Latvians Online is pleased to announce a new column about travel in Latvia – unusual destinations and the gastronomic delights they offer.

Flattened by frequent wars and smudged by heavy industry, Valmiera is not a beautiful looking place. But what this city of 25,000 in the heart of Vidzeme lacks in prettiness it more than makes up for with a winning attitude.

Take sports. To date, Valmiera’s athletes have brought home two Olympic golds (courtesy of BMX rider Māris Štrombergs in 2008 and 2012) plus a silver and bronze (for walkers Jānis Daliņš and Adalberts Bubenko in 1932 and 1936 respectively.) Add in a slew of medals won for Germany by champion dressage horse Rusty, born and bred near Lake Burtnieks just north of Valmiera, and Valmiera’s per capita Olympic ranking flies off the charts.

The town also excels in less sweaty ways. While the rest of Latvia struggles back after the crisis, its factories churn out stuff from fibreglass to fire extinguishers. Valmiera is home to one of Latvia’s top theatres, and a string of bars and clubs keep the students of Vidzeme University busy after school. And Valmiera is also home to a clutch of very good restaurants.

Top of the food chain is Dikļi Palace. This magnificent neo-Baroque manor just west of Valmiera hosted the first ever play performed in Latvian (a translation of Schiller’s The Robbers staged in 1818 with local peasant actors) and the first song festival in 1864, and today it is showing the nation how to cook. Celebrity chef Valters Zirdziņš creates menus based around game and produce so fresh and local you can literally watch farmers offering produce at the kitchen door. Hook some “matje herring tartar, rye bread, quail egg and cream”, swim over to “sturgeon fillet prepared in citrus butter with cauliflower puree and ginger carrot” then tipple with Valmiermuiža dark beer ice-cream with raspberries and caramel. The main dining room has a hunting lodge feel and a smart casual dress code, and if that’s a bit plebeian one may reserve the private dining suite. On the summer terrace you can savour Latvian-bred steaks and magnificent views of the manor gardens. And if you can’t move a muscle after dinner, you can crash in the four-star hotel littered with antiques or enjoy a massage with beer hops in the spa.

You can also find an elegant atmosphere and haute cuisine with local ingredients at Rātes Vārti. One of Valmiera’s oldest restaurants, the “Town Hall Gates” is a genteel, unrushed island in the centre of town. Park yourself in the Provencal-style dining room or the street-side terrace and feast on “fried river trout in herb butter” or “cheese parfait with black plumb tea sauce”. The restaurant’s owners also cater for big celebrations at the Brūtes (Sweethearts) events complex just south of Valmiera.

A few minutes’ walk from Rātes Vārti, Liepziedi un Rozmarīns is one of Latvia’s best pizzerias. Set picturesquely between Valmiera’s castle ruins and the Gauja River in a centuries-old bakery, “Linden Blossoms and Rosemary” is a marriage between fine Vidzeme produce and the Žentiņš family’s love affair with all things Italian.  You won’t find any pineapple or pickles here; only traditional toppings are used and the pies are baked to crispy perfection in a wood-fired oven. The “Al Salmone” and the “Frutti di Mare” are especially scrumptious. In summer groups of ten or more can attend the “pizza school” at the owners’ property “Vīnkalni” near Valmiera, where you learn to roll dough and sprinkle cheese amidst the rolling hills and storks’ nests. Of course, you get to eat your creations and a coffee and tiramisu are included too.

Compared to other towns its size, Valmiera positively buzzes after dark.  It even has its own theatre restaurant, Ceturtais cēliens, in the basement of the Valmiera Theatre. Joyfully mingling thespian nostalgia with voluptuous seventies furnishings, the dishes at “Act Four” like “beef-mushroom stroganoff in brandy sauce” and “dark chocolate mousse with strawberry soup” also sound a bit flared and side-burned. But an occasional time warp can be fun, and the potato pancakes we devoured last visit were outstanding. If you want to chew to a different beat, bop over to the Parks jazz club. On nights when Latvia’s top jazz, blues and rockabilly outfits play you won’t care if the food is cold (and you’ll be lucky to find a table), but when things quieten down they do nice lasagna and ribs.

