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: