Day 9 - Riga

Our day here in Riga was split into two. The morning was spent doing an open bus tour and the afternoon walking the streets of Riga's Old Town.

We walked the short distance to the bus stop and took these photos of the 'Girls on Tour' and then of the ' Old Fogeys!'

 

The bus stop was next to the Opera House with its manicured flower gardens.

We rode through the streets lined with the famous Riga Art Nouveau buildings, many designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, the son of the famous film maker Sergei Eisenstein, who produced the film Battleship Potemkin. Trying to take photos from the moving bus was not easy, as the photo below will show, so we will come back here and look at the buildings again.

We were amazed to see a virtually identical building to the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. We were told there were seven buildings of this design that were built by a Soviet architect, with the remaining five in Russia. This one housed the Academy of Sciences and was built in the early 1950's.

After about an hour, we stopped at the Town Square where this gaunt-looking statue, so reminiscent of Communist design, commemorated the Fallen from 1915-20.

It stood next to the Museum of Occupation. We spent half an hour in the museum which details the dreadful times from 1940 to 1991 when the Latvians were under both Russian and Nazi occupation. In 1940 the Russians occupied Latvia as their part of the secret German-Russian Pact of 1939, whilst Germany invaded Poland. Hundreds of thousands of Latvians were either deported by Stalin to Siberia, or murdered. Then the Germans invaded and, under the Nazis, the Latvian Jews were murdered by death squads or sent to the death camps.

We returned to the bus and continued the tour seeing, in the distance, the TV tower that became famous in 1991 as a symbol of Latvian resistance to the Soviets. It was surrounded by Soviet troops in an effort to stop the broadcasts from the tower.

We finished the tour and had a snack lunch in one of the small squares close to the hotel. The others then continued their sightseeing individually while we explored on foot. Here is a selection of the places we visited:-

Close to the Opera House is the Freedom Monument. It was built in 1935 and paid for by public donations. Stalin wanted to pull it down but never managed to do so. It is now one of the most revered places in Latvia.

 

 

 Riga's Lutheran Cathedral which has wonderful stained glass windows.

 

The cathedral was closed for thirty years during Soviet rule and only opened again in 1989.

Next, we walked to the President's Residence, which is part of Riga Castle dating back to the 14th century.

Finally, we walked to the Town Square to see the House of the Blackheads. They were a society of traders founded in the 14th century. The building was totally renovated in 1999.

We returned to the hotel and met up with Bob & Thelma who had taken one of the small canal boats and gone through the canals and along the Daugava River where the large cruise liners dock.

In the evening, we had a meal at one of the local Latvian restaurants. Unfortunately, the service was dreadfully slow and when the meal was over I made the BIG mistake of querying the bill, as I couldn't understand why a 10% tax charge appeared to be 15%. After much argument, the staff discovered that they had added up the bill incorrectly and the total was in fact about £90 more!!!! In future I'll keep my big mouth well and truly shut!

Tomorrow, we leave Latvia for Estonia, the last of the Baltic States we will be visiting. The tour continues!