If readers of this column earlier this year were rather ‘referendumed out’, then the bad news is that we may be looking at another referendum in Latvia on a confronting issue, though this time we may not get all the way through the referendum process.

While the referendum on granting Russian the status of a second official ‘state’ language was rejected by three-quarters of voters in February, a second signature-gathering campaign has begun on the proposition to grant all non-citizen residents automatic Latvian citizenship.

Last week organisers of this campaign handed a list of over 12,000 signatures supporting this proposal to the Central Electoral Commission. In case anyone has forgotten the technicalities of seemingly referenda-happy Latvia, the issue stems from the fact that there is a very low threshold to begin a referendum process in the country. Anyone wishing to get a referendum proposal up must in the first instance gather 10,000 notarised signatures supporting the proposal. If these are gathered, the Central Electoral Commission organises a second round of signature gathering. If one-tenth of the electorate signs (currently just over 150,000 voters), then the proposal goes to the Saeima for consideration. If the Saiema nevertheless rejects the proposal, it goes to a full referendum. The proposal for Russian as a second state language went through all these steps, but this proposal on citizenship may not get all the way.

A key factor in the second-round signature gathering success of the language referendum was the decision by leader of the Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas Centrs) popular leader and Rīga Mayor Nīls Ušakovs to support and sign for the referendum, despite the official policy of his party declaring they supported only one state language – Latvian. This time around, Ušakovs has declared he will not sign for the proposal and will not participate in a referendum if it comes to pass. Now, it must be rememberd that in the campaign for the Russian language referendum he also at an early stage said he did not support it, only to reverse his decision in the second round of signature gathering.

However, additional factors may weigh with him now. As this referendum, if it comes to pass, has no more hope of being accepted than the language referendum, to put his weight behind two defeated referenda initiatives woud cast him in a poor, opportunistic light. But personally also Ušakovs, a Russian, is himself a naturalised Latvian citizen, who passed the citizenship test (language plus knowledge of Latvian history and constitution) and rather famously declared it was not a difficult test. It has been mooted that many who did in fact go through this procedure to gain citizenship (over 120,000 so far) would not themselves be happy with a proposal to now grant citizenship to all without needing to go through such a test. However, to take the spotlight off Ušakovs, a number of other members of SC are supporting this referendum campaign, and once again we may see a very divided SC, as we saw with the language referendum

The organisers of this referendum initiative are different from the shadowy group (of largely non-citizens) who initiated the language referendum, but equally politically interesting. This time it is the old Soviet-oriented hard-line party For Human Rights in a United Latvia (Par Cilvēku tiesībām vienotā Latvijā – PCTVL) that is behind the move. This Party, supported largely by ex-Communist Party members and Soviet sympathisers, has been prominent as an opposition party in post-independence Latvia, but has not secured a place in the Saeima at the last two elections (parties need to get 5% of the vote to gain any representation). It has seen a lot of its former support drift away to the more centrist Harmony Centre, but believes it can regain some ground with Harmony Centre’s own inability to gain a place in Latvia’s coalition government, and the radicalization of ethnic politics brought about by the language referendum.

Although not currently represented in the Saeima, PCTVL does have a deputy in the European Parliament, veteran Tatjana Ždanoka, who has opposed Latvian citizenship policies since their inception and is determined to restore her party’s fortunes. But recently another voice adding to the mix has been that of the odious Vladimir Lindermans, the National Bolshevik initiator of the language referendum, who has claimed that all possible pressure will be put on Ušakovs and SC to support this referendum too. Meanwhile, those opposing this referendum want the Constitutional Court to decide on whether such a proposal to grant automatic citizenship is itself against the Constitution…

Changing the referendum criteria – by another referendum?

