Art Nouveau & Old Town

You are standing in front of the Freedom Monument, Riga's most powerful symbol, and it is worth spending a moment here before you take a single step. The column rises forty-two metres above you, a slender shaft of travertine topped by a copper figure of a woman holding three gold stars aloft — one for each of the three historic regions of Latvia: Vidzeme, Latgale, and Kurzeme. She has been standing here since nineteen thirty-five, and the fact that she is still standing at all is, in itself, a story worth knowing.

Riga was founded in twelve oh one by Bishop Albert of Riga, a German cleric who arrived with Teutonic crusading knights and the intention of Christianising the Baltic peoples by whatever means necessary. The city he built on the banks of the River Daugava became one of the most important trading ports on the eastern Baltic coast. By twelve eighty-two, Riga had joined the Hanseatic League, the great network of northern European merchant cities that stretched from Bruges to Novgorod, and the city grew wealthy on the trade in furs, amber, flax, and grain moving between the Russian interior and western Europe.

Walk north along Elizabetes Street and then turn onto Alberta Street, and within moments you will understand why Riga is called the Art Nouveau capital of the world. About forty percent of all buildings in Riga were constructed in the Art Nouveau style — a higher proportion than anywhere else on earth — and Alberta Street contains some of the most extravagant examples of that style ever built. The facades here are not restrained. They are not tasteful. They are delirious.

The buildings you are looking at on the left side of the street — numbers two, four, six, eight, and thirteen — were designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, a Russian imperial civil engineer who worked in Riga between nineteen oh one and nineteen oh six. Eisenstein was not, by most accounts, a modest man. His buildings are covered in screaming faces, writhing mythological figures, enormous female masks with wild hair, garlands of flowers twisted around columns, sphinxes, serpents, owls, and lions. Every surface is busy. Every surface is doing something. The facades lunge toward you with an energy that feels almost aggressive after the restraint of most European streetscapes.

Walk back south to Elizabetes Street and you find a different register of Art Nouveau — still exuberant, but slightly more controlled than the theatrical excess of Alberta Street. Elizabetes Street was one of the main boulevards of the new city built outside the old medieval walls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its buildings represent the full range of the Latvian Art Nouveau movement at its peak.

The most important thing to understand about Riga's Art Nouveau is that it was not simply imported from Vienna or Paris. Latvian architects — particularly those who had studied at the Riga Polytechnic Institute and then at the major European academies — returned home and created something distinctive. The movement here developed two main streams. The first was the Eclectic or Perpendicular Art Nouveau you saw on Alberta Street: ornamental, figural, heavily decorated, inspired by Jugendstil but pushed toward the theatrical. The second, which you see more of here, is sometimes called Romantic National Romanticism — buildings that used folk motifs, Baltic mythology, and simplified geometric forms to create something that felt specifically Latvian rather than generically European.

Leave the boulevards and walk south into the old medieval core. The streets narrow, the buildings lean slightly toward one another, and the scale drops suddenly from imperial to intimate. You are looking for a row of three attached houses on Maza Pils Street, and when you find them, you are looking at the oldest surviving stone residential buildings in the Baltic states.

The Three Brothers — Tris brali in Latvian — are a set of three houses built at different times between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, pressed together in a narrow row that was once typical of Riga's medieval merchant quarter. The oldest, number seventeen, the white house, dates to the late fifteenth century. Its facade is plain and functional, with a wide storage door at ground level designed to let merchants roll barrels and bales directly from the street. The middle house, number nineteen, was built in the early seventeenth century in the Dutch Mannerist style, its stepped gable and decorative scrollwork reflecting the influence of Baltic German merchant culture at its most prosperous. The youngest, number twenty-one, dates to the mid-seventeenth century and is the most elaborate of the three.

A short walk south through the old city brings you to the facade of St Peter's Church, the defining landmark of Riga's skyline and one of the most significant Gothic brick churches in northern Europe. The church tower rises above the city's rooftops, its slender spire a landmark visible from far out on the River Daugava. This has been a landmark of Riga for over eight hundred years, though the tower you are looking at now has been rebuilt more than once — most recently in nineteen seventy-three, after a German artillery shell set the original wooden spire ablaze in nineteen forty-one during the Second World War.

The church was first mentioned in written records in twelve twenty-one, making it roughly as old as the city itself. For most of its history it was not a cathedral or an episcopal church — it was a parish church for the merchants and craftsmen of the lower town, which meant it was funded and maintained by the guilds and the civic community rather than by the church hierarchy. This gave it an unusual character: it is a church that belongs to the city in a direct, practical sense, and its history reflects the city's history rather than the church's.

