Riga's Christmas Market

Once a year the market we visit in the cobblestone square of Riga's largest church gets transformed to its Christmas and Winter solstice counterpart. It carries traditional things that one needs to mark the passing of long days into short: baskets to carry to raw yarns and linens needed for extra warmth, bright yellow beeswax candles to put bedside, heavier and darker bread to support heavier and darker butter...

The stands that are built in the old fashioned way of farmer's huts are laced with white lights, so that a glow transforms the open space of the city. Families walk around, drinking hot tea made of wild strawberries that turn their lips as pink as their cold cheeks. Rather than have Santa Claus sit in on a throne waiting for childen to come to him, he walks throughout the market, telling jokes and handing out bon-bons to the young ones excited to catch a glimpse of him, but also to the older women who sit in the circles of the weaving guilds, bringing them warm gingerbread that never seems to run out of his pockets.

It is one of our family's favorite times of year, and the market illustrates those things we love beautifully. Embracing the changing season with warm traditions and the company of friends, turning the year's dark months into our personal light.

Taking Pictures of Lithuania From The Car

Ingrida was driving through Lithuania, in a new Swedish Saab this time. We borrowed it from our brother-in-law who had just flown from Riga to Berlin for a small vacation. Despite making the road literally less bumpy, I think she missed the simplicity of the broken down Ladas. It took her long past the outskirts of Riga and the Stat Oil gas station to learn that she needed to pull up the little ring that encompassed the shift knob to find reverse. Me, I offered what comfort I could and graciously pointed out that we would almost always be going forward. Needless to say the queen of drivers ignored me even though I offered her her favorite Latvian cinnamon buns, that I had bought in the tiny white kiosk at the tip of our sweet street that Grandfather had pointed out.

In the early morning rain, now hours ago, we had driven in great traffic down Lacplesa iela, a street named after a medieval hero, and across the “Stone Bridge” of Riga to take the unmarked narrow turn that would bring us out circling and put us on the Central Lithuanian road.

I had brought a small Nikon digital camera to document amber and folk art. Ingrida suggested that I take pictures of the interesting things that we pass, kind of a Robert Frank view of Lietuva. In my naiveté I said, ‘yes, why not,’ still trying to compensate for the evil new car’s strange gear shifts and the fact that I was almost useless.

Where I pointed my camera, every single scene I fell in love with: a farmer with his horse and wagon returning from market, the carved old trees that bordered homesteads, the Mountain Ashes planted in twos before the main entryways to the old Lithuanian buildings, and the covered crosses at the cross roads, but my documentation never seemed to work out. The worst was the storks.

We had spent the summer with storks finding them everywhere we went. Traditionally they are a great good luck symbol. But in the last years they have become something more; perhaps a symbol of balance and union with nature, and of one still being within culture and knowing the old ways, the ways of the People.

“You certainly have to have some pictures of storks,” Ingrida, The Driver said. My ill fated stork pictures and their pursuit would take a tragic novel to describe. It was at the very end of our journey going through central northern Lietuva back towards Riga that I realized the storks were playing with me. I saw a field with at least 50 storks all walking their old man like walk, bobbing and bending, and when I had actually seen them through the lens of my little camera and taken the picture, not one showed up on the LCD screen.

Ingrida asked in her sweet way, now long and long after the shift knob, “Did you get it?” I said “Yes.” A picture in my mind forever, of these wonderful birds, the dark tilled soil, the wet rich tall grass heavy with seed on the side, and the hayed land encircling.

Kaunas

I find a great peace and comfort in this Lithuanian city. Here, Ingrida and I work all day long in the amber trade among darting minds and gracious beaders. Exhausted at night, we throw ourselves into the harmony of the city and the setting sun as its last lights illuminate the pedestrian avenue. We always stay in the same old giant Soviet hotel, only partially remade, that sits on the walk way.

The amber work of the day, the selection and size of beads, the many discussions, and the paper and pencil of design, always exhausts us. At the end of work we are tired and emptied out. Tired and empty we walk down the long tree lined avenue facing into the sun and quietly, among the gracious others that surround us, friends walking arm in arm, lovers around small tables, women in linen going home, we renew our strength and relax into a simple celebration of life.

The hotel is a certain smell that stays with one through the long odd passages that lead to painted doors and narrow dark wooden beds, two in our room that by their size won’t allow us to sleep together. White sheets, comforters even in summer, are piled on the darkness of the mattresses. The bathrooms are always odd and not quite working. But the rooms are always reasonable and familiar, whole in their own way, leading one outward to the sweetness of the Lithuanian streets.