But that is not all on the referendum front! The earlier language referendum alerted many to how easy it was to set the referendum process in motion, and particularly the low 10,000 signature threshold in the first round. The coalition and other parties have been in a constant state of agitation over how to tackle this problem: twice now the President has sent back for consideration draft laws that the Saeima has passed on altering these requirements. The coalition has proposed to raise the bar on referenda by initiators having to sign up 150,000 themseves to begin the process in the first round, in place of the current 10,000. As an interim transition measure, until 2015 initiators would have to sign up 50,000 supporters in the first round.

Other issues covered by new laws would include controls over financing of referenda initiatives (currently there are no stipulations) and the means of recording signatures. However some parties have suggested making a number of constitutional amendments to ensure certain items in the constitution cannot be changed by a referendum. In the most ludicrous move, the latest version of the law would have been accepted by the President but the two opposition parties SC and the Greens & Farmers Union (Zaļo un zemnieku savienība) petitioned the President to not promulgate the law: under Latvia’s constitution one other way to initiate a referendum is if one third of the Saeima members propose to have a referendum on a law passed by the President. So, there was even a prospect of having a referendum on what the critieria for future referenda should be! All in the name of having fewer future referenda…? While all of this has been going on, the coaliton itself has now split over what the first round criteria should be.

In the coming weeks the coalition in particular needs to work hard to present one united view of the legisation, and something that the opposition Green & Farmers Union, which earlier was onside with the intended reforms, can also agree to. We will also see if the second round of signature gathering for the citizenship referendum will be organised by the Central Electoral Commission (many are urging it to not accept the proposal), and if so, if the required number of signatures are gained. At the moment it may appear unlikely, but there have already been too many surprises in the referendum merry-go-round to make any predictions certain.

 

Even though two time Olympic gold medalist Māris Štrombergs was asked to be Latvia’s flagbearer at the closing ceremonies, Štrombergs and Latvia’s BMXers decided that the honour should go to Ineta Radēviča who had missed a bronze medal in the long jump by just 1cm.

In a press release Latvia’s Olympic Committee reported that after making their decision, the BMXers sought out Radēviča who, overcome with emotion, agreed. She was quoted saying that this was the best thing that’s happened to her in London.

On the last day of competition there were no surprises and Latvia’s medal count stayed at one gold and one bronze. As of late Saturday, Latvia was 48th in the official medal standings where golds count more than silvers and silvers more than bronze. Meanwhile Lithuania pulled in a sprint canoeing silver on the last day of competition to up their count to four medals including a gold and finished tied at 40th while Estonia trailed at 61st with a silver and a bronze.

Latvia’s last hopefuls, pentathlete Denis Čerkovskis ended up 19th, wrestler Armands Zvirbulis did not make it past the quarter-finals, sprint kayakers Krists Straume and Aleksejs Rumjancevs placed 3rd in the B final which put them in 11th place overall while racer walker Igors Kazakevičs came in 45th over 50km.

Viewers of the Games no doubt noticed that there were faces and names that one would not normally associate with the country whose colours the athletes were carrying. Not surprising in this day of mass global movement and dual citizenship. One such athlete was Sanita Pušpūre, a 30 year old Latvian now from Cork in Ireland. Pušpūre competed for Ireland in the women’s single sculls which is a rowing discipline. She finished 1st in the C final putting her 13th overall. Pušpūre has competed internationally for Latvia but qualified for the Olympics for Ireland. Traditional sports such as Gaelic football, hurling and rugby are popular with the Irish leaving the field wide open for recent immigrants in others.

Latvia maintained its medal streak at the London games. They have come home with at least one medal from each Summer Olympics since the 1932 at Los Angeles when legendary walker Jānis Daliņš took the silver in the 50km race. That of course does not include games held while Latvia was occupied. Moreover, high profile wins this year in BMX cycling and Beach Volleyball mean that the name Latvia was seen and heard by millions around the world.