49 Fun Facts About Latvia

Latvian's closest living relative is the language of which country?

Lithuania. Latvian and Lithuanian are the only two Baltic languages still in official use; the rest, Old Prussian among them, died out as their speakers were absorbed by neighbouring peoples.

Which country borders Latvia to the north?

Estonia. The border even splits a town: Valga in Estonia and Valka in Latvia were a single settlement until 1920 and now promote themselves together as one town in two countries.

Medieval Riga joined which league of cities?

Hanseatic League. Riga, founded by a German bishop in 1201, stood on a river trade route to the east, and Cēsis, Limbaži, Koknese and Valmiera later followed it into the league.

Which river flows through Latvia's capital on its way to the sea?

Daugava. Known upstream as the Western Dvina, it rises in Russia's Valdai Hills and crosses Belarus before reaching Latvia, where hydroelectric dams harness its flow.

Europe's widest waterfall, the Venta Rapid, lies in which Latvian town?

Kuldīga. The ledge is only about two metres high, and in spring fish leap up it, which is why the town was once known as the place where salmon are caught in the air.

What is Latvia's highest point, at just 312 m?

Gaiziņkalns. An observation tower built on the summit in the 1980s was never safe enough to open, drew visitors anyway, and was finally blown up in December 2012.

Which Latvian seaside resort near Riga is famed for its long white-sand beach?

Jūrmala. The name is simply the Latvian word for seaside, and its pine air, mineral springs and curative mud made the town a spa resort as well as a beach one.

Latvia's constitution names four historical regions: Courland, Latgale, Zemgale and which other?

Vidzeme. It is the region that takes in Riga, and a 2021 law on historical lands now recognises a fifth, Selonia, alongside the constitution's four.

The name Latvija derives from which ancient Baltic tribe?

Latgalians. Theirs was one of four Baltic tribes that merged into the Latvian people, and their name also survives in Latgale, the country's eastern region.

The ancient Balts traded which local product as far as Rome and the Mediterranean?

Amber. The fossil resin gathered on the Baltic shore was nicknamed the gold of the north, and the overland route that carried it south for thousands of years is still called the Amber Road.

The crusader state founded in medieval Latvia was formally called Terra Mariana, but is better known as what?

Livonia. Terra Mariana means 'Land of Mary', the name German crusaders gave the pagan country after conquering and forcibly baptising it in the thirteenth century.

The Duchy of Courland founded 17th-century colonies in the Gambia and on which Caribbean island?

Tobago. Duke Jacob's Courlanders planted a colony there in the 1650s but could not hold it, and the island's Great Courland Bay still carries the little duchy's name.

Which kingdom captured Riga in 1621 and ruled it for almost a century as one of its largest cities?

Sweden. Its kings took the peasants' side against the local barons and brought in elementary schooling, and they held the city until Peter the Great took it in 1710.

Russia annexed Courland in 1795 as which kingdom was wiped off the map?

Poland. Courland was a fief of the old Polish commonwealth, so when the Third Partition erased that state the duchy passed to Catherine the Great's empire.

Latvia declared independence on 18 November, days after which war ended?

World War I. The republic was proclaimed a week after the armistice, but it took almost two more years of fighting before Moscow signed away its claim to the country.

Who staged a bloodless coup in 1934 and ruled Latvia as dictator until 1940?

Kārlis Ulmanis. He had been the republic's first prime minister in 1918, and when the Soviets took over in 1940 they arrested and deported him; he died in Soviet custody two years later.

The secret protocol of which 1939 agreement assigned Latvia to the Soviet sphere of influence?

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Within weeks Moscow forced Latvia to accept Red Army bases on its soil, and the following summer it occupied and annexed the country outright.

In June 1941, days before Germany invaded, the Soviets deported thousands of Latvians in one night, mostly to which region?

Siberia. Families were packed into cattle cars, the men split off for labour camps and the women and children sent to remote settlements; 14 June is still a day of mourning in Latvia.

About 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were murdered in late 1941 in which forest?

Rumbula. The shootings of 30 November and early December emptied most of the ghetto, which the occupiers then used to hold Jews deported from Germany.

Which Riga landmark is housed in five huge pavilions built from the frames of German Zeppelin hangars?

The Central Market. The steel frames came from First World War airship sheds at a German base in western Latvia, and they were rebuilt as five market halls that opened in 1930.

The peaceful movement that led to Baltic independence from 1987 is known as what?

The Singing Revolution. Tens of thousands gathered at festivals and rallies to sing national and folk songs as an act of resistance, and by 1991 all three countries were independent again.

The 1989 Baltic Way human chain linked Tallinn and Riga with which third capital?

Vilnius. About two million people joined hands along 675 km of road on 23 August 1989, fifty years to the day after the secret deal that cost all three countries their independence.

Latvia declared full independence on 21 August 1991, as a coup in Moscow against which Soviet leader collapsed?

Gorbachev. The hardliners' putsch against the Soviet president fell apart on the very day Latvia's parliament voted, ending a transition that had begun with a first declaration in May 1990.

In 2004 Latvia joined NATO and, weeks later, which of these?

European Union. Latvia entered NATO in March 2004 and the EU on 1 May, reaching in one spring the two goals it had set itself after breaking from Moscow in 1991.

Which currency did Latvia give up when it adopted the euro in 2014?

The lats. Latvia had already lost it once, when Soviet rule swept it away in 1940, and had brought it back in 1993, two years after regaining independence.

Which Latvian president, elected in 2023, became the European Union's first openly gay head of state?

Edgars Rinkēvičs. He had been foreign minister for twelve years, and in 2014 he came out in a tweet, the first Latvian lawmaker to say publicly that he was gay.

Legend says Latvia's flag copies a bloodstained white sheet, a tale much like that told of which country's flag?

Austria. Its red-white-red is said to recall a crusading duke's tunic, soaked in blood except where his belt had been, while Latvia's darker banner is recorded in a chronicle of the 1200s.

How does the white stripe on Latvia's flag compare in width with each red stripe?

Half as broad. The 2:1:2 stripes vanished from public view when the Soviets took over in 1940, and the flag was officially restored only in February 1990.

The female figure atop Riga's Freedom Monument is affectionately known by what name?

Milda. She holds three gilded stars aloft, and laying flowers at her feet was banned under Soviet rule until about 5,000 people defied the authorities there in June 1987.

Roughly one third of the buildings in central Riga are in which architectural style?

Art Nouveau. Most of the buildings went up in a single boom between 1904 and 1914, when the city was growing fast, and several of the best known are by Mikhail Eisenstein.

The Latvian folk festival of Jāņi celebrates what?

The summer solstice. Latvians head for the countryside to weave wreaths of flowers and oak leaves, sing through the short night and eat a caraway cheese made specially for the feast.

Riga Black Balsam, Latvia's national drink, was first made in 1752 by what kind of tradesman?

An apothecary. Abraham Kunze sold the bitter herbal mixture as a medicine, and legend has it that it cured Catherine the Great when she fell ill on a visit to Riga.

Rupjmaize, the staple of the Latvian diet, is a dark bread made from which grain?

Rye. The dense, dark loaf is such a staple that its crumbs become a national dessert, layered with berry jam and whipped cream like a trifle.

Which language, though not official, is the mother tongue of over a third of Latvia's people?

Russian. A 2012 referendum asked whether to make it a second state language, and about three-quarters of voters said no.

Which branch of Christianity was the faith of most Latvians before the Soviet occupation?

Lutheranism. It took hold where German nobles and townsmen held sway, while the south-east of the country, long governed from Poland and taught by Jesuits, stayed Catholic.

In which sport did Latvia's team win its first world championship medal in 2023?

Ice hockey. Latvia, co-hosting the tournament, beat the United States 4-3 in overtime to take third place, the best finish in the team's history.

Latvian NBA star Kristaps Porziņģis is nicknamed what?

The Unicorn. Kevin Durant coined it during Porziņģis's rookie season, to describe the rare sight of a player over seven feet tall who could also shoot three-pointers.

Māris Štrombergs, independent Latvia's most successful Olympian, won two golds in which sport?

BMX. The sport made its Olympic debut in Beijing in 2008, where he won the first men's final as reigning world champion, and he kept the title in London four years later.

Which ballet legend, born in Riga in 1948, defected to Canada in 1974?

Mikhail Baryshnikov. He slipped away from a Soviet company on tour in Toronto, joined American Ballet Theatre within months, and later ran it as artistic director for most of the 1980s.

Rundāle Palace, the baroque residence of the Dukes of Courland, was designed by which architect?

Bartolomeo Rastrelli. The future architect of St Petersburg's Winter Palace began it in 1736 for Ernst Johann von Biron, but when the duke fell from power in 1740 it stood unfinished for more than twenty years.

Which disease swept through Riga during Peter the Great's siege of 1710, killing a large share of its people?

Plague. It broke out while the tsar's army surrounded the city, and the garrison that surrendered in July 1710 had been devastated by disease and hunger.

Latvia's worst post-independence disaster, in late 2013, was the collapse of what in Riga?

A shopping centre roof. Fifty-four people died, three of them rescue workers killed when more of the building came down, and Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis resigned six days later.

Which Latvian tennis player won the 2017 French Open while unseeded, a first title of any kind on tour?

Jeļena Ostapenko. Ranked 47th in the world and without a single tour title, she beat Simona Halep from a set down in the final to become the first Latvian to win a Grand Slam singles crown.

Which Latvian port, fed by a pipeline from the Volga oil fields, became a major outlet for Soviet crude?

Ventspils. Its harbour at the mouth of the Venta stays free of ice, so ships can load there all year round, and it grew into a major export port for chemicals as well as oil.

What is the name of Latvia's unicameral parliament?

Saeima. Its hundred members are elected for four years, and it is they, not the voters, who choose the country's president.

Which is Latvia's second-largest city?

Daugavpils. The painter Mark Rothko was born there in 1903, when it was the tsarist garrison town of Dvinsk, and a museum of his work now fills the arsenal of its old fortress.

Who served as President of Latvia from 1999 to 2007, after decades as a psychology professor in Canada?

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga. Her family fled Latvia in 1944 when she was a child, and she came home only in 1998, after 54 years away, to be elected president the following summer.

Which was Latvia's first national park, established in 1973?

Gauja. It was created to protect a river valley of red sandstone cliffs and caves more than 350 million years old while keeping it open to walkers, and it is still the country's largest park.

Which large animals have been reintroduced at Latvia's Pape Nature Reserve?

European bison and wild horses. They were released along with cattle bred to resemble the extinct aurochs, so that their grazing would keep the floodplain meadows rich in other species.