On Valdemārpils

The story of a small town in Latvia with a big name. It was renamed after a legendary Latvian ideologue who used to teach there, Krišjānis Valdemārs. It has an award-winning 500-year-old linden tree, a crumbling Baltic German manor house, and a lovely lake. Join me as we visit Valdemārpils.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

On Valdemārpils

It’s all in a name

Some Latvian place names give everything away at once. Ventspils is a port. Jūrmala is a seaside resort. Sigulda has castles and cliffs.  

And then there’s Valdemārpils: a small inland town named after a man who spent his life convincing Latvians that their future lay exactly at sea.

I’m standing here on the edge of Sasmaka Lake, with a slightly creaky pier, reeds, and a line of roofs in the distance.

In this episode, I’ve come to Valdemārpils, a town that manages to pack a lot into a very small space. It has a national-awakening ideologue, a sacred tree that has outlasted empires, a crumbling manor that looks midway between a fairy tale and a horror film, and a lake that has witnessed more history, fishing, gossip, and probably teenage summer romance than any guidebook will tell you.

We’ll wander through four chapters: first, how this little town came to be; then the story of Krišjānis Valdemārs, after whom it is named; then the legendary linden tree and the decaying Sasmaka Manor beside it; and finally, what you can actually see and do here – if you ever decide to leave the Riga–Ventspils highway and take the turning after Talsi that most people ignore.

So, let’s start with the town itself: long before it was Valdemārpils, and long before anyone here dreamed of national awakenings or maritime schools.

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A small town with a long memory

Today, Valdemārpils feels like one of those small Latvian towns where life moves at a pace much slower than in the capital, Rīga. There’s a main street, a church spire pointing politely at the sky, a couple of small supermarkets, people walking, and that slightly sleepy feeling you get in places where people still know who your grandparents were.

But beneath that quiet surface lies a layered history.

The old name of this place was Sasmaka, which you’ll still see on the lake and on the nearby ruined manor. Sasmaka was part of Courland, the western region of Latvia that’s been tugged back and forth between German, Polish, Swedish and Russian powers over the centuries. It was a manor‑centred settlement, organised around the estate and the church rather than any grand urban plan. In the 19th century, Sasmaka had as many inhabitants as Talsi, and 84% were Jews. This puts the population in the low thousands. A town.

Like so many places in Latvia, the story here is: first, indigenous Baltic tribes and their sacred sites; then, the medieval crusading orders and German nobility; then, serfdom, Lutheranism, and slow, quiet changes; and finally, the 19th‑century Latvian national awakening that begins to reshape how locals think about language, education and identity.

You can feel some of that history in the layout. The town stretches along the road, with the church as an anchor point, and, off to one side, the manor and its park slip gently into decay by the lake. If you walk from the centre towards the water, you’re walking through centuries: merchants and peasants; students and teachers; Soviet planners and post‑independence entrepreneurs, all layered in the same streets.

In the 19th century, as nationalism and ideas of self‑determination began to circulate in the Baltic provinces, Sasmaka wasn’t just an anonymous village. It became one of the places directly touched by a man who thought Latvians should stop being peasants tied to land they didn’t own and instead look outward to the sea.

That man was Krišjānis Valdemārs. He worked here, and later the town would take his name. But before we get to his story, it’s worth remembering that without the backdrop of a place like Sasmaka – with its manor, lake, and Lutheran parish life – his ideas might never have taken root in quite the same way.

Officially, this was Sasmaka until 1926, when the young Republic of Latvia looked at its map and quietly began editing the story told by place‑names. In some cases, that meant scrubbing out obviously German forms; in Sasmaka’s case, it meant a more personal gesture. The government took this inland town and deliberately renamed it Valdemārpils – Valdemārs’ town – in honour of the ideologue of the national awakening who had once trudged these streets as a young teacher. It wasn’t a Soviet‑style renaming after a distant revolutionary. It was an independent Latvia choosing to anchor a small place to one of its own thinkers.

When the Soviets later arrived and began renaming maps across the region, they left this particular name untouched. A town named after a man who fought Baltic German feudal power and championed education and economic progress? That was a story they could live with, even if they quietly edited out the parts where he believed Latvians should shape their own destiny.

Today, when you stand by the lake and look back towards the houses, you’re seeing a modest echo of what was once a hierarchical world: the manor at the top, the church, the school, and the wooden houses of everyone else. The population is now about 1,150 residents. And somewhere in that mix, Valdemārs appears as a young teacher, with a head full of plans for how Latvians could, quite literally, change their horizons.