Out of my last 3 birthdays, I have spent two here, and I count myself lucky. Extremely lucky. For here is a gracious civility built upon simple human interaction with a high regard for a depth of intellectual thought. Here lovers should come, to be lovers in the whole. Here thinkers should come to be thinkers in the whole. Here mystics would find that they are mystics in the whole. For each is embraced and offered that wonderful right of way that marks a city that is confident of itself, small enough to be known, and complete.

More on Lithuania:

Thank you for the response to the entries about Lithuania. As some have asked for more writing on this gem in the Baltics, tomorrow's piece will be be about a particular city I love, Kaunas. Until then, here is a pictoral clue of my inspiration today, the tree lined streets of that city you will soon read about...

Lithuania

I fell in love with Lithuania in 1988. Somehow Ingrida and I were able to cross the boarder without being turned back, separated, held, or made to pay a bribe larger than what we could afford. We had come to Lithuania to talk with folk artists and amber masters, to get amber crosses for the priests graduating from the seminary in Minnesota as per Grandmother’s wish, and to place our own family crosses at Krustu Kalns, Cross Hill, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope.

We were driving a Soviet red Lada car that had screw drivers stuck in the windows to hold them fully rolled up and to keeping them from falling outward or inward. The car had been broken into in Rezekne by young street kids who had simply pushed the windows in. The car of course was borrowed and Ingrida was the driver as she has always been, being better at jiggling the shift and hoping that it actually got into 1st, 2nd, 3rd and with God’s help, reverse. Sweet Ingrida had bought a motorcycle when she was old enough to drive one, a little Italian-made Harley Davidson dirt bike. When she was old enough not to break Grandfather and Grandmother’s heart, she pointed it outward and had been driving since.

Ingrida drove and we talked as we covered most of central Lithuania, going down its middle and turning east towards Vilnius. Everywhere was delight. I remember how organized the Lithuanian fields were, for the kolhozas in Latvia were sketchy on their care. If one walked them, it was ripe and waste. The waste was not created with ignorance for the land but rather it came from a tired, almost exhausted uncaring about the whole.

Here in Lietuva, was care, small measures of love made visible. Trees gently pruned. A hedge tended and cleaned of parasites. Rows of roses laid down for no reason at all but that they were beautiful. Even the ditch grasses were clean and ready to be cut for fodder.

I was moved by it. So it was most fitting that as we tried to not attract attention to ourselves I was given a five foot verba, a great Palm Sunday creation of broken flax, field crop, and grasses, that showed the Lithuanian “Tree of Life.”

No one that we passed by in crowded Vilnius did not stop to look. We were like a wave that created humor and sweet concern all about us, for Easter was a world away, and we were carrying an ancient national symbol through the streets of a difficult time… a western fool and the thin Latvian woman.

It was because I was Irish, not Lithuanian, an American who probably didn’t know anything about anything that it took us just 3 hours to cross over again at the boarder. The guards could have cared less about Limewood masks of Devils, flax constructs of wise horses and spiritual birds, or the gentle womens woven belts that blessed the basic ability of a Lithuanian woman to bear Lithuanian children. They passed us through with the 12 white amber crosses tied about my neck on a rough band of leather.

The verba, The Palm Sunday weaving that the Lithuanian’s make to commemorate Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, takes the place of split palm fronds which no common person in Eastern or Northern Europe had ever had. The one I carried then is still among the very small set of things that adorn my gentle apartment in Riga. Perhaps it is the greatest thing for it is the eldest in our history, Ingrida’s and mine, that has survived in a vagary of apartments and places to stay.

Looking at it, as the summer rains slash against our ancient wood windows, I am renewed with wonder about the heart that made it so purely. Here is love and an ancient faith that forms the common into beauty and tells again the story of a People. Thinking about my being then in Lietuva, to carry such a thing through the streets of Vilnius among the police and the soldiers, in a time of struggle, then I say that I could not think of a better thing to carry. For it was not a gun which the movies prefer, nor a slogan which is only politics, but a simple form of a profound spiritual belief about an eternal return, “cut the tree down and it will grow again.” Made through the will of an artist, it gives reverence for something that is “more” in the dark nights of the soul.

The Baltic Road

In 1987 Grandfather, Grandmother, Ingrida and I, with our daughters, then little children, were finally unofficially allowed to travel through Latvia to visit the family graves in the east, in the little village of Feimani, Latgale. As we were driven by a distant relative with Party connections along the great river Daugava, grandfather and grandmother told their stories that had to do with the road from Riga to Rezekne, through the history of their life, to the crowded car. To this day I remember the brightness of their faces and the sense of rapture that wrapped the shiny black official car in the moment and made it something more.

