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:

The Palace in Winter

Rundale

Rundale, a little over an hour drive from Riga, is a beautifully restored Baroque palace once owned by the Dukes of Courland and designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the architect of many of St. Petersburg's most famous palaces, including the Winter Palace, Peterhof, and Smolny Convent.  It is bea-u-ti-ful. We saw it in winter, when the grounds around it (which have also been restored) were completely buried in snow and impossible to appreciate, but the white landscape made the yellow of the main building and the almost Pompeian red of the stables stand out even more.

 Rundale Side Facade

Stables facing the main entrance

Approaching the main gate

The Palace has had a very difficult history.  Built over a period of 30 years, starting in 1736 and ending in 1768, with a hiatus of 24 years from 1740 to 1764, it was damaged during World War I -- when it was occupied by the German army -- and the war for Latvian Independence in 1919.  In the years after World War II,  it was used for grain storage and as a gym for local schools -- and judging from photographs from the period it was in very poor shape.  Renovations began during the Soviet period, in 1972; and after Latvia regained independence in 1991 another major effort was begun.  The results are amazing.  A number of important rooms have been restored to look as they would have in the 18th century -- ceiling frescoes have been repaired to look as if nothing had every happened to them; floors have been laid where the original parquet had worn away; and ceramic stoves have been reconstructed to match the few remaining originals.

And the restoration continues.  Even while we were there, a man worked with a tiny paintbrush on the stucco roses decorating the walls of one of the State Rooms.

The State Rooms are impressive, but my favorite were the private rooms of the Duke and Duchess, including the bathrooms with ceramic washbasins and chamber pots!   Most of the art displayed in the rooms is reproduction -- the originals are long gone; some, including a Rembrandt, to museums in other parts of Europe.

Fantastic!  Love it!  Who Lived Here???

The Palace clearly had belonged to very wealthy and powerful people, so I was curious about these Dukes of Courland.  It turns out they have a very long history in the area and go back to the Livonian Order, a branch of the Teutonic Knights, who conducted crusades in this part of the world in the 13th century.  Livonia was an area roughly covering northern Latvia and Southern Estonia that was disputed in the Livonian Wars of the 16th century -- wars that involved everyone in the region: Russians, Swedes, Danish-Norwegians, Polish-Lithuanians, and of course, Livonians.  The wars did not go well for the Livonians, and parts of the old Livonian Confederation were given to a Baltic German nobleman who had been the last Master of the Order of Livonia, Gotthard Kettler.  So he became the first Duke of Courland and Semigallia -- an area stretching from the Daugava river to the Baltic Sea.

His descendants built the Duchy into a prosperous state, with a metal working industry, important ports at Ventspils and Liepaja, and trading relationships with the major powers of the time, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal.  The Duchy even had colonies in Africa and the West Indies -- turns out Tobago was Courlandish!!  (Couronian?)  Interesting, no?

But even these Dukes didn't build Rundale.  They owned the nearby Jelgava Palace -- so who built Rundale????? It turns out it was a very interesting character, who took over the title of Duke of Courland not by being born into it, but because of his friendships in high places -- one Ernst Johann Biron.  Biron was the son of a groom of the then-Duke of Courland, and he was quite the operator.  Through his sister, who was the favorite of a powerful minister in the Russian court, he ingratiated himself to Anna Ioannovna, a niece of Peter the Great.  By that time, Anna had married the next Duke of Courland -- who promptly died, making her the Duchess of Courland!  What timing....

And then another stroke of luck!  The young Czar -- a second cousin -- died, and Anna became ruler of Russia. She must have really liked Biron, and maybe he was also very clever at managing affairs of state, because she appointed him de facto administrator.  He turned out to be as effective at administration as at managing his enemies, who were dispatched unceremoniously, and gruesomely --(beheadings! the rack! Siberia!)

While administering Russia, and not coincidentally, Biron became richer and richer, and when the Kettler line of the Dukes of Courland became extinct, he was appointed the new ruler of Courland.  So, in 1736, he decided to give himself a summer palace and construction of Rundale began.

Unfortunately for Biron, Anna died a few years later and he fell out of favor, was briefly exiled to Siberia, and then lay low for the next 20 years, until another friendly Russian regent emerged.  He was then able to return to Courland -- and Rundale -- as Duke until he died.  (And this explains the lag time in building the Palace.)

Rundale did not stay in Biron's family.  When Catherine the Great took over Russia, she awarded Rundale to one of her favorites, and the Palace passed into the hands of Russian nobility until World War I.

What about that Biron, eh?