It’s often in more obscure or out-of-the-way institutions that you stumble across the tales and artefacts that fit less neatly into the national storyline, the revealed preferences that show what the culture really values or fears deep down.
The Latvian Museum Association lists over 160 operating museums, meaning that there is one for around every 12,000 Latvians. This includes the well-funded tourist attractions of Riga, but just as in any country, there are a lot more museums that are remote, rarely open, dedicated to almost forgotten fragments of history, or that would simply be baffling to anyone from elsewhere.
It’s this latter group that this series is dedicated to: the wonderful unusual museums of Latvia. And we’re defining “unusual” basically however we like – it could mean unique, slightly uncanny, incredibly Latvian, or just, well, rather unusual.
Jūrkalne Storm Museum
Make it to the furthest, most sparsely populated reaches of Latvia’s westernmost province, Kurzeme, on a cool but sunny summer day and it’s easy to feel that you’ve landed in a rather blessed plot. Swathes of forest line the sandy beaches and lie in deep folds further inland, seeming thicker and more enticing than anywhere else in Latvia.
Sky-wide meadows are infiltrated at their verges by hazy clouds of wild flowers, bunched together by colour. Tiny villages are clustered at a servile distance from the onetime German manor house, each with their attendant stork couple settled down on top of a roadside pole.
And there are few more quietly stunning sights on this quietly stunning coast than the cliffs of Jūrkalne. At twenty metres the highest of their kind in Latvia, the cliffs tower above the narrow strip of beach below; the abrupt cut at the edge of the bluff is tranversed by wooden steps, which due to rapid erosion of this part of the seashore need to be reconstructed every few years. The suddenness of the precipice makes the ranks of upstanding firs at the top seem as though on a conveyor belt towards imminent doom, with a few in the vanguard already faceplanting themselves diagonally down the slope.
A walk just about anywhere along this coastline is a balm for the soul, and yet many wayfarers’ first glimpses of these picturesque shores have been overlaid by terror, lurching and rocking on raging seas or suddenly feeling a sickening clunk from beneath. The coast is prickly with lighthouses, with the Irbe Straits some 50 miles north presenting the biggest hazard to shipping. This is where the Estonian island of Saaremaa trails down like a scorpion’s tail to within a short boat ride of Latvia. It’s famous for its strategic importance and perilous shallows, but to reach Riga by sea it must be breached.
Some ten minutes’ walk from the cliffs of Jūrkalne, up in the rafters of a former pub you’ll find an idiosyncratic testament to the many who have come to grief in these treacherous waters. Opposite a miniature fishmongers and within view of the village’s Catholic church, the oddly named Museum of Storms (Vētru muzejs) collates a diverse range of items liberated from the deep, retrieved from shipwrecks or washed up on the shores, mostly close by to Jūrkalne.
Sunk in the shifting navy and turquoise half-light of the fathoms beneath the surface, a mock-up of a scuba diver hung from the ceiling shines a torch on the intriguing hoard washed together below. As you’d expect, there are anchors, boat wheels, wonky heavy-duty nails rusted multiple colours, skew-whiff rope ladders, life-rings and a fogged-up compass or two. But alongside them are a couple of vinyl records, ochre with rust or whatever it is that attacks vinyl underwater, a squashed tankard, the shinbone of an unfortunate mariner, delicately painted crockery, chipped and cracked but otherwise and more or less unscathed, and much else besides.
There’s even a letter written in Lithuanian, stuffed into a bottle and chucked into the sea; its author has apparently never been identified, although it looks to date from no more than 20 years ago. “I ask all Lithuanians [who visit] – maybe they can find this lady, it would be very interesting to know what happened further” says museum guide Inita Plēsuma.
The roots of the museum are in a popular exhibition originally staged at the Jūrmala City Museum, “Ships of the Deep”, which ran for several years starting in 2006. It was co-ordinated by probably the best-qualified person in the country to do so, diver Voldemārs Rains, the only underwater archaeologist in Latvia. While himself a native of coastal Jūrmala, just the other side of the Kurzeme peninsula, Rains cut his teeth in the field in the Russian Far East; under the Soviet occupation, the Latvian coast was a highly sensitