On Rīga at 825

Rīga is 825 years old. Join me as we join the big party! We also tell the history of Rīga, not as a chronological listing, but through legends, stories and tales.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

On Rīga at 825

On 15 August 2026, I stood on the 11th November Embankment as lasers cut across the Daugava, fountains threw silver light high into the night sky, and tens of thousands of people celebrated their city. Rīga turned 825 years old this week. That's older than the printing press. Older than the Reformation. Far older than all the planes, cars, trams, buses and trains that bring people to this city. Yet it still feels like a city figuring out who it is. Today, I want to take you back through eight centuries, tell you a few of the stranger tales this city tells about itself, and then walk you through what it actually felt like to be there for the big celebration. Let’s have a party!

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The city that keeps reinventing itself

The river Daugava is my witness to the history of a city built by outsiders for outsiders, which eventually became a most Latvian place.

Our story begins with Bishop Albert von Buxhoeveden, a powerful German Catholic, who was appointed Bishop of Livonia by his uncle, the Archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg, on the condition that he conquer present-day Latvia and forcibly convert its pagan indigenous population to Christianity. In 1200, he took 23 ships and 500 crusaders (some accounts suggest 1,500 armed crusaders, although there were no cruise-ship-sized vessels in 1200, so this seems a rather inflated figure!) and set up camp in Ikšķile. Albert realised that Ikšķile, although on the Daugava, was far from the sea and not a good base for invading the surrounding lands. So in 1201 he built a castle nearer the sea, where a stream met the Daugava. This castle was the foundation of Rīga. I note the irony that modern Rīga celebrates its 825th birthday around an act of forced conversion and colonialism, and a "civilising myth" invented later by German chroniclers to justify it. Merchants from Gotland and Lübeck built a trading hub, while Albert set about converting the Livs and offering them protection against neighbouring tribes. He stayed for nearly three decades to build his little empire. When he died in Rīga in 1229, the city was a small walled settlement of a few thousand people.

Fast-forward to the late 13th century, and Rīga is now a Baltic trading post, joining the Hanseatic League in 1282 and becoming the dominant trade hub on the eastern Baltic shore. Walking around the old town of Rīga today, you can imagine the scene at that time. Well-dressed German merchants, exclusive guild halls, ships in the port loaded with grain, timber, wax and furs heading westward, with salt and cloth bound eastward. Noise, activity, commerce and business. A city organised for the enrichment of outsiders, even if they now referred to themselves as Baltic-Germans. At its Hanseatic height, Rīga became a proper Baltic trading city of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people, which, by medieval standards, was a serious place of warehouses, guilds, and ships.

But that peaceful relationship would be tested. Our witness, the Daugava, will tell you why. Every ruler across the region wanted Rīga for the river and the port, yet the city itself retained its trading character no matter who sat on the throne. Rīga changed hands like a card being dealt around a table: the Livonian Order, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden and Rīga's "golden age" as Sweden's largest city, then Peter the Great's Russia after the Great Northern War. Centuries of other people’s empires.

Rīga became one of the Russian Empire's great industrial cities with a 19th-century boom. Railways and factories were built, and architects constructed the grand art nouveau buildings that frame the city. Do listen to my episode on Rīga’s art nouveau architecture. In barely half a century, this industrialisation turned Rīga from a city of around 100,000 inhabitants into one of the Russian Empire’s great industrial cities with about 500,000 people on the eve of the First World War. But beneath the Baltic-German-run businesses, a Latvian national movement was stirring, in which teachers, poets, and journalists began to dream of a Latvian Rīga, not just a Rīga in Latvia.

That became a reality in 1918. The declaration of Latvian independence on 18 November 1918 turned Rīga from a provincial trading post into a national capital for the first time in its 700-year history. However, that independence came after war, occupation and mass evacuation. The city was heavily depleted, with probably only around 200,000 inhabitants.

The Second World War put a big dent in those independence ambitions. Soviet occupation, Nazi occupation, Soviet occupation again. Rīga survived being fought over twice in one war, losing much of its old architecture, including the House of the Blackheads, destroyed in 1941 and finally reduced to rubble by Soviet authorities in 1948, and its historic Jewish community in the Holocaust. Rīga changed during the Soviet occupation. Street names were altered to Soviet ones, and monuments to prominent communists and to Russian battles were erected. The city grew to accommodate the apartment blocks quickly constructed on the outskirts to house the mass migration of factory workers from Russia. I live close to one such area, Imanta, which I cheekily call a Russian part of Rīga, as Russian is still the dominant language there. Rīga grew to 915,000 people by 1989, the largest it has ever been. Russian became the official language during the occupation, with Russian migrants assuming a privileged position in society. The Soviet occupation resulted in about fifty years of subjugation for Latvians. 

Pride was eventually rebuilt, brick by brick. With the Singing Revolution, Latvians restored independence in 1991. Then something remarkable happened in the 1990s, when ordinary Latvians donated money to rebuild the House of the Blackheads exactly as it stood before the war, finishing it just in time for Rīga's 800th anniversary in 2001. Let’s leave this history of Rīga with the image of a city that keeps being knocked, and keeps rebuilding itself as an act of civic will. Rīga's population today is around 589,000, far smaller than 35 years ago at the end of the Soviet occupation, but still the largest city in Latvia.

Which brings us, neatly, to what Rīga does best: telling stories about itself. Some of them are true. Some of them are... let's say, enthusiastically embellished. Here are a few of my favourites.

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Tales of the city

My first story is about a cat house and the World’s pettiest lawsuit. Walk around the old town, and you will come across a custard-yellow art nouveau building on Līvu laukums. Now look up, and you will see two black cats arching their backs on the turrets with their tails pointed, quite deliberately, at the Great Guild Hall across the street. It is a story of wounded ego. A wealthy Latvian merchant (some versions of the story name him Blumer) is refused membership of the German-dominated Great Guild, so he commissions cat statues with their backsides aimed squarely at his rejectors. A medieval equivalent of showing the middle finger. The guild is so outraged that it takes him to court. Documents in the lawsuit refer to the cats’ bottoms. Nobody’s entirely sure whether the cats were ever really turned around, or whether the merchant won and kept them defiantly in place. The story endures because it's really about who belonged in Rīga, and who didn't. And Latvians turned this petty legal dispute into their unofficial city mascot as you'll find that cat on nearly every fridge magnet sold in the tourist shops in the Old Town.

The second story concerns the Three Brothers, Rīga’s oldest bit of gossip. Walk down Mazā Pils iela, and you will find three houses squeezed shoulder to shoulder at numbers 17, 19, and 21, each from a different century — Gothic, Dutch Mannerist, and Baroque. Number 17, dating from around 1490, is the oldest surviving stone dwelling house in Rīga. The folk name "Three Brothers" derives from a legend that men from the same family built them one after another. The mask carved into the facade of number 21, believed to ward off evil spirits, is a lovely reminder that even prosperous Hanseatic merchants hedged their bets with a bit of folk magic.

The third story is about the highly contested question of where Christmas traditions began. A plaque on the cobblestones of Rātslaukums marks the spot where, in 1510, the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, a guild of young, unmarried foreign merchants, allegedly erected and decorated the world's first Christmas tree, danced around it, and then burned it as a ritual close to the Christmas festivities. There were no candles or tinsel on the tree, just paper roses, fruit, straw toys, and fire torches for illumination. I do need to give this story an honest twist. Tallinn, just up the coast in Estonia, insists its own 1441 tree came first, and both cities trace the ritual to the same Blackheads brotherhood. So the "world's first Christmas tree" is really a friendly 500-year-old rivalry between two Baltic capitals. Next time someone tells you Christmas was invented in a shopping mall, tell them it started with Rīga merchants burning a tree in the town square.

The last story continues with the Blackheads and is about the house that rose twice. We briefly mentioned the House of the Blackheads in our history of Rīga in Chapter 1. Originally constructed in 1334 and lavishly rebuilt in the Renaissance style by the 17th century, it was home to the same Blackheads brotherhood who invented Christmas trees in our previous story. This time the story is about the building, which was bombed by German forces in 1941, then dynamited by Soviet authorities in 1948 to erase it from the city's memory entirely. Then, newly independent Latvians, many of them not wealthy at all, personally donated money in the 1990s to rebuild it stone-for-stone from old photographs, finishing just in time for Rīga's 800th birthday. Twenty-five years after they rebuilt that house for the city's 800th birthday, I went to watch how Rīga throws itself an 825th one.

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The birthday party

I went with my son to the old town of Rīga to experience a bit of the city’s 825th birthday celebrations. The theme was “Open Riga! Code: 825!” Bus and tram transport in Rīga was free for the weekend. We hopped on a rather empty No. 4 bus and got off near Rātslaukums. The old town was not so empty, and we were greeted by thousands of people. The cafes, restaurants and bars spilling out onto the cobbled streets were thriving. I haven’t seen Rīga so busy for a long time. Formal and informal musicians and street artists were everywhere. 

One young girl, younger than my son, was playing her violin. She had already collected quite a few tips in her open violin case. Notes, not coins - people were feeling good. Kids were performing hip-hop outside McDonald’s. 

A silent statue, or whatever you call these painted street artists who stand motionless, had somehow got caught up in the day’s emotion and was marching around high-fiving kids.

We went to the Freedom Monument to see the silver, bullet-shaped Auto Union Type C car, powered by a 6-litre, 520-horsepower V16 engine and capable of a top speed of 340 km/h. It is a remarkable piece of 1930s automotive engineering, designed by Ferdinand Porsche, and it won many races. I expect this car came from Germany in a padded container. However, the Riga Motor Museum has a Type C/D that Viktor Kulbergs saved from being cut up for scrap metal during the occupation, and it has been on display there since 1997. The German car we saw at the monument drove there from the museum that morning. That V16 engine must have sounded great for petrol heads.

Eksporta iela by the Daugava was closed for the Red Bull Showrun, Latvia's first-ever live Formula 1 car demo, featuring drifting displays, drivers demonstrating rally skills, and MotoGP. The Latvian racer Mārtiņš Sesks was there.

We checked out the craft market in Doma laukums, listening to some oompah jazz for a bit.

We skipped Krastu mačs, the traditional 24-hour "Battle of the Banks" basketball tournament on the Esplanade, and the Riga Football Festival. We didn’t even try the special Vecrīga cake at the festive restaurant. We also skipped the many activities for young children.

We did, however, go down to the main concert venue on 11th November Embankment and listened to the folk group Auļi perform traditional music on the same embankment where Hanseatic ships once docked. The Latvian bagpipes and drums set the scene well. 

Other performers followed, including Atvara (Latvia's 2026 Eurovision act), then a specially commissioned evening concert, Mana partitūra Rīga ("My Riga Musical Score”), and a finale featuring a laser, fountain and video show on the Daugava. So much better than fireworks.

People were happy, enjoying the free spectacle all day. Latvians really know how to throw a good party!

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Eight hundred and twenty-five years

Bishops and crusaders, trade and commerce, guild feuds over cat statues, mass industrial expansion, and everything renamed after communists, the oldest Christmas tree (maybe), and a building blown up twice and rebuilt out of sheer stubborn love. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: Rīga isn't a museum piece. It's a city that, generation after generation, keeps choosing to rebuild and reinvent itself as something worth celebrating. Here's to the next 825 years.

[Photo of the Riga 825 poster by An Englishman in Latvia. Chapter music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay. Sound effects recorded by An Englishman in Latvia]