For everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

The Latvian Academy of Sciences Building and the Maskavas District

The area of Riga that extends beyond the Central Market -- known as the Maskavas Forštate (Moscow District) -- is more interesting than one would immediately guess, and it took me a year of living here in Riga to discover it.  Most of it is in poor shape, but there is lots of history and culture hidden here, if you know where to look.  

The main landmark of this area is the Latvian Academy of Sciences Building, built in the Stalinist style over a period from 1951 to 1961.

The Latvian Academy of Sciences Building

The building is similar to many others erected during the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union and in other parts of Eastern Europe, including the Seven Sisters in Moscow, the Hotel Družba in Prague, the Hotel Ukrayina in Kiev, and others.  And my Polish friends noted the similarities with the Palace of Culture in Warsaw.

The Facade of the Latvian Academy of Sciences

The Soviet symbols have been largely removed from this structure, except for some hammers and sickles at the very top that are hard to detect.  Instead, the Latvians have reclaimed this building for themselves and, as they renovate it, they are emphasizing its links to Latvia. The building was designed by Latvian architects and decorated by Latvian craftsmen, and their art is evident in many big and small details, such as the oak leaf cluster motif throughout (from the facade to the light fixtures), and a wood and glass door that reminded me of the Arts and Crafts style.

A Chandelier

A beautiful door

But, most importantly, this building houses Latvian culture, arts, and science.  And for that to remain as is, everything must change…. The hammers and sickles decorating the halls have been replaced by the Latvian symbol of learning:  an owl crowned by three stars representing the three historical regions of the country (Vidzeme, Latgale and Kurzeme-Zemgale).

One of the tallest building in Riga, the Latvian Academy of Sciences offers among the best views of the city -- especially because, unlike the tower of St. Peter's, it affords a view of the spires of this church as well.  Buy a ticket to the viewing platform (available from a kiosk in the lobby) and ride the elevator to the 17th floor, and you will see this:

Riga in September from the Latvian Academy of Sciences

The opposite side of the viewing platform shows a different view:  a collection of old buildings from different time periods in need of renovation; some green areas and a few empty lots; and here and there a few onion-shaped domes of different colors.  This is the Maskavas Forštate side of the city and the area where Russians and Jews settled in earlier centuries.

The Maskavas District of Riga

The green areas and empty lots are sadly what remains of the center of Riga's Jewish community before World War II.  The Great Choral Synagogue stood in this area, until it was burned down in 1941 with a large contingent of the Jewish population inside.  A memorial is located on the site of the Synagogue at the corner of Gogoļa and Dzirnavu streets.

The onion-shaped domes testify to the Russian origins of the Maskavas district.  The distant green dome in the picture above belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church of All Saints, while the golden dome in the picture below belongs to an Old Believers church, also knows as Grebenshikov's Church.  This is one of the largest Old Believers congregations in the world and I have heard it houses a remarkable collection of icons.  These are two very interesting attributes, so I've tried to go visit this church many times, but I can never seem to find it.  I saw it clearly once from the train as it crossed the Daugava River on the way to the Central Station, and later I drove around the area where I thought I saw it -- but no luck.  From above, though, the golden dome is unmistakeable -- and maybe one day I'll make it there.

The Golden Dome of the Old Believers Church

And then, if you look straight down from the top of the Latvian Academy of Sciences building, you will see this:

Church of the Annunciation of Our Most Holy Lady

This is the Russian Orthodox Church of the Annunciation of Our Most Holy Lady.  What is notable about this, you will ask, apart from the vibrant colors?  Well… this is where the Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa married the Latvian psychoanalyst Alexandra Wolff von Stomersee in 1932.

Wow!  The Leopard here in Riga!!  I ran down to see the church up close.  It's small, and like many Orthodox churches it's both cozy and opulent inside.  It's being renovated and it looks beautiful, maybe even better than it did in 1932, but it probably mostly stayed the same, while around it the world changed.

A Glimpse of the Church through the Gate

One Fish, Two Fish…

… Salted Fish, Smoked Fish:  Riga's Central Market

Here is something you won't see very often:  a real, honest-to-goodness central food market housed in real, honest-to-goodness converted Zeppelin hangars -- five of them!  Yes, Zeppelin hangars…  which at one point housed real Zeppelins!

And we're not talking about the urban hipster's dream of Ye Olde farmers' market, offering hypoallergenic, clover-scented cheese made from the milk of Alpine goats who've grazed strictly on fields of four-leaf clover.  Oh, no.  Oh, no, no, no....

Here, just a short walk from Old Town and right behind Riga's Central Train Station, you will find a whole side of pork freshly split by the gentleman wielding the axe behind the meat counter, if that's what you're looking for.  If it is fish you are searching for, please enter the next hangar, where you will find the fresh sturgeon, trout, and flounder you've been dying to cook -- of course taking care to sidestep that gigantic fish that just jumped out of its bin and is now flapping on the floor on its imagined way back to the Baltic Sea.

This market is, in other words, THE REAL THING!

Riga's Central Market from the top of St. Peter's Church

The idea for this fantastic market dates to just after World War I, when the Riga City Council looked for a more permanent and sanitary space for the market stalls alongside the Daugava river.  To house the new market, the City Council decided to use the Zeppelin hangars left behind in Latvia by the German army.  Architects and engineers went to work to ensure that the structures could function as market halls, and devised a plan to use the top part of the hangars as the roofs of the pavilions, with brick and reinforced concrete walls holding up the heavy structures and providing temperature control for the Baltic climate.

By 1930 the market was operational, and it was the largest and most modern in Europe.  There was central heating and lighting, and underneath the market there was a network of tunnels to allow the movement of goods to and among the pavilions, as well as 27 freezers with a capacity of over 300 tons!

And Riga's Central Market was important during the Soviet period as well.  It was considered the best market in the Soviet Union, and sold products from 60 collective farms.  It is now part of a joint stock company managed by the Riga City Council, which also manages other, smaller markets in town.  It is a real market, used by all type of shoppers, but it is also increasingly a tourist destination, thanks to its history and breathtaking architecture (Jugendstil details decorate the pavilions as well.)

There are five pavilions, each with its own specialty market:  meat, fish, vegetables, dairy, and a gastronomy market, where you can find items like hemp butter.  (Yes, really -- and it's actually quite tasty.)  Outside the pavilions, there are additional stalls where everything from produce to shoes and clothes is sold.

Open Air Stalls

The Meat Pavilion

I loved the meat pavilion, where the aforementioned butcher whacked away at some huge slabs of beef, and a whole pig's head advertised the pork specials.

The Vegetable Pavilion

The vegetable pavilion had beautiful stacks of vegetables imported from other climates, like all sorts of peppers and eggplants, as well as Latvian specialties, like pickled cabbage, pickled beets, and pickled… pickles!

Cabbage and beets

Also in the vegetable pavilion, in a corner, is a fabulous Uzbek bakery, which makes different types of  Uzbek bread, called non, in a traditional oven.  This is also the real thing, as my friend Elya, who is from Uzbekistan and who showed me this place, assured me.

Making Uzbek Bread

Traditional Uzbek Oven

But for me, the most interesting (and entertaining) pavilion was the fish pavilion.  In addition to fresh fish of all kinds, from salmon to trout to flounder, and even sturgeon, there are vendors of some very Latvian products:  salted fish, typically herring; smoked fish of an incredible variety, from flounder to eel; and dried fish.

Fresh Sturgeon and Trout

Smoked Mackerel

Smoked Flounder

Smoked Eel

Salted Herring (in Front)

Dried Roach

Seeing all this smoked fish made me want to find out more about how it's made, so I went to the Jurmala Open Air Museum, but that's for another post….

Art Museum Riga Bourse

The Art Museum Riga Bourse, inaugurated in 2011, is one of Riga's newest and most beautiful art spaces.

It is housed in a historical building completed in 1855 as Riga's first stock exchange (the Bourse, or Birža in Latvian.)   Riga was at the time the third largest city in the Russian Empire, after Moscow and St. Petersburg, and one of the main ports and train hubs in the Empire. Its economy was growing and diversifying, and, as it did so, the influence of the old Baltic German guilds began to decline and a Latvian middle class arose.  The effort to build the Bourse reflected these economic changes and related aspirations -- it resulted in a prominent location (on Doma Laukums, across from the Riga Cathedral) and a space large enough to house not just the stock exchange, but also meeting rooms and other places to conduct business, including shops on the ground floor.

It must have been an impressive place even then -- look at the now restored staircase in the building:

And these halls, at the time, were for business and socializing:

Venetian Hall Bourse Museum

Makart Hall Bourse Museum

Meanwhile a movement of National Awakening began and resulted in Latvia's independence in 1918.  National institutions began to sprout up, and Latvia's Museum of Foreign Art was established in 1920, with art donated by some of the same individuals who conducted business in the Bourse.  This collection, however, was held not at the Bourse but in Riga's Castle, and the Bourse continued its role as an economic hub right until Soviet occupation in 1940.  During Soviet times, the Bourse housed some local cultural offices and suffered from neglect typical of the times, as well as damage from a fire in 1980.

Restoration began in 2008, with the goal of moving the collection of the Latvian Foreign Art Museum from the Castle to this space, and also to expand the concept of the museum and provide a space for exhibitions and contemporary art.  I love the results.  This is the atrium of the new Museum, with a deconstructed gondola hanging from the rafters:

The gondola may be a reference to the style of the building, which is described as that of a Venetian Renaissance palazzo.  The atrium itself is a new space, resulting from the enclosure of what was at one point a passage for people and cars.

The upper floors now hold an interesting collection of Western and Oriental art.  The Western collection includes paintings from the 16th to the 19th century (displayed in the Venetian and Makart Halls pictured above), primarily by Dutch and German painters.  There are a number of beautiful still-lives; a nice Monet, titled "Winter Landscape"; and some depictions of biblical stories, including a large painting by the Italian master Luca Giordano, "Solomon Worshipping False Gods," below:

But my favorite was this portrait of an old woman by Balthasar Denner, from the first half of the 18th century:

Adjacent to the Venetian Hall is the Western Gallery of the Museum, below:

This holds a major collection of Meissen porcelain and other decorative objects, such as the cabinet below, whose front is inlaid with tortoise shell:

The Western Gallery also includes a silver collection that has an interesting and moving origin.  When the Museum of Foreign Art was established, soon after World War I, the new Latvian state was impoverished from the war and asked citizens to donate silver as a way to bolster the state's reserves -- and many did.  In the chaos of rebuilding, accurate records of donations were not kept, and some of the silver that made its way into the collection of the original Foreign Art Museum may well be from these original donations to the state's coffers.

Silver Family Tree

Donated Silver Objects

One floor below the Western Gallery and the Venetian and Makart Halls -- in the space that once held the offices of the Bourse -- is the Museum's Oriental Gallery, which includes decorative objects from China, Japan, India, and Indonesia.  This collection also originates from donations at the founding of the Museum, although it was expanded during the 1970s.  It features some very interesting objects, including these amazing ivory carvings from 19th century India:

The ground floor of the Museum provides a space for rotating exhibits.  There were two very different exhibitions when I visited:  one on Romanticism and 19th century paintings, and one by a contemporary Italian/Romanian artist.  Any museum that can do all of this at once is a pretty interesting place.

Here Is the Church, and Here Is the Steeple....

The Churches of Old Town

This is the classic view of Riga's Old Town from the Daugava River:

All these spires, belfries, and steeples....  Riga seems like a very secular city, and yet there are churches, it seems, around every corner of Old Town --  Riga's Doms, St. Peter's, St. James's (also known as St. Jacob's), Our Lady of Sorrows, St. Saviour's. And they represent different denominations -- Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Anglican.  In some cases, the same church even changed denominations during the years -- going from Catholic to Lutheran, or Catholic to Russian Orthodox, and then back to Catholic.  And during Soviet times some of the churches took on other roles -- in the case of St. Saviour's, the Anglican Church, becoming a student club.

In the first few months of walking around Old Town -- and getting lost in the winding streets -- I had trouble finding and recognizing the different churches, so I decided to figure out once and for all which spire belongs to which church and what is unique about each.

Riga's Doms Church

Riga's Doms is the city's Lutheran Cathedral, having become Protestant after the Reformation.  (Doms comes from an archaic form of the German word for Cathedral.)  It is possibly the easiest to find of the churches in Old Town, since it sits in the largest open space in Old Town, the Doma Laukums (Cathedral Square) and, as I discovered while lost, most of the wider streets lead there.  This is the view of the tower, the steeple, and the spire of the Cathedral from the very interesting cloister attached to the church.