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Krišjānis Valdemārs: the man behind the name

If you travel around Latvia, you’ll bump into the name Krišjānis Valdemārs quite a lot. There’s a street named after him in Rīga, there are monuments, and in coastal towns you’ll often find references to him as the ‘father of Latvian seafaring’.

But here in Valdemārpils, in what was once Sasmaka, the connection is more intimate. This is where he actually worked as a young man, long before anyone thought of putting his name on signposts.

When you read the standard biography of Krišjānis Valdemārs, it’s a story that ranges from rural Courland to Tartu lecture halls, from St Petersburg editorial offices to the docks of Ainaži. But tucked into the early chapters is a quieter line: ‘He worked as a teacher in Sasmaka.’

He was born just up the road, at Vecjunkuri in Ārlava parish, in 1825. By his teens and early twenties – roughly 1835 to 1845 – he was here in Sasmaka, working as a private teacher, saving every kopek he could to study further. There’s no grand record of him returning here as a famous ideologist to give speeches. Once he left, his battles were fought in Tartu lecture halls, in St Petersburg newspapers, and later along the Baltic coast, where he pushed Latvians onto ships and into maritime schools. He was talented, stubborn, and very aware that Latvians were essentially stuck in a social structure that left them with the land, but not the power.

But the foundations of that fight were laid here: in a village schoolroom, in the shadow of a manor he did not own, surrounded by a population whose language and labour he believed deserved more than eternal servitude.

Later, as editor of Pēterburgas Avīzes, he would publish what must have been percolating during those early Sasmaka years: furious critiques of Baltic German feudal power, calls for education, and pleas for Latvians to lift their eyes from the furrowed field to the much wider horizon of trade, learning and the sea.

Valdemārs was born in 1825 into a peasant family, not someone destined, on paper, to become an ideologist of national awakening or a champion of maritime education. He trained, he studied, and he ended up here as a teacher, at a time when education was one of the few ways to quietly start changing a society from the inside. Imagine him walking these same streets, passing the manor, heading to the school, possibly looking out at the lake and thinking about the much larger body of water to the west that many of his pupils had never seen.

Valdemārs became convinced that the way out of poverty and dependency for Latvians was through seafaring and trade. Why should only Germans and others build ships, captain them, and control commerce? Why not Latvians?

Later in his life, he would be involved in founding maritime schools, most famously in Ainaži on Latvia’s northern coast, institutions that trained Latvian captains and navigators and symbolically shifted Latvians from being merely farm labourers to participants in global trade. But that vision, that sense that Latvians belonged on the sea, had to start somewhere. And one of those starting points was here, in Sasmaka, in the classroom where he taught.

If you come here today, you will find a granite monument to Valdemārs – the kind of thing that, in many towns, can feel slightly generic. But in Valdemārpils, it’s worth pausing for a moment to imagine him not as a bust carved from stone, but as a slightly overworked teacher trying to persuade his students that the world was far larger than the landlord’s fields.

When the town was renamed Valdemārpils in 1926, it wasn’t merely branding or a gesture to a famous son. It was a statement: this place, once defined by a manor and its lords, is now defined by a Latvian intellectual who challenged the old order. The place has reclaimed its former village teacher as one of the architects of the Latvian idea.

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The linden of sacrifice and the decaying manor

From the centre of town, it’s a short walk to what, for me, is the most striking part of Valdemārpils: the park around Sasmaka Manor and the legendary linden tree, which now competes not only for local attention but also for titles such as ‘European Tree of the Year’.

Let’s start with the tree.

In Latvian, it’s called Elku liepa – the linden of sacrifice. The name hints at its much older significance. Long before Christianity, Baltic tribes regarded certain trees as sacred, places for offerings, where spirits or gods were thought to live, and where you didn’t just chop wood; you approached carefully, with respect.

For generations, the linden in Valdemārpils has been the thickest linden tree in the Baltics. Legends say it has served as an ancient cult tree for centuries: its estimated age is 400-500 years. The linden’s mighty branches bend to the ground and rise to the sky, creating a sanctuary filled with small sculptures and knick-knacks. Cracks in the tree’s wood appear like mythical spirits from ancient fairy tales.

Standing beneath the crown of the linden here, you get a sense of time that’s so different from our own. Human generations have come and gone. Empires have risen and fallen. Regimes have changed. The tree has simply continued to grow, scar, heal, and persist.

