🇱🇻 Latvia
Riga
Riga is the capital of Latvia and the largest city in the Baltic States with 630,000 people — a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1997) for its exceptional Art Nouveau architecture (the largest and finest concentration of Art Nouveau/Jugendstil buildings in the world, 750+ buildings, the most in any city including Brussels, Vienna or Paris) and its medieval Old Town (Vecrīga) that survived WWII relatively intact. Riga was founded in 1201 by Bishop Albert of Buxhoeven as a trading port and crusader base against the Baltic pagan peoples — the German Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order controlled the city for 300+ years, leaving a legacy of German merchant culture that shaped the city into one of the great Hanseatic trading cities of the Baltic and the second-largest Hanseatic city after Lübeck. The Art Nouveau district (Quiet Centre, Alberta Street, Elizabetes Street) was built between 1896-1913 when Riga was the industrial capital of the Russian Empire — the merchant families and the Russian industrial boom created the wealth for the extraordinary Jugendstil buildings with their human faces, mythological figures, owls, sphinxes and grotesque masks as architectural decoration; Mikhail Eisenstein (father of director Sergei Eisenstein) designed the most theatrical buildings at Alberta iela 2a, 4 and 13. Latvia regained independence in 1991 after 50 years of Soviet occupation (1940-1941 by the Soviets, 1941-1944 by the Germans, 1944-1991 by the Soviets again) — the Occupation Museum (Latvijas Okupācijas muzejs) in the Old Town covers the deportations, the resistance and the Singing Revolution of 1987-1991 when 2 million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians formed a 675 km human chain (the Baltic Way) demanding independence.