Turn off the main Riga-Liepāja highway a few miles before its final destination, at the small town of Grobiņa, then head north through light copses and past millponds, a scatter of wind turbines turning stolidly off to the right. Before too long, you’ll see a muddy-coloured and intermittently bare hill rising above the lightly rolling countryside, abruptly truncated at its peak. Nearby, vast grey barns, from which an incessant tinkling emanates, are lined by seagulls and other scavengers; every now and then, they scatter as one like breadcrumbs thrown from a hand.
This is the landfill and recycling site Ķīvītes (“Lapwings”), operated by the company Liepājas RAS, and this is where much of the industrial, agricultural and household waste from Liepāja, Grobiņa and the surrounding area meets its end. It’s kept out of sight (not to mention the other senses) for a pretty evident reason, and most would assume anything disposed of here is best left well alone.
And yet, through the automatic gates, past the waiting lorries and up the stairs of the main administrative building beyond, is waiting a collection of objects, large and small, attractive and otherwise, which have been preserved despite the intentions of their onetime owners – and that now constitute a wild, eclectic mash-up of Latvia’s recent and not-so-recent history.
As a sign in the corridor outside the one-room museum points out, “many interesting items, which could be viewed as striking testaments to their time, end up in the rubbish”. The story here began more than a decade ago, when staff at Ķīvītes rescued a pūra lāde, the hefty and delicately decorated dowry chests often found in this part of the world, that had been discarded among the waste at the site. Having narrowly escaped a fate of being pecked by birds, smothered by rubbish and slowly consumed by the earth, it initiated the collection, which now tops 2,000 items.
Striking testaments to their time, these certainly are. Inside, a Russian Orthodox icon gazes out, pointedly ignoring the football match pennant hanging just adjacent. The latter, pristine white despite its sojourn in a rubbish heap, comes from FK Liepāja’s 2017 Europa League tie against Belfast club Crusaders FC (the Northern Irish visitors were sent packing, losing 2-0).
Nearby, a spinning wheel, apparently originating from Lithuania, pokes out above a wad of what looks like Monopoly money. These cartoonish notes with their faded colours and simple designs are Latvian rubles (popularly known as repši after Einars Repše, later on prime minister but at that time chief of the Bank of Latvia), and were in fact legal tender for around nine months in 1992 and 1993, as the country moved slowly from the Soviet ruble to the revived pre-occupation currency, the lats.
Close by, there’s a framed Bible verse dating from the interwar period or perhaps earlier, its admonitory moral message a strain to read, as the Latvian diacritical marks have not yet settled and solidified into their modern positions. It sits next to a Soviet-looking cookery book promising coverage of cheese and cheese-based foods, and is overlooked by a khaki-coloured gas mask. A portrait of Lenin is almost obscured by a rotary phone and a ladybird-decorated boombox.
Across the room we find a cluster of musical instruments. There’s a kokle – a stringed Latvian folk instrument with a jangling, slightly haunting tone, which could be described as sounding like a rippling brook or leaves soughing in a light breeze, if all these natural elements were made of incredibly infinitesimally thin and delicate metal. Alongside are some objects that look a little like guitars but seem more anachronistic. A lute? A balalaika? There’s also a compact retro record player with a selection of Yugoslav folk tunes on the turntable, put out by Melodiya, the state-run label of the Soviet Union.
“One of the most frequent questions is: how could someone have thrown that out?” Laima Druva, environmental management specialist at Liepājas RAS, says of the comments staff receive from visitors, mostly from the surrounding south Kurzeme area, though occasionally having travelled from further afield. “That’s the reason this is the Museum of Unappreciated Things: because someone could no longer see any point in these things and wanted to get rid of them.”
It’s certainly not hard to understand why someone downsizing or spring-cleaning might conclude that they have no particular need for a kokle or a balalaika in their day-to-day life, but these examples are beautifully crafted, if cracked or otherwise worse for wear.
There are, as is inevitable with a collection of abandoned and anonymous objects, tantalising mysteries: just what was the emotional significance of this black-and-white photo of a river, sunshine dapples showing up as blanks, that someone not only developed but framed it? Why does this eccentric and possibly black-market English-language globe, despite doing a creditable job for most of Europe, dispense with capital letters for evidently insignificant locations like “munich”, and with comprehensible and indeed visible borders for much of the Balkans?
A TV screen placed on the floor has handles affixed to its sides, and a control pad below featuring buttons with brusque, baffling commands such as “LOST TARGET” and “PANEL BRILL”. Druva can’t identify it with certainty, but speculates that it most likely comes from a ship and was used for geolocation – explaining that “as we are a city by the sea”, nautical-related offloads sometimes find their way to the site.
However, other artefacts speak precisely to a time and place, a moment arrested in time before history spooled out. There are sheafs of the interwar paper of record, Jaunākās Ziņas (The Latest News), and the associated entertainment magazine Atpūta (Leisure), both founded by Emīlija Benjamiņa, the fabulously wealthy, glamorous and well-connected “press queen” of independent Latvia, recently described by director Kristīne Želve as the country’s “first influencer".
One edition in particular of Atpūta must have been among the last ever, printed in summer 1940, just after Latvia was formally and unwillingly swallowed up by the Soviet Union. A grim pair of Communist functionaries graces the cover, while a back-page feature exhorts, wisely, “Let’s Learn to Speak Russian!”, providing relevant grammatical and vocabulary exercises. Benjamiņa – who remains a figure of intense public fascination even today, as a 2021 seven-part docudrama series telling her life story on Latvian TV testifies – is still listed as editor. Little more than a year later she was dead from dysentery in a labour camp in Perm Krai, having been deported to Russia by the occupying power, along with many thousands of her compatriots.
Since the end of that regime, Latvia’s waste indicators have shifted considerably: in 2017 the quantity discarded was treble the rate of 15 years earlier; although even then, the country was still among the EU members with the lowest levels per capita. This general trend, if perhaps not its speed, seems inevitable, given that the shift from an economic order characterised by chronic shortages and mend-and-make-do to one where supplies are seemingly infinite for those with the means to buy them.
One thing brought out very clearly by the museum’s collection is that while the Soviet Union notoriously struggled to produce sufficient consumer goods, and, at certain junctures, even sufficient food for its population, it certainly did not stint on the manufacture of natty little pin badges adorned with city crests or the logos of sporting events.
Still, with increasing alarm at the disastrous impact of the currently dominant economic system on the planet’s creaking ecosystems, mend-and-make-do is very much in vogue. And the museum has an environmental slant simply by virtue of its existence: these things may be unappreciated, but they’re clearly not useless, even if their use lies only in the diversion they provide to others. It certainly seems to inspire those who make it out here with an idealistic fervour: the most recent comment in the visitors’ book declares “Society has to change its attitude. Behaviour has to become more responsible!”. Which is hard to disagree with, if lacking in specificity.
On the forecourt outside, alongside recycling bins, wooden signs point out both the museum and a mysterious place called the “junk room”. This space, housed in a nearby shipping container, was the first reuse centre in the Baltics when it opened, allowing people to bring in and exchange selected unwanted household goods.
Inside, a discovery is waiting: someone has correctly anticipated that an old hardback Estonian-Latvian conversational dictionary with a simple key design on its cover might find an appreciative home elsewhere. The system works.
