I have just returned from the Latvian capital Riga, where I was invited to present a paper at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council’s annual conference, and I found that some of the most memorable sights in this fascinating city would be easily accessible only to conference delegates.
My hotel was situated in the centre of the Art Nouveau district, and any walk out risked cricking one’s neck in case another piece of glorious architecture was missed.
I attended an evening reception in the main university building where we were shown the observatory (Jupiter and two of its moons were clearly visible through the telescope), taken on to the roof for a view over Riga at night, and had a memorable visit to the student prison. Here, during the nineteenth century, students were locked up for three days for drinking, five days for smoking, and a fortnight for arguing with lecturers, and the walls were covered with their drawings and messages. Look carefully and you will see that the poor chap on the right spent Christmas and New Year locked up for daring to question an academic.
When not straining my neck in the street, I seemed to spend much of my time looking down on Riga from lofty vantage points, such as the Star Lounge on the 11th floor of the hotel, from which I first saw this very Soviet-looking building (centre, between the television tower and the handsome Orthodox Church), known locally as ‘Stalin’s Birthday Cake’.
On my final day, I was lucky enough to visit this building, the Latvian Academy of Sciences, to meet the archivist from the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art. The 17th floor observation platform has excellent views of the new National Library of Latvia building (under construction, just beyond the arched bridge).
Access to the very top of the ‘Birthday Cake’ was forbidden during the Soviet era. The day after independence in 1991, staff arrived at work to find the corridors full of chairs, tables, beds, recording equipment – unknown to anyone, this part of the building had been a KGB surveillance station.