Dear fellow Latvians around the world,

There is a proposal to rename a Riga street from Basteja
bulvaris to its former name : Zigfrida Annas Meierovica bulvaris. 
As many of you know Meierovics was the very effective foreign minister who stood up for Latvia in international circles in the early 1920s.  Below are instructions in Latvian what website to access, etc.
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ZigfridsAnna Meierovics bija visu laiku izcilakais valstvirs.  Patlaban Rigas dome ar Interneta palidzibu veic aptauju par tautas noskanojumu saja jautajuma. Nobalsot var Rigas Domes majas lapa (lapas kreisas puses malina ir attieciga rutina.)

http://www.riga.lv/LV/Channels/

Thanks for the heads up! I’m delighted to see that the current tally is 83% in favor of Meierovica bulvāris.

Vysu lobu,
/P

Right on! Basta Basteja! Let’s go for Meierovičs!

Stephen

Two questions -

Not that I disagree with the honorific, but “Basteja” was not a Soviet moniker, was it?

Was it common to give males “Anna” as a name (even a middle name)??

Matronyms aren’t common. His mother, Anna, died twelve days after his birth, and his father then gave him the second name. (Makes me think of Remarque and Rilke, though...)

The council responsible for monuments and odonyms voted down the change on Thursday, almost unanimously (the lone dissenter being the chair, Ojārs Spārītis).

Basteja bulvāris is the original name—it became Meierovica bulvāris in 1929, Padomju bulvāris in 1940, Deutschordenring in 1941, and was again Padomju bulvāris until 1990.

Vaida Villeruša published a fervent polemic against renaming Basteja bulvāris here.

I disagree with her on most every point.

Lielisks piemērs: kad Francijas valdība ieteica pārdēvēt Bastīlijas laukumu Šarla de Golla vārdā, atbilde bija - vēsture ir neskarama! Vai tāpēc Šarls de Golls ir mazāk cienījams?! Toties mums Jānis Stradiņš paziņo: “Šoreiz Rīgas vēsture jāupurē Meierovica vārdā!” Un to saka par pirmo ielu Ārrīgā, kur vēsturiskie nosaukumi vairs tikai uz vienas rokas pirkstiem skaitāmi - Akas, Dzirnavu, Stabu, Skolas.

I never heard of a proposal for changing the name of the Place de la Bastille—but the historic Place de l’Étoile was indeed named for de Gaulle (even if most people still call it l’Étoile). If to use the example of Paris—it fails. Many historic names in Paris have been changed—Washington, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy have “erased history,” not to mention Van Gogh, Gershwin and George Bernard Shaw.

“Vēsture ir neskarama”? I can’t agree—it isn’t fixed at a particular point in time, and certainly not at a point of origin. The point that most of the streets in the Center, outside the Old Town, do not bear their original names would seem to run counter to her argument. Smilšu ceļš, Pēterburgas iela, and Aleksandra iela all precede Brīvības iela; it’s Brīvības that matters to most of us, not Ļeņina, Hitlera, or the earlier, “more authentic” odonyms.

The silly arguments about difficulty with orthography have now segued into arguments about the standard length of addresses.

Villeruša does great damage to her argument with the closing paragraph:

Kāds krietni jaunākas paaudzes pārstāvis man skaidroja: tie, kuriem bija kādas idejas, tie, kuri izturējās ar pietāti pret saviem priekštečiem plašākā skatījumā, ir veci vai miruši. Tie, kuriem ir nauda, samaksās un nosauks jebkuru ielu savā vārdā. Man naudas nav. Ja būtu, nopirktu Basteja bulvārim tā nosaukuma neaizskaramību uz visiem laikiem. Tagad varu vien cerēt uz Rīgas domes godprātību.

So, unless we stick to a sclerotic view of history, the nouveaux riches will redraw our maps? Changing the name of Basteja bulvāris doesn’t erase the memory of die Entwicklung Rigas zur Großstadt; we still have a Vaļņu iela and a Bastejkalns. Some are saying that the 1929 renaming was an instance of Germanophobia. That may be so—we were rather adamant about erasing the Germanic between the wars, esp. after 1934—but Z.A. Meierovics was a genuine national hero across the Latvian spectrum. The whole country came to a standstill for his funeral in 1925. The year the boulevard was renamed, the monument in Meža kapi was erected. How does his resting place fare in our time? Another sad tale of muttishness, of course.

This isn’t changing Kosmonautikas gatve to Džohara Dudajeva iela—this is rechristening a street that already bore the name of someone to whom we owe, in large part, Latvia’s de jure existence. This is neither an ephemeral vogue nor purchased monicker. (And again on the immutability of origins—by that logic, shouldn’t Andrei Sakharov give way to Iron Felix? Should all the padnosaukumi in the mikrorajoni remain forever?)

We now have a Čaka iela (still Marijas to Blaumaņa/Avotu). Resplendently appropriate, naktstauriņi and all—he deserves the street he sang of. It strikes me as inane to insist upon original names—much of Rīga, as she points out, bears other names. Valdemārs, the Germans’ despised Merkel, Kalpaks, Barons, Rainis, Aspazija… they all have their names immortalized in that area (Aspazija in the very same boulevard!). They reflect the period when Rīga became an increasingly Latvian city and then the capital of the Republic, at least as important a shift in the city’s history as the tearing down of the walls—and the restoration of which we theoretically live in.

Vysu lobu,
/P

A response to Vaida Villeruša by Pēteris Bolšaitis --

“Par Meierovica bulvāri un Latvijas dzimšanas dienu”

/P

Peteris Cedrins - 15 April 2008 01:29 AM

A response to Vaida Villeruša by Pēteris Bolšaitis --

“Par Meierovica bulvāri un Latvijas dzimšanas dienu”

/P

Thanks for the heads up P. Definitely worth reading, if solely to peel the onion that is Rīga and begin to comprehend the layers upon layers of history and “ownership” reflected in the street names alone!