And here is the view from the Square:

And here is another view, from the tower of St. Peter's Church:

The original church was built in the 13th century, but its shape kept changing in the intervening centuries as a result of expansions, damage from fire, and structural improvements.  The appearance of the tower changed also.  It is now described as baroque, and dates to the 18th century.

The major attraction of the Cathedral is its organ, which is one of the largest and most famous in the world.  The original organ was installed in the 17th century and at the time was the largest musical instrument in existence.  The current organ dates from 1884 and is still used for concerts.

Although most of the Cathedral's stained glass windows were destroyed in World War II, some remain and tell a little bit of the history of Riga.  Here is Walter von Plettenberg, Master of the Livonian Order, declaring freedom of religion in Riga in 1525, thus allowing citizens to profess the Lutheran faith:

The pulpit of the church is also very interesting and dates from 1641, with some additions and renovations in the 19th century:

And I loved this door, tucked away to the right of the altar:

Another interesting feature of the Cathedral is the cloister, which dates to the original days of the church, when monks lived in a then-adjacent monastery.

It now houses all sorts of interesting archeological finds, not just from the Cathedral grounds but from elsewhere in the city, including, strangely, the stone used by the town's executioner for his... ugh... work:

St. Peter's Church

The tallest steeple in Old Town Riga belongs to another Lutheran church, that of St. Peter.  This is really distinctive because of a three-tiered belfry:

From the side, St. Peter's looks a little like the Doms Church:

But the facade, with its three arched doors, sets it apart:  

St. Peter's is one of the oldest churches in the Baltic.  A wooden church was built here in 1209, but the current church was started in 1406 and expanded during the 16th century.  By 1690, St. Peter's had the tallest steeple in Europe.  When it burned down in the 18th century after a lightening strike, Tsar Peter the Great, who was visiting Riga, ordered it rebuilt.  It survived until World War II, when it, together with much of the church, was destroyed by mortar fire.  A series of photographs inside the church document the destruction that took place in 1941.  They are dramatic -- and really convey the horror people must have felt in seeing this historic building burn down.

The current steeple dates to 1973, when a 10-year reconstruction project was completed.  It is now possible to ride an elevator to the top for some amazing views of the city -- including all the other (lower) steeples!

St. James's Cathedral, St. Mary Magdalene, Our Lady of Sorrows

St. James's is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Riga, and is also known as St. Jacob's in guidebooks, since in Latvian the two names translate the same.  It has a distinctive green steeple that juts out of a red brick tower:

And here it is in the distance, seen from the top of St. Peter's, together with Riga's Doms:

This church seems to have changed hands more than any other.  It started out in 1225 as a Catholic church, but became Lutheran after the Reformation.  During the Counter-Reformation it became Catholic again, and was run by the Jesuit order -- only to return to the Protestants in the first half of the 17th century, during the Swedish occupation of Riga.  Finally, in 1923 a referendum handed it back to the Catholic Church.

Clustered around St. James's are two additional Catholic churches, St. Mary Magdalene, whose steeple is just in front of St. James's in the photo below:

 and Our Lady of Sorrows Church, just down the street from the Riga Castle (and Presidential Palace):

Of the three, my favorite is St. Mary Magdalene.  Small and beautifully decorated -- with a colorful  design on the ceiling -- it was built in the 13th century for Cistercian nuns cloistered nearby.  It also changed hands a number of times, and became a Russian Orthodox church in the early 1700s until 1923, when it reverted to the Catholic Church.  Maybe the Russian Orthodox influence is responsible for the rounded base of the steeple, as well as the side turret, and the door overhang below:

 

St. Saviour's Church

The last in my tour of churches is the Anglican St. Saviour's church, built in 1859 for the British traders who lived in Riga and the sailors who would visit the port.  It sits right at the edge of Old Town, facing the Daugava -- a convenient location for those coming from the port.

During the Soviet period St. Saviour housed the student club of the nearby Riga Polytechnic Institute and dances were held here.  Some of the renovations date to this period, including this stained glass window, whose modern design replaces the original destroyed during the war: