Art Nouveau and Star Wars Bars in Riga

This post is just for the odds and ends of Riga I didn't put in the other ones but don't want to leave out!

One of my favorite things we did was an Art Nouveau walk. Art Nouveau is a style of both architecture and art popular between around 1890 and 1910, and Riga has the highest concentration of such architecture in the world in its center. This construction exploded at the turn of the century in Riga, because the bourgeoisie needed somewhere appropriately impressive to live. 


The detail and whimsy are amazing, and I spent a good amount of time gawking with my head turned up. 



We also went to the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum, which as one would expect is very sobering. The stones there are actually brought from the Riga Ghetto, and the walls list the 70,000 Latvians and 25,000 other European Jews who were brought to Latvia to be murdered. 


In the room above, each glowing box had a picture, the life story of, and things like letters from a Jewish citizen who was killed during the Holocaust (in many instances Nazis marched them into the woods, forcing them to strip as they went along, and shot them into holes). 



The train car was representative of one used to transport the Jews, with the inside being filled with not only pictures but also of a mirrored wall and birch trees, which created a forest reflecting into infinity (and I assume it was meant to evoke the forest where the mass executions took place). 

The house above was moved from the Jewish Ghetto--30 people were forced to live inside at a time. The memorial is a tree of life and wooden Hebrew letters.

On a lighter note, we also went to Clayton McNamara's Drinking Emporium, a self-proclaimed geek bar. The owner said the inside is for every kid who didn't get the Star Wars present they wanted for Christmas--and he did seem to have everything in the bar, from a life-sized Han Solo frozen in carbonite to limited edition action figures from all kinds of sci fi movies (my favorite was the Aliens drinking Jack Daniels). 



We also had lunch at a restaurant specializing in black garlic dishes, and while I didn't notice much of a difference between black garlic and normal garlic, the soup was phenomenal, as was my goat cheese and raspberry salad. 


St. Peter's Church 

The Cat House...legend has it that the angry cats are facing the Great Guild, which refused membership to the tradesman who built the house. 


Powder Tower, which at various points was a defensive structure, a prison, and a torture chamber. 

The old moat around Riga, now a beautiful green space.

The Three Brothers, the oldest dwelling complex in Riga (built between the 15th and 17th centurie) and representing various styles of architecture. 


Freedom Monument, honoring soldiers killed during the Latvian War for Independence (1918 to 1920). 









Comments

  1. JackieMay 27, 2022 at 8:01 PM

    Impressive indeed and that bar is so cool! There is so much history there. We might have to go one day :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JackieMay 29, 2022 at 7:27 AM

      And so pretty like the Erstwilder collection! :)

      Delete
    2. EricaJune 10, 2022 at 7:41 PM

      Yes you would love it! And you can wear your beautiful Erstwilder brooches! :D

      Delete
  2. RachelMay 28, 2022 at 7:08 AM

    I love Art Nouveau architecture too, though I didn't know that's what it was. I just think of it as the buildings with all the faces. You sure pack a lot into your days!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. EricaJune 10, 2022 at 7:41 PM

      It's exhausting to be a Lucas on vacation!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas Magic in London, Part One

Image
Since London is a huge and historic city with endless things to do, you can't visit without doing something new (even if you're staying for fewer than 48 hours). So first up on the agenda--the Dickens Museum! Dickens lived there for two years, from 1837 to 1839, and it's the only house in which he lived that's left standing. Also he wrote Oliver Twist there! And while Dickens isn't my personal top-tier Victorian author, I'm up for any literary site and especially any insight into Victorian times. In another life, I'm a Victorianist at an East Coast college, wearing wooly sweaters while I read in my toasty office. I don't know why so many of these are sideways...just tilt your head. Anyway, on the lower level you can wander through the kitchen and Dickens' wine cellar, where I learned that Victorian families kept pet hedgehogs to eat bugs. Elowen enjoyed drawing "Bill Spikes" (puns!) while I looked around. On the next floor, Elowen charged ...
Read more

Otherworldly Magic in the Puzzlewood and a Visit to Hereford

Image
Our second full day in the Cotswolds was supposed to be rainy and also it was a bank holiday, so we didn't think we'd be able to find parking or enjoy the little towns we had slated for the day. Instead, we decided to drive to Puzzlewood (which was actually very close to our hotel in Wales) and then visit the Cider Museum in Hereford, both things I'd really wanted to do and was feeling angsty about missing.      Puzzlewood is an ancient woodland (dating back at least 10,000 years) in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire England. A local landowner laid down a mile of windy, maze-like pathways in the 1800s for his children, friends, and neighbors, and it later opened as a tourist attraction in the 1900s.  I wanted to make sure we had it mostly to ourselves, so we were there and in line at the ticket office before the gates even opened--then we dashed in!       It's even more glowy-green and otherworldly than it looks in the pictures, and it truly feels...
Read more

Mdina, the Silent City

Another highlight of Malta (perhaps more legitimate than Popeye's Village) was Mdina, known as the silent city both because no cars are allowed other than those of residents and also because it has only a few hundred residents.  The city gate I'm sure in summer it's pretty packed, but we had the city largely to ourselves...just a few other tourists and some horse and carriages. And it's truly lovely...the streets shine, smoothed by hundreds of years of feet walking through history before you, and there are so many narrow, winding alleys in which to get lost.  It's been inhabited since prehistory, with a Phoenician settlement in 8 BC. Then the Romans captured it and it kept passing hands through the centuries until the Order of St. John (a Catholic military order) took the city over in 1530. It later belonged to the French and then of course the British got it back, and then MUCH more recently it was used as a filming location for King's Landing in the first seas...
Read more