WHY LATVIA?

Green and elegant.

A wonderland of health and eco-travel, where an elegance of culture and open-minded resilience are steeped in uniquely vigorous folk traditions.

The Latvians have always found great beauty and spiritual resources in the natural world. There are songs about living rivers, trees with different personalities, the sun goddess, and waves pounding on the shore, but also about the many varieties of beans that grow here and the color of their flowers, and about the intricate tasks that the bees perform and the many gifts they bring. So today, even after centuries of varied human influences like wars, occupation, industrialization and market economy, the Latvians are still honoring Mother Nature in word and deed. How could it be otherwise?

In post-Soviet central Europe, Latvia is unique in that it is the only country where every government has been a center/right coalition and those in power have never been representatives of the left or from among the communist old guard. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a Latvian professor from Canada, was the president who helped form the image of Latvia in Europe and the world. The first woman president in the Baltics, she stood vibrantly next to world leaders such as Bush, Mitterrand and Blair and proved that the voice of a small new nation can ring loud and clear. This is a fine example of the power and skills of the land that sings.

The Latvian Dainas are a unique cultural phenomenon. They are a record of Latvian culture in poetic verse that encompasses the entire course of human life through childbirth & youth, marriage & adult working life, old age & death. Until the 19th century these verses were not written down, but rather were an integrated part of folk consciousness and a vehicle for group identity that originated more than 1000 years ago. This spiritual heritage has been all the more important since endless invasions and subjugation kept Latvians from amassing other kinds of wealth. The more than 1.2 million texts and 30,000 melodies are now written down. This cultural heritage played an important part in the Latvian National Awakening that led to the first Song Festival in 1893; it was a vessel of national identity during the years of independence from 1918–1940, and the uniting force that allowed the people to reject Soviet Occupation through the Singing Revolution in the early 1990s.

What are the Latvian people like? In nature, the edges where forest and grassland, mountains and plains, or land and sea meet, elements of each side mix and produce unique phenomena found nowhere else. Latvian culture has developed on an edge, the edge between the Indo-Europeans and the Finno-Ugric peoples; and the Latvians have often found themselves living on an edge—the edge of the German political sphere and the Hanseatic economic “empire,” of the Swedish political establishment, of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union. They have absorbed influences from many sources, but have tenaciously maintained their own essential culture, and the result is a complex and unique society that has developed against all odds.