The world that opened up then with our ability to travel the Baltic roads as a family has changed my response to those roads even as I travel them now, for the road became stories and the stories opened fresh with every vista and view. The gracious little stories, sad, funny, or quietly terrible, told by Grandfather, by Grandmother, by Great Aunt Elza, by a multiplicity of people, unfolded their simple words into a multiplicity of levels that slid easily from personal history into folklore and the mythic.

The road that we traveled together in those years also produced its own stories: driving from Tallinn to Riga when there was no official gas and everyone looked for the Lithuanians along the coast highway who were selling gasoline in smuggled buckets and tins; of Grandmother Anna’s pilgrimage to Krustu Kalns, the Hill of Sorrow and Hope, in an oddly painted green cargo van packed with praying old women who were going to say the rosary from Riga to beyond Bersai, and the calmness of my two little daughters who were allowed to accompany them dressed in thin raincoats and holding bags of sandwiches. Stories that were left after all the break downs here and there, along every main road that ran through the three countries. Family stories of Grandfather, Sean, the improvised water bucket and the huge farmyard dog, that makes us laugh even now.

Not being able to travel outside of a certain area in Riga for so many years made the road when it did open for us into a precious thing. Every field, forest, tree, stork, village, city, became memorable. The clouds, the smell of the land, the type of crop in a field and its condition, even how the stones were dressed on the battered walls that had been left standing seemed to tell us something about each of these distinct lands and their people.

We were taught that summer, Ingrida and I, to listen with our hearts, the seat of the soul, as it enfolded what it heard in the changing moment into that rare state of timelessness and union. To our daughters, it was but part of their inheritance; the gold of the dainas and the living Latvian oral tradition.

A Winter Recipe:

For my father, lamenting the approaching and inevitable Minnesota snow falls, a recipe guaranteed to warm the coldest set of bones:

Sorrel Soup
Note: the dark green sorrel leaf resembles spinach in look and taste. However, sorrel has a lovely tart flavour that can't be replaced in this recipe.
250g (8.75oz) pork, 800g (28oz) water, 300g (10.5oz) sorrel, 30g (1.05oz) carrot, 20g (0.7oz) onion, 10g (0.35oz) parsley, 20g (0.7 oz)fat, 20g (0.7oz) pearl barley, 1-2 eggs, salt, sour cream, dill and parsley.
Soak pearl barley for 6-8 hours in cold water. Dice pork. Put pork and grits in a saucepan, add water to cover and cook until the meat is almost tender. Chop sorrel, onions and carrots and sauté in butter. Add sautéed vegetables, parsley and salt to the saucepan, and continue cooking until meat is tender. Before serving, sprinkle with chopped dill or parsley and add sour cream. You may substitute 200g (7 oz) of diced potato instead of pearl barley. Boil potatoes with the meat. Steam sorrel separately and add it to the soup when the meat and potatoes are tender. Decorate with a boiled egg. (Courtesy of the Latvian Institute.)

The Gaismas Pils

We have often talked about the changes Latvia has gone through in the period of being rebuilt. Literally, post 90's revolution, the architectural growth of the country has been astounding. The nation has always prided itself on its ornate buildings and dedicated museums, and with the newfound wealth it has been offered from the European Union, this is more true now than ever.

A fledgling agency within the government is currently overseeing the building of a new concert hall, a new modern art museum, and a new national library. With each building, special attention is being paid to incorporate mythological and cultural symbolism, as even with modern Latvia, the ties to tradition remain essential.

The proposed national library is of particular interest to our family of devoted readers, and we are especially impressed with the design of the building, which represents one of our favorite Latvian folk legends. The Gaismas Pils, or Castle of Light, was a hill of glass that once stood in the capital, and according to legend, sank into the depths of the river Daugava during the blood period of oppression in Latvia. In folklore this crystal mountain symbolizes the heights of achievement - something not easily attainable but full of rewards for those who make the commitment to reach its peak. Latvian literature also speaks of the Castle of Light as a metaphor for wisdom that has been lost. The legend says that when brave men and women summon it, the castle will rise from the darkness, and the people will once again be free.

The architect, Gunars Birkerts, who designed the project based on the original proposal of Saeima from the 1920's, has incorporated the symbolism by building a literal crystal hill on the bank of the Daugava river. While the reflective paneling is meant to interpret the original tale, it evokes further meaning to the Latvian people who will use the new library: while the building is modern, it is built as a literal mirror across the river from the Old Town, thereby directly reflecting the old roots of Riga throughout its new corridors.

We continue to be so thankful that despite the modern changes taking place in Latvia, the pride and respect for tradition still permeates. To read more about the Gaismas Pils, please click here, and you will be offered a site in both Latvian and English.

We leave you now with one of the most favored Latvian forms of expression, the translating of a Daina folk poem into song. This particular arrangement is at a song festival honoring Jazeps Vitols in his original arrangement about The Gaismas Pils.

Whistle While You Work:

Hello, everyone!

Part One of Sean's Journals is regrettably done. What a wonderful time we had reading and reminiscing about our journey this summer. We were sad to see it close, but excited to get to the new chapter of our blog posting, and what you can expect from us.

We will be responding to our customer's and student's Frequently Asked Questions, discussing upcoming goings-on in the store, writing essays on cultural significance, and doing a second showcase of Sean's journals from his time spent with the great pottery masters of Latgale.

Meanwhile, our solstice and Christmas offerings are newly up in the store, and while we regret jumping into the consumer fray of beginning the holidays so early, we are delighted to mark one of our most interesting seasons of merchandise. We love this time of year, when Minnesota is just beginning to get cold and the bare birch trees look not that different from those growing along the dunes of the Baltic.

We live in the old way, working harder as the sun sets earlier, lighting the lovely Tannen-duft pine houses, and having an excuse to eat our dark, dark Estonian chocolate to keep warm. We listen to Latvian radio streaming across the internet, fantastic broadcasts brought to us from the cobblestone square right next to the Riga Winter Market.

With the impending chill, as always, excited to share with you our common threads.

Sean's Journal, Part Eight: Bread, Honey, and The Conclusion

Along with the Song Festival came many events. As we dropped Grandmother and Grandfather off in a little parking lot near the Music Conservatory we heard a choir practicing medieval songs that sung in Latin of the joy of God’s presence in our world. As seductive as they were in their clarity, organization, and word choice, Ingrida and I still had to leave, for we had offered to buy perfect bread and different healing honeys for the family gathering in the evening, around the television again, with Grandfather’s ailing knees.

Grandmother always bought three loafs of bread whenever we stopped anywhere. Eating small twists from the loaf she would announce like a great wine connoisseur whether the bread was dry, moist, sweet, sour, raised well, rounded in flavor, and well baked. It didn’t matter what Grandmother’s verdict was, we would never throw any bread away, for bread is, in its simple way, sacred. Rather, the tables of the day would find us with Grandmother announcing that she would eat the dry sweet sour bread please, “the one with the thin crust, that’s not quite baked enough.” To us she would offer the best bread as she always did, eating the other herself as if she did some kind of penance for the state of the world’s poorer breads.

So as a thank-you, Ingrida and I had pledged to go to the Bread Festival and buy the very best breads we could find: moist, clear, flavor rounded, appropriately formed, thick or raised open, the flour and moisture structured by baking, cooked with an awareness of the middle of the loaf and the crowning of the crust. Further more, we had coughs to cure, pain in the knees, and weakness in the arms, that only country honey could cure.

Of course, we arrived too early, half the booths weren’t yet set up and the crowd was non-existent. But still we voted on the best bread display of The Great Brooches of the Sun formed of dough and walked away with a dense sweet sour rye bread formed around plump partially dried fruit and wild hazel nuts for Grandmother, her heaven of selfish bread choices. For the table and our guests Ingrida brought a fermented rye and flax loaf that was perfect in color, heavy in form, and thickly structured, appropriate for an evening of beer and spirits. To make the next two days ones of delight, we brought two string bags home with us which held single sliced samples of every great bread that had ever been produced in discerning Latvia.

Honey was a hard choice! We bought pure Linden Honey for coughs and colds aware that it has a tense aftertaste, and also rare, full flavored, dark Wild Forest Honey for strength. We were moved by the passion of the bee keepers and we left the little park thinking, in a world of modern things, how close real bread and honey are to song here, and to the souls of a people.

Sean's Journal, Part Seven: In the Heart of the Song Festival

The Latvian Song Festival may sound trite to those who do not know it. I heard it referred to by an American- Latvian who had never gone as “A time for Latvians who are living abroad to come back to Latvia and spend their money.” We think of a national event in America with cynicism: parades, dogs, flags and ponies, when each has lost a great deal of their meaning.

The Latvian Song Festival does start with a parade, it has flags, many of them, and Riga’s dogs would be quite unhappy if I spoke ill of them. As to ponies, they still have a countryside where they are quite real. The Festival goes over a week ending in a final great chorus of singers and folk dancers that has consistently won the Guinness Book of World Records for its size. During the Song Festival’s time, it’s true that for tourists lunch and drink specials, and “ethnic” markets are opened throughout Riga.

