga. What was once the
country's major industrial centre had fallen on hard times since independence
and switch to market economy, producing mass unemployment and an atmosphere of
despondency. The city also faces much prejudice with 90% of its population being
Russian-speaking. Founded by Ivan the Terrible who sacked the Livonian fortress
in 1656 and built his own fortified settlement, Daugavpils remained a garrison
city and later Tsars built a huge citadel on the banks of the Daugava. The city
developed as a major industrial centre in the lead-up to WW1, attracting 1000s
of migrant workers from all parts of the Russian Empire. This process continued
after WW2 when the Soviet occupiers deliberately imported a totally non-Latvian
workforce for the city's ever-expanding manufacturing industry. The result is
the predominantly Russian-speaking population of today with few Latvians living
in Daugavpils, the industry in decline and the city facing economic depression.
Against this historical background, we set off
to walk the pedestrianised main street of Rīgas iela and explore
Daugavpils' grid pattern of streets; doubtless it did not usually face an influx
of visitors. Everywhere Russian Cyrillic script was in evidence and even the
buses had dual Latvian-Russian destination boards. Despite the city's reputation
as a run-down place, in the centre at least locals appeared to go about their
business with a purposeful air and youngsters were as trendily dressed as
anywhere. The city suffered severe damage in WW2 and the buildings generally
lacked any distinctiveness. But across the railway tracks, we got our first
glimpse of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb, 2 Russian
warrior saints who have long been patrons of the Russian-speaking population.
The cathedral's shining golden bauble-like domes impaled on their pale blue
spires presented an imposing sight (Photo 11 - Gilded onion-domes of Daugavpils' Russian Orthodox cathedral).
A wedding had just finished and we seized the chance to see the cathedral's
icon-bedecked interior (Photo 12 - Iconostasis of Daugavpils' Russian
Orthodox cathedral). The other curiosity that has to be
witnessed at Daugavpils is the crumbling remains of the Citadel (Cietoksnis). Built by
the Tsarist Russians in the late 18th century and reinforced during the late
1800s, the star-shaped network of earthworks and brick ramparts, redoubts and
fortifications enclosed a huge area of what was a permanently garrisoned
stronghold. It survived almost intact during WW1 and WW2, and during the
communist era, the Soviet air force used it as a training school. In the huge
open spaces within the fortress, apartment blocks had been built during the
1970s, infilling gaps between the original Tsarist mansions. Once the Soviets
left in 1993 after Latvian independence, the entire complex had progressively
fallen into dereliction. Many of the buildings are now totally abandoned, but the
grubby apartment blocks remain occupied providing low-cost social housing.
Exactly like Karosta at Liepāja, this was a totally bizarre place:
crumbling Soviet apartment blocks amid semi-derelict Tsarist mansions with the
odd scattering of artillery pieces to remind of its former fortress role (Photo 13 - Tsarist mansions
alongside
Soviet apartments at Daugavpils Citadel). And to
complete the picture of dereliction and alienation, the remains of Soviet
security gates regaled with hammer and sickle and red star, topped with rusting
barbed wire still enclose the outer perimeter of this sordidly enclosed residential
estate. The dark litter-filled hallways and staircases of these crumbling
apartment blocks looked forbidding places. As at Karosta, we were glad to have
had this grotesque experience, but even gladder to walk away through the
forbidding fortress gateway, passing a young mum with a small child trudging
from the bus with her shopping back into this enclosed world locked away behind
the citadel walls. Returning from our curious day in Daugavpils to our lakeside
camp at Siveri, we paused at the little town of Krāslava to walk along the main
street and photograph the brightly coloured wooden cottages, a delightful rural
contrast with some of Daugavpils' urban squalor (Photo 14 - Wooden cottages lining
main street at Krāslava).
It was now time to move on into Latgale's
rolling uplands dotted with lakes and remote farms and extending eastwards to
the borders of Belarus and the Russian Federation. Taking its name from the Latgalians, one of the original Baltic tribes who settled in Latvia 4 millennia
ago, the region preserves a stronger sense of identity than other parts of the
country. Latgale's uniqueness is largely due to its having been separated from
the other regions for most of its history, missing out on the process of
cultural and linguistic unification which bound the other 3 regions into a
national entity. Most significantly, it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth from 1561 until the Partition of Poland in 1772. During this
period, the living northern and western Latvian tribes gradually standardised
their language into a mutually intelligible tongue while the isolated Latgalians
retained their own archaic dialect. They were also cut off from the Lutheran
culture which developed in the rest of Latvia, remaining under Catholic control
evidenced by the number of wayside crosses not seen in the rest of Latvia.