Walk west toward the river and you will reach Town Hall Square, dominated by one of the most extraordinary buildings in the Baltic: the House of the Blackheads. The facade is a riot of Gothic and Dutch Renaissance ornament — stepped gables, terra-cotta friezes, gilded details, heraldic shields, and a clock flanked by sculpted figures — and it stands in almost theatrical contrast to the open cobbled square in front of it. It looks like something built to be admired, because it was.

The Brotherhood of the Blackheads was an association of unmarried foreign merchants who traded in Riga from the fourteenth century onward. The brotherhood took its name from its patron saint, Saint Maurice, an early Christian martyr of African origin whose face appeared on their seal. Membership was restricted to merchants who were not yet masters of their guild — young men, in other words, building their fortunes and their reputations in this busy Hanseatic port. The Blackheads were known for their wealth, their parties, and their elaborate ceremonies, and the building they constructed as their guildhall reflected all three.

You are standing in Town Hall Square — Ratslaukums — the civic heart of Riga for eight hundred years, and the paving stones beneath your feet have been walked by Hanseatic merchants, Swedish governors, Russian tsars, Nazi officers, Soviet apparatchiks, and now, the tourists and residents of an independent Latvia. The square has changed hands more times than most cities change governments, and yet it keeps functioning as a public square, which is perhaps the most stubborn thing about it.

The square was the site of the city's medieval market, the place where news was proclaimed, where courts held public sessions, and where punishments were carried out. The stocks and the scaffold stood here. So did the merchants' weighing stations, where goods were officially measured and taxed before entering the city's trade. The square was a machine for civic life, handling everything from commerce to justice to ritual.

Walk northwest from the square through a short alley and you will arrive at Dome Square, opening up around Riga's cathedral like a drawn breath. The Dome Cathedral — Rigas Doms in Latvian — is the largest medieval church in the Baltic states, and it sits in its square with the comfortable authority of a building that has been the most important structure in the city for eight hundred years.

The cathedral was founded in twelve eleven by Bishop Albert, the same man who founded the city itself a decade earlier. Albert was building not just a church but a statement of authority in a recently conquered territory, and the scale he chose — a Romanesque basilica on the largest plot of ground in the city — reflected his intention. Construction continued for centuries, which is why the cathedral is architecturally layered in ways that require some patience to read: Romanesque foundations, Gothic choir, Baroque organ loft, a tower that has been modified so many times its stylistic origin is genuinely ambiguous.

Follow the river path northward from the cathedral along the bank of the Daugava, and within a few minutes you reach Riga Castle, a large whitewashed complex sitting directly on the riverbank. This is the official residence of the President of Latvia and one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the city. It does not look particularly dramatic from the outside — centuries of rebuilding have given it the slightly anonymous appearance of a government building rather than a medieval fortress — but its history is one of the most turbulent of any structure in the Baltic.

The original castle on this site was built in thirteen thirty by the Livonian Order, the military-religious organisation that was the successor to the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic region. The relationship between the Livonian Order and the city of Riga was comprehensively, repeatedly hostile. The city resented the castle as a symbol of the Order's authority over the free merchant republic. In thirteen forty-seven, the citizens of Riga demolished the castle entirely. The Order retaliated by forcing the city to rebuild it. The castle was completed again in thirteen fifty-three, demolished by the citizens again in thirteen sixty, rebuilt again by order of the Teutonic Grand Master. This cycle of resentment and compelled reconstruction went on for more than a century before the city finally made its peace with the fortification it was perpetually tearing down.

The final stop on this walk takes you away from the medieval core and across the river to Pardaugava, the left bank of the Daugava, to a neighbourhood called Kalnciema Quarter. Cross by the Akmens Bridge and walk south along the left bank until you find the cluster of wooden buildings on Kalnciema Street. This requires the longest walk of the day, but it brings you to something that most visitors to Riga never see, and that most Latvians consider one of the city's most important places.

Riga's wooden architecture is not as famous as its Art Nouveau, but it is equally remarkable. In the nineteenth century, the areas outside the old stone city were built almost entirely in timber — long, low wooden buildings with ornate carved window frames, decorative fascias, and small courtyards. These buildings were the homes and workshops of workers, craftspeople, and the Latvian-speaking population who lived outside the German merchant core of the city. They represent a vernacular building tradition that stretched across the Baltic and Scandinavia, adapted here to the particular climate and materials of Latvia.