Yet those that truly hear the Song Festival’s language and listen to what that language sings, it is a time unimaginably inspiring. It was the first symbol of cultural independence after the fall of Communism. The parade was the first gathering of free Latvians, and to this day they come together to celebrate this fact more than anything.

We brought Grandmother and Grandfather as close to the opening parade route as we could. The police had cordon off streets leading out of Riga Old Town, and Grandfather wanted to be near Laima’s Clock, and the televised announcement stand where every Latvian who had come to great Riga, or lived in great Riga, also wanted to be.

So Ingrida drove as far as we could straight towards the angry policeman who was dramatically shooing us away. When we were as close as we dare go, I leapt out to help open the back doors of the yellow Skoda as quickly as I could, as the tired Latvian policeman righteously attacked with his waving. When the door was opened, out came a 90 year old man with a cane and a folding stool, to be followed by his bride of 63 years with her simple but constant dark beret, carrying her own seating arrangement. The policeman, who still possessed the Latvian respect for elders, patiently watched them exit, and then told me in a clear precise way, with no tolerance at all, to drive off. It was 3 hours before the parade and every Latvian who could was assembling.

Our job, given to us in evening planning by Grandmother and Grandfather, was to return the car to our apartment and to then get flowers, traditional large white daisies or the sweet and profound blue rye flowers, and then meet them near the clock. Latvian tradition dictates handing out bouquets to each relative and friend who passes in the singing procession, so that blooms innumerably outnumber people, held in the hand of every one person who was gathered to honor the blooming of the generations. Our elders were no different. They would, of course, give out flowers to all, to those who passed by who didn’t have any yet, especially if they were from Latgale, the Eastern part of Latvia whose complicated and dying language both Grandmother and Grandfather still speak and love.

We ran from our apartment only to find the flower stalls all empty. Even the market, the great tirgs, had only rejected blooms, too old, too wilted, left. A young Latvian country girl about nine years old, with her sister who was four years older, spotted us a half a block away and came forward to stand by her two buckets of yellow field flowers that she still had left. The little one, as beautiful as can be in traditional dress and maiden’s crown, sold us all of her last yellow flowers, at double the price. The sweet rye flowers, she said, were all gone. We paid her gladly, even relishing her cunning, for her braids were thick, her crown was straight, and her language was perfect. It was a day of celebration for all.

As we moved through thousands of people, we realized that we would never be able to find Grandfather and Grandmother. Or if we could we could not press through the crowd of people five rows deep that lined the streets. But Ingrida, a golden daughter, still tried, and three hours later she finally joined them to burn herself in Saule’s clean sun and to be by their side as they, at last, gave the bundles of flowers out one by one to the singers and dancers who moved down the avenue in front of them. Four hours later, grandfather stretched his stiff legs in the entry way of our favorite park, happy to simply be alive. I was at home, cooking a celebratory meal on the old Soviet stove, with which to welcome them all back from a day well spent.

It was after the parade, in the night, in our little fallen down apartment made holy with family that I had an epiphany. We had set out our best drinks and food, the dinner which had been prepared had long been consumed. A song came on our small television continuing the festival, with tens of thousands singing it, about Heaven’s smith, Perkons, whose sparks from his great forge fall into the Daugava, the sacred river of the People. And about a sword that falls into the Daugava as well, quenching itself. And about Saule, the female Sun, whose tears would also fall into the Daugava. As I struggled to translate the song fully to myself, I realized that a whole country was singing the song in the quiet open space of memory, all those who knew the language. I realized that the song which everyone was singing or listening to or praying with, was teaching both strength and sorrow, addressing a courage and loss that was ancient, even to when the first German Crusade came to this land I was in. The song held it all again, in that time, and united to this now. Held, remembered, and passed through, by the will of a whole People. I was humbled to learn the emotions of the Latvians.

I smiled inwardly as I accepted another of Grandmother’s wonderful after dinner cheese sandwiches on dense sweet sour bread, as I move across the wooden floor to welcome more knocking family from the family outspread at the 1880’s red madder door. I smiled, for here in a little apartment made waste by the Soviet, was a place where I would bring my family and my students to learn. To learn as I was learning, alive in a moment that, like the song, was both ancient and new.

Sean's Journal, Part Six: An Apartment of Promise

"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself,

again and again."

-Joseph Campbell

Years ago we bought an apartment in a quiet district, near the railway station, in central Riga, the principal city and capital of Latvija. We bought it for our children and our extended family, so that we, together, would have a place to gather, and not forget a history of heritage. The apartment is but minutes from the Old Town of Riga and at night one can walk along the canal that runs like a green ribbon through the city’s center.