Under Russian Tsarist rule from 1772, Latgale was attached administratively to eastern
Belarus, distancing it further from mainstream Latvian culture. But
the Latgalians always regarded themselves as a branch of the Latvian national
family and in 1917, the Latgalian Council voted to join with the rest of
independent Latvia governed from Rīga. Latgale was always an ethnically mixed
area, with Latvian-Latgalians dominating the countryside, and Russians
clustering in the towns and cities which under the Soviets were earmarked for
intense industrialisation with huge levels of mass immigration of workers from
other parts of the USSR.
We paused at Luzda, founded in 1177 and said to be
the oldest town in Latvia, and set on a spit of land between 3 lakes. The town's
most distinguished feature are the remains of the Livonian Order castle set on a
flat topped hill overlooking the town and its lakes. Westwards from here, we
reached Rēzekne, Latgale's next largest city after Daugavpils. Rēzekne developed
in the 19th century as a typical Tsarist grid layout city, but was pulverised by
artillery fire in WW2 and under the Soviets it grew into a major industrial
centre with drab communist-era factories and apartment blocks described as
'unremittingly grey'. As we approached the city, our passage was again blocked
by impenetrable road works totally denying access to the centre. We could but
battle our way
out, and in doing so missed Rēzekne's only noteworthy feature,
the 5m high statue of Māra of Latgale holding aloft a victory cross celebrating
the Latvian victory over the godless Bolsheviks in 1920 and Latgale's subsequent
incorporation into the newly independent Latvian Republic. Post-WW2, the statue
was twice destroyed by the Soviets and replaced by a statue of Lenin; Māra was
only restored in 1992 after Latvia's second independence. We just about managed
to extricate ourselves from the roadworks criss-crossing Rēzekne's network of
railway lines. One of the city's 2 railway stations is served by the 3 times
weekly Vilnius~St Petersburg express. After a long cross country drive, we
finally reached the northern Latvian town of Alūksne and tonight's campsite,
Camping Jaunsētas set on the shore of Lake Alūksnes. We stayed here 3 days to
take a break and catch up with jobs, and to take a ride on the Gulbene~Alūksne
narrow gauge railway, a surviving stretch of rural line formerly providing a
local service linking to the Soviet broad gauge inter-city main line. Unlike
volunteer-operated preserved lines, Gulbene~Alūksne narrow gauge railway
provides a functional public transport service to all the isolated hamlets
between the 2 towns with a twice daily return service. The timetable meant
catching the train from Gulbene, and on a miserably wet day, we drove there
again denied access to the station by road works. It must be boom times in
Latvia for road construction companies with EU funds flowing freely. We
eventually reached Gulbene's grandiose station where the little single coach
train pulled by an ex-Soviet diesel stood waiting (Photo
18 - Gulbene station on the
Gulbene~Alūksne narrow gauge railway). The 33km
long journey took a tedious 1½ hours chugging along through the unending forest
at snail's pace and stopping at every little rural halt, some little more than
shacks in the empty forest. But the service was well used for routine travel by
local people from these isolated tiny settlements; it was we who stood out as
obvious visitors.
Leaving
Alūksne, the road passed within a
couple of kms of Estonia's southernmost point, and with the open Schengen
borders, we took a sneak preview look at our next host country before resuming
our Latvian journey along the former Tsarist postal road linking Rīga with
Pskov now in Western Russia. This was a straight and surprisingly traffic free
road and we made good progress along towards the small town of Cēsis. Several of
the villages we passed through along this road still had large official-looking
buildings which once must have been Tsarist staging-posts. Turning
off on a
minor road to the village of Āraiši, we reached the Āraiši Archaeological Museum
site on the shore of the tiny lake opposite the modern village. Here there is a
modern-day exact replica of a 9th century lake village found on
the site by Latvian archaeologists. The Āraiši Lake Village (Āraišu ezerpils)
was constructed on a man-made island of decking-lattice logs out in the shallow
lake joined to the lake shore by a wooden causeway. The compact village had 15
small log houses closely clustered on this log-decking island surrounded
by defensive stakes and shrouded by reeds in the shallow waters of the lake. In
terms of human habitation, there were the remains of a 13th century Livonian
Order stone fortress also on the site, and illustrative reconstructions of Stone
and Bronze Age habitations. Finally there was the modern village of Āraiši set
on the northern edge of the lake; with its red-roofed church and slender spire,
the village made a picturesque backdrop to its 9th century predecessor
lake-village (Photo 19 -
Reconstructed 9th
century timber-built lake village at Āraiši). We
crossed to the artificial island set out in the lake to examine the
reconstructed log-dwellings with their turf roofs, another meaningful insight
into a 10th century Latvian tribal community which was soon to be wiped out by the
invading Germanic knights.