Over time, people ascribed different meanings to it. For some, it became a symbol of resilience, a living witness to wars, deportations, and the smaller tragedies of local life. It has seen weddings and funerals, lovers’ quarrels, gossip on benches, perhaps a few teenagers sneaking cigarettes on summer evenings.

In recent years, the linden has been nominated in wider competitions – a kind of Eurovision for trees – drawing attention far beyond the Talsi district. It came 4th in the European Tree of the Year Awards 2026. And there is something wonderfully subversive about that: a quiet Latvian town with a tree that ends up 4th on European voting lists. It’s as if the village elder has been dragged onto a continental stage and everyone suddenly realises how interesting their stories are.

If you are here in person, I’d recommend two things. First, stand under it in complete silence for a minute. Listen to the leaves, the birds, and the distant sounds of the town. And second, think about how many people, over how many centuries, have stood in more or less the same spot, with completely different thoughts on their minds, yet the same living being above their heads.

Now, just a few steps away, there’s another witness to time. But this one is not thriving. It’s Sasmaka Manor.

Sasmaka Manor doesn’t just look like a Baltic German estate; it was one, firmly embedded in the network of families whose surnames read like a who’s who of imperial landholding. Here you find names like Manteuffel‑Szoege in the 17th century, then Hohenastenberg‑Wigandt and von Sass in the 18th – all ethnic Germans administering Latvian land from a comfortable distance above the people who worked it.

The estate itself is older, but the current manor house dates from 1886, the late imperial period, when the Baltic German aristocracy was still very much in charge, even as nationalist ideas, socialist agitation and peasant anger were gathering at their front doors.

In the early 20th century, those doors were literally under fire as the 1905 revolution saw manors across Latvia attacked and burned. After the First World War and the creation of an independent Latvian state, land reforms began to chip away at the old order. The final chapter came with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent repatriation of Baltic Germans to the Reich in 1939 and 1940. Most of the families who had owned estates like Sasmaka didn’t so much ‘move’ as get swept out by geopolitics.

Under Soviet rule, buildings like this were stripped of their aristocratic pretensions and repurposed as community buildings: often schools, local institutions, meeting spaces, and offices. The ballroom becomes a classroom. The salon becomes an accountant’s office. Portraits of nobles are replaced by portraits of Lenin.

When the Soviet system collapsed, and Latvia regained independence, these buildings suddenly became very expensive to heat, repair and repurpose. Some find new lives as hotels, museums or private homes. Sasmaka Manor hasn’t, at least not yet. It stands here in a kind of legal and economic limbo: described simply as a manor in a park near Lake Sasmaka, visibly abandoned, with its current ownership not loudly advertised.

The old families are gone. The Soviet state that repurposed their property is gone. What remains is the shell: beautiful, decaying, and waiting for someone with a lot of money and a vision, in a town with other, more immediate priorities. Oh, a stork couple has built a wonderfully huge nest on the manor roof. Delusions of grandeur?

While the linden is still alive and gathering honours, the manor is quietly collapsing. If you’re into urban exploration, it’s the kind of place that sets your imagination racing. You look at the facade and its grand terrace overlooking the lake, and see layers: the wealth that built it, the ideology that repurposed it, and the neglect that now gnaws at it.

The manor is decaying; the tree is still growing. It’s hard to think of a more concise visual metaphor for Latvian history than this: a ruined manor and a sacred tree sharing the same park.

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What to see and do: town and lake

At this point, you might reasonably ask: aside from trees, ruins, and the ghost of a visionary schoolteacher, what is there to do in Valdemārpils?

To be clear: this is not a tourist destination like Jūrmala, even if it has a Tourist Information Office. There are no restaurants, not even queues for ice cream in different flavours, and no scooters zipping past in every direction. And that’s precisely the point.

Valdemārpils is a place for slow exploration.

Start in the town centre, where the roundabout is. There is a car park there. Look at the Lutheran church, which has been the spiritual and social anchor of the area for generations. Step inside if it’s open. Latvian rural churches are rarely flashy, but they carry their own emotional weight: simple wooden pews, worn floors, hymn boards, maybe a modest organ. Imagine the sermons delivered here under different regimes, in different languages, to congregations navigating their own storms.

By the side of the Lutheran church stands the granite memorial to Krišjānis Valdemārs. It is simple yet elegant.

Wander northwards from the roundabout along the main street, appropriately called Lielā iela – main street. Walk past the old wooden houses. So beautiful and clearly from a different age. You will pass a small supermarket where you can pick up a coffee or something sweet or savoury.

Turn right down Raiņa iela. As you go down the hill, turn left at the wooden sign to Elku liepa. The linden of sacrifice and the manor house are a short walk or drive along a narrow gravel road. There is parking beside the tree. 

Return to that roundabout, then make your way down towards Sasmaka Lake along Ezera iela – Lake Street. Turn left just after the church and monument.

There is a car park by the lake, a sandy beach, a swimming area and changing cubicles, plus a children's playground and fitness machines for adults. There is a slightly decaying pier and some pontoons for boats. A cabin hires boats and similar equipment in summer. The lake is not enormous, but it has that classic Latvian mixture of beauty and practicality. It is a rather nice place in summer to spread out a blanket and have a picnic, or, Latvian style, a barbecue.

Walk along the shore. Look back at the town from different angles. The skyline is simple – no skyscrapers, just roofs and trees – yet it reminds you how close everything is: school, church, manor, park, lake. The whole life of the town fits comfortably into a stroll.

If you have time and transport, you can also use Valdemārpils as a base for exploring nearby towns and the countryside in Kurzeme, such as the castle town of Dundaga or the fishing village of Roja. But even if you only stay within the town limits, there are stories.

You will come across traces or memorials connected to the Jewish community that once lived here, as in so many Latvian towns, before the Holocaust. Those traces are often subtle: the old synagogue on Ezera iela, or simply the absence of what used to be a vibrant part of the town’s fabric. This is a sad story repeated throughout Latvia. When Valdemārs taught at the school, most of his pupils were Jewish, as about 80% of the town’s population at that time was Jewish. After the First World War, this proportion fell to 15%, but they nevertheless lived in harmony with Latvian locals, with Jewish and Latvian children studying side by side. Antisemitic ideas first arrived in Valdemārpils in the mid-1930s under the authoritarian Ulmanis regime. Jewish people suffered more during the 1940 Soviet occupation, as they had more to steal. Most remaining Jews living in Valdemārpils were slaughtered within the first weeks of the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1941. In July 1941, 150 Jews lived there. In August, none. Of all the seized townhouses, more than half had belonged to Jews. Communism did not bring any good news to the Jewish population in Valdemārpils either.

And then there are the contemporary stories of people who choose to stay or return, even as so many left small towns for Rīga or further afield to the UK, Ireland, or Germany. If you get the chance to talk to locals, ask them what they think makes Valdemārpils special. You may hear about the tree, the lake, the quiet, the community, or simply the fact that ‘it’s home’.

From a tourism‑brochure perspective, the list of attractions might seem short: a historic centre, the lake, the ruined manor and park, the linden, a synagogue and a church.  

But from a storytelling point of view, everything feels dense. Each of those sites connects to broader themes: colonial history, national awakening, ecological persistence, rural depopulation, and the question of how small places survive in a world that keeps centralising everything.

So, what to do in Valdemārpils?  

Walk slowly. Look closely. Maybe talk to local people. Swim in the lake if it’s warm enough. Let the town tell you its stories.

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Under the linden

So that’s Valdemārpils: a small town with a big name and quietly remarkable neighbours: a sacred linden tree and a crumbling manor.

In one park, in one town, you can stand between three very different visions of Latvia: first, the pre‑Christian world of sacred places in nature; second, the Baltic German world of estates and hierarchy; and third, the Latvian national world shaped by people like Krišjānis Valdemārs, who refused to accept that Latvians should remain forever in the role assigned to them.

If you ever find yourself driving through Kurzeme with time to spare, consider turning off the main road, driving through Talsi, and giving Valdemārpils a few hours of your time. Visit the linden, look at the manor, walk by the lake, and think about how many times this landscape has been rearranged, yet it still feels intimately, recognisably Latvian.

Oh, if you are hungry, I can highly recommend the restaurant Pannas in Talsi. Great food with big portions, beware! And the best non-alcoholic cocktails I have tried in Latvia. As a responsible driver, I do not drink alcohol when driving. There are no restaurants or cafes in Valdemārpils.

For me, as an Englishman in Latvia, places like Valdemārpils teach me about the country I live in. Not just the capital, not just the resort towns, but the small settlements where the great historical currents left distinct marks, and where life continues at a human scale.

Until next time. From the shore of Sasmaka Lake, beneath the watchful branches of the linden: ātā.

[Image of the sacred linden tree and Sasmaka manor house by An Englishman in Latvia. Music Tomomi Kato from Pixabay]