During Soviet times the apartment had been a communal space for three families. Two cheap gas stoves were set in the tiny kitchen and each family lived in one of the three bedrooms sharing the kitchen, the hip bath, and the single sad toilet that worked by poring buckets of water down a hole.

However, the apartment was intended to much more splendor, built in the Czarist time in Latvija, in the 1880’s. The walls and floors are built upon six inch thick hand hewn pine that had been floated down the Daugava River from Belarus. The ornamentation of its hallways and ceilings was grand long before it had long been striped away.

The five story brick building that our apartment resides in was built when the famous Jewish School was erected across the street. Our building was built to house the Jewish School’s director and principal staff. When free Latvija was lost the Jewish School became the principal Ukrainian School of Riga. The last family member of the original inhabitants who was raised in our building died in the nineteen nineties and spoke of our apartment and the building as a place of grace.


We love the apartment. And after rebuilding the bath and toilet in the early 90’s, we have come this summer to finish restoring the rest of it, the walls, ceilings, floors, windows, and doors. By doing so, we have leapt into that odd and singular craziness that always accompanies getting anything truly and cleanly done in Eastern Europe. But which marks those who try with the subtle air of difference, moving them closer, male or female, to the heroes whom Joseph Campbell so well describes.

Sean's Journal, Part Five: Blessings in the Market

Most folk art is about luck in the old sense of the word, a world of fates to be cajoled or conjoined. Almost all of our old, vintage amber is a visible ritual of blessing. Almost all of the new amber that we are drawn to or design blesses as well. I found a triangular piece of opaque yellow amber in the market place after Midsummer that was so old that its outside was oxidized blood red. Ages ago when the world was a world of song it had been shaped into the Baltic Triangle of the World Mountain, The Mark of Mara the Earth Mother. It is the representation of our life under the Sun, one’s youth, one’s prime and one’s descent to death and burial with The Whole of the People Who Have Come Before. This small, red Bronze Age piece must have been turned up by a plowshare or washed back in from the sea from that time of dreams.

The holy piece had been pinned a hundred years ago when Latvia was just beginning to rise. Later, it had been strung as jewelry by an invalid in the Folk Arts Guild under Soviet oppression.

I was astonished to find such a thing in the market place. The little amber triangle was magic when magic was central to a people… when magic was the acknowledgement of suffering and a form of prayer for “more,” when prayer as it is known today was still thousands of years away from coming to our world.

The pendant’s seller was a middle aged woman who sold things for the invalids. We gave her as much as we had. More than she or we could initially imagine. I put it on and have not taken it off.

It was later on, while I was talking to Ingrida to take a break from the wonder of the red amber that I saw the gentle weaver’s charms made by an invalid as well. They were a macramé of string made by a grandmother using a women’s weaving method so old and so thoughtful that we sometimes forget that their forms were born of great power and passed down as a heritage through family. Here was The Female Open, The Female Closed, and The Female Pregnant with the Light of the Sun and the Bursting of Waters.


We live in a different world now. I don’t know if it is better. At my age I try not to judge things. Rather I think that it is Ingrida’s and my place to live between the two worlds, the now and the world of the past, and act as a bridge so that these worlds might touch together in a fruitful sense and the best that is in us, as a species, be remembered and so, continue. To this end we each have given a life time.

Imagine then my joy in a day which had already been blessed to find that another grandmother, unknown and unasked for, had drawn with white chalk, a blessing over our threshold, over the dark painted door of our Riga apartment, made in the eighteen eighties that Ingrida and I constantly pass through in the bridge of our worlds. There on the lintel she had printed the anagram of the Holy Family and the Three Magi and linked it to our apartment. What could have moved her to do so but love? What emotion other than that could have overwhelmed me as I took the amuletic weaver’s charm’s in my hands and thought of the life that made them; the hands, the soul, and the memory that moved her to create?

We live in a world that is better for any blessing. That the holy can reach out and touch us is thing beyond measure, singular and critically important. Yet it happens, again and again, in the little moments, in the common day… when the soul has been granted time to see.

Sean's Journal, Part Four: The Light of Midsummer

Jani, St. John’s Eve, is one of the most important of the ancient Latvian festivals. Nature’s growth has risen to its purest point in the cycle of the year and all is bathed in the healing light of the longest day. When the almost dark falls a great fire is lit and its light beckons all of Janis’ children to gather, singing.