It was just a short drive into the pleasant and
unassuming town of Cēsis. We parked by the central square of Vienības laukums
which is dominated by the Victory Monument (Photo 20 - Victory Monument at Cēsis).
This tall, slender obelisk commemorates the joint-Latvian-Estonian defeat of
German forces in 1919 finally freeing Latvia from centuries of German
domination. The Soviets had demolished the monument in 1950, offended more by
its political symbolism of Latvian patriotism than its lack of aesthetic
subtlety. It was finally restored in the 1990s after Latvia's second
independence. For a small town, Cēsis has 2 book shops, one of which provided us
with a detailed map of the Gauja National Park which would serve us well over
the coming week. The helpful staff in the TIC provided us with a town plan,
well-documented with local points of interest. We followed this for a walk
around the old town's cobbled streets: the 13th century sturdily-buttressed
church of Sv Jāna Baznīca, the castle which had been the seat of Grand Masters
of the Livonian Order, the attractive cluster of wooden houses, and the
now-expired Cēsis brewery founded in 1590 and said to be the oldest in Northern
Europe. And we camped that night just outside the town on the sandy banks of the
River Gauja at Camping Zagarkilns where the hospitable warden invited us to help
ourselves to as much chopped wood as we liked for an evening camp fire. And we
did, sharing a sociable fire with a like-minded couple of Dutch
travellers.
been
evacuated in the event of nuclear war. This totally self-sufficient complex,
known under the code name of 'Vacation Hotel', was the strategic nerve-centre
for running the country following nuclear attack, with direct secure hot-line
telephone contact with the Kremlin in Moscow and links to key services in the
rest of the country. Work on construction of the underground complex was begun
in 1968 with the rehabilitation sanatorium finally built on top as cover. It was
so secret that its existence suspiciously remained classified until 2003, 12
years after Latvian independence, with government and military leaders of
post-communist Latvia allegedly divided about how to deal with this Cold War
relic. It is now open to public visits, and we telephoned to reserve a place on
a tour, curious to see what went on there.
secret
world via thick steel doors. We were led along lino-floored corridors, but such was the persisting paranoia about secrecy that no photographs were allowed. A
plan topped by a few sage words from Lenin showed the Complex's scale. Small
rooms were crammed full of radio and telephone equipment, teletype machines, an
archaic computer terminal and reel-to-reel data storage, all terribly hush hush
but apparently still operational. These would have provided the means of communication
with the outside world. But when the rest of the country had been devastated by
sneak nuclear attack from the evil forces of Western imperialism, who we
wondered did these Soviet imbeciles think they would be communicating with, and
how? A heavy telephone handset formed a secure hot-line to the Kremlin; perhaps
the answers would come from there, but since the Soviet withdrawal, the line had
mysteriously gone dead. A command and control room was filled with charts
detailing the country's key military and civil strategic installations, including a
chilling map showing the flooding impact if the great dams of the Daugava Valley
were breached by nuclear attack; Rīga would be flooded to a depth of 6m in 6
hours. Further corridors led to gloomy, claustrophobic offices which would have
occupied by the Secretary Generals of the Latvian communist party, Comrades Voss
and Pugo. In a neighbouring conference room, overseen by a portrait of Lenin, we
were treated to a gas mask drill (Photo 21 - Gas mask drill at Līgatne
underground bunker complex);
other Latvian visitors told of recollections from the 1970s when gas mask drills
were a regular feature of school and workplace life, something totally unknown
in the West. It was as if the communist authorities deliberately hyped the dangers
of nuclear attack, demonising the West to create a sense of fear in the public to
justify the oppressive régime. After all this, we returned up the
innocent-looking staircase to the hospital lobby. This had been a grotesquely
surrealistic and chilling experience, giving a gruesome glimpse into Cold War
realities from a Soviet perspective. And outside back in 2011 in the hospital
car park, it was still raining.
and steep cliffs on the northern bank (Photo
22 - Forests of the Gauja
National Park near to Sigulda). The path undulated
across the steep, sandy, forested valley-side and along close to the river bank
as canoeists paddled past returning our waves of greeting (Photo 23 -
Canoeing on the River Gauja). We passed 15m high sandstone cliffs carved out
by the river and reached a crossing point by suspension footbridge for the
return walk along the wooded cliffs tops on the northern bank, leading back to
Krimulda village with the remains of its 13th century Livonian Order castle set
high above the river valley.
castle
towers and rampart walls and the wooded Gauja valley beyond (Photo
24 - Restored medieval
fortress at Turaida).