In the hours before the bonfire, we gathered flowers, leaves, and grasses for crowns and wreaths. Saplings were cut to stand at the doorways; others were bent and tied into circles to be hung on windows. Walking through the fields and forest, I took little pictures of the simple things in nature and of the beauty of the light as I picked daisies or gathered three kinds of grasses. I spoke my thank you, up and out, for the cycle and balance of nature, for the gathering of family, and for the simple beauty of the moment. It is a deep, graceful, beauty that comes not just by union with great nature but by participation with those who are deeply thankful for all that nature is and will be.

Sean's Journal, Part Three: Means of Transportation

We had arrived in Eesti 3 days before midsummer. We stayed 2 days there and then journeyed south from Estonia to Latvia. We traveled by Euro Lines, taking the Bus south to Riga, taking the coast highway that runs from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius, Lithuania, now called Via Baltica. There is no longer a train between the two countries and one must go by bus or plane. We elected to take Euro Lines, the choice of locals, so that we would have a toilet on the bus for our 5 hour journey. We earned the toilet, having for over twenty years traveled on the regular busses without toilets, which would pull into an official toilet stop and everyone would run for what ever facility existed: out-houses, tiled stalls, wood cupboards, and/ or the forest. I must say that more often than not the forest was preferable. There, the bus driver would have 2 quick cigarettes with about 20 other people who were more desperate to smoke rather than use the facilities, and when done, he would get into the bus, start the engines, and drive away. Regardless of where ever you were in what ever process.

If one has the opportunity, take a train. A four hour journey within Latvija costs 9 dollars, whereas a bus with a toilet, if available, will cost 30. Bear in mind that this year it costs about 80 dollars to fill the tank of a medium size car and the price of gas is going up.

As we drove down the beautiful highway, with the great pines rising from the sand dunes, the cities and larger towns were starting to become deserted. The field flowers and tall grasses that had fill the market places and the temporary road side stands that the farmers had erected were almost sold out. Cars were parked along public stretches of forests or fields while their inhabitants gathered gentle gifts freely given from the wealth of the green world. Everywhere, every one who could, was going to the country. Going to the country to eat, to drink, to sing, and to join in fellowship on the days when great nature is at its height. Being at its height and power, nature graciously blesses and heals in spirit all who will let themselves be truly taken by the harmony of her beauty… who will let go of the worry laden “now” and become more.

We would go as well, Ingrida and I, first by bus, then by driving a yellow Skoda deep into the country, to a “seta,” a homestead with cranes, among wet forest and tilled fields, with a “pirts,” the holy sauna of the Latvian People, taking grandfather and grandmother, going together to be whole, joined once again with the family outspread.

Sean's Journal, Part Two: Tallinn's Old Town

Tallinn is a fantastic harbor city full of history. The majority of her visitors rush to see Old Town. But the vitality of the city lies about Old Town like a ring. The new modern rising Estonia is gleaming metal and glass. In a way it is quite fitting that the old road which leads to historic Parnu going south out of the city goes past “modernist” estates, which were built during Estonia’s freedom in the 1930’s. They are masterpieces of the clean aesthetics of the right angle and how it may hold the circle, square and rectangle. They are among the finest I’ve ever seen in the Baltics.

Tallinn’s main open market is near the bus station on Tartu Mtn, an easy walk or tram ride from Old Town. It is quite fun to go through. Not being overly large it is very accessible without being exhausting. The most interesting products for us usually come from individuals who sell on the outskirt or boundary of the market proper. There the selection of goods is most easily carried away when it becomes overwhelming, when the vendors yell or the market police come.

We had come to Tallinn for the Medieval Day’s Celebration that happens in Old Town’s Square. We spent hours talking with our artisans and meeting new ones. My folly was buying a leather bracelet from a 60 year old woman who had made 20 pieces in the whole of a year and whom we could probably never contact again. I walked away with the red and blue fox leather bracelet and thought how if I put it out in the store I’d have wonderful customers asking for bigger or smaller, green, purple, or yellow fox bracelets and being very disappointed when we gently said, no, the foxes are limited. The older woman’s works, made during the long dark nights of winter, were based on her dreams and the animals that would come to speak to her in them.

Ingrida bought a number of traditionally dressed Estonian dolls from a grandmother and granddaughter. When she asked if we could order more the young granddaughter, translating, told us that Grandmother, who was a traditional costume master, had made them to take her mind off Grandfather’s sickness. With Grandfather’s death, Grandmother was now sending each and every the little doll out into the world. When they had all found homes Grandmother would quit the market for she would make no more.

Coming In By Sea: The Pictures

Sean's Journal, Part One: On the Topic of the Sea

Every journey to Northern and Eastern Europe brings its own, singular, time of discovery and reflection. For thirty years Ingrida and I have journeyed across Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland talking with folk artists, collecting folk tales and studying culture. In the small markets and festivals, in out of the way little stores, in barns and granaries we’ve purchase folk art. Among gracious masters of their craft we have purchased amber.

Together Ingrida and I have born testament to such fragile things as the thin trees that rise from the little islands in Swedish waters. Together Ingrida and I have watched some of them fall to bones. Yet the rocks that the trees grew upon will be there for our children.

Together, in a world of change, we have watched borders open that once were closed, great cities rise like slumbering giants out of a forced stagnation. Though every harbor that we knew has changed, we can still feel the same tension that we felt thirty years ago in those who travel along side us and whom like us are coming home after a distance of time and place.

These lands, waters, skies, and languages have shaped us. We in turn have marked their history with personal memory. Such history is a foundation that new memories should be built on. In moment upon moment we bind again our souls with the land, the sky, the sea, the ancient 3 elements, and to the common people who still hold these elements dear in the vast room of their hearts.

A journal is but a record of when a soul has time for words. It is a wonderful little, as changeable as the soul is changeable, and as limited as to what quiet one may find in a day or a night. So here dear reader is the little, done with love, made to make the quiet, sleepy moment, more, in those delicious long lasting lights, which spread out through the day and seem to ask great night not to come so quickly, which is the joy of Northern European summers.

Swedish Waters

One of the most beautiful parts of a voyage from Sweden to Tallinn or Riga is the long quiet sail from Stockholm through the archipelago of islands to the open sea. For those who know the unpredictable Baltic, it is a time of gentle waters before the rough and tumble of open sea waves. Ingrida and I use it as a time of rest, a time of romance, where we may sit as a couple softly before a window and mark together the islands of our past and present.

Tallinn Harbor, Estonia

My wedding ring fell off my finger as we sailed from Tallinn to Helsinki on a Russian ship 30 years ago. It was a simple pounded circle of bronze two sizes too big which the extended family that had been left in Latvia was happy to get at all. Ingrida was weeping then as the spires of Tallinn were receding and the Russian soldiers were yelling for us all to get inside so we wouldn’t see what military ships were in the harbor. As I comforted and then gently tried to move her away from the badly painted railing to the deck door, the perfect ring slid off and fell cleanly into the rolling waters. Its loss made Ingrida cry the more as we were shoved through the door into the ship’s barren center room by the soldiers with rifles and the shades on the few windows were pulled down and guarded.

I always see the little ring in my mind, the holy bronze buffed as golden as the female sun, when ever we sail into Eesti’s great harbor and the spires of her ancient churches rise up into the light. I kept telling Ingrida then, those many years ago, as we leaned together on thin plastic chairs taking what comfort we could from the warmth of each other, that we hadn’t really lost the little ring. It was there, in the sea, guarding a gate to an older world which we had just joined; an older world that somehow was still surviving by a simplicity of faith and an idea of promise… the faith which we had just pledged, the promise which we had vowed to struggle to keep.

The Beginning:

"Tēva zeme nepieder

ne kalnâ, ne lejâ,

pieder mātes villainites,

vaj rakstitas, nerakstitas."

"The Fatherland doesn't belong

in the mountains, nor the valleys,

it belongs in mother's patterned shawls,

written, unwritten."

Welcome to Baltic Imports: The Blog. You may know us in Minneapolis as the gift shop and lecturers of the same name. You may know us in Riga as folk artists and cultural researchers. Or you may just be getting to know us right here.

Since the 1970's, we have served those communities mentioned and many more as supporters of the preservation of Baltic culture, most especially in traditional folk arts such as pottery, amber, linen and wool textiles, and woodwork. In our home in Latvia, we strive to provide resources for artists committed to working in the spirit of our ancestors. In our home in Minnesota, we strive to educate and inform willing ears of the rich history and tradition of the old country.

We couldn't do this without our wonderful customers and students, and we recognize how blessed we are to be able to continue to travel through the Europe we love, and along the way meet so many talented beings who share the same pride of the Baltics as we do.

This blog is both a thank you to that experience, and a tool, to be used to further explore the observations and journeys we have taken in this adventure of finding our home no matter how near or far we are to The Baltic Sea. It is an open forum, where we encourage question asking and open discussion. It is a lesson to remark on great craftsmanship, and it is a memoir of a family's multi-generational cultural passion not to preserve, but to prosper.

We will begin with Sean's travel journal from the summer, shown here exclusively in chronological order, each entry offering new remarks of places not yet seen, and musings recalling older memories of having passed through before. From there, the essays are endless.

As always, Thank You and Enjoy.

Sincerely,

Sean, Ingrida, and the Baltic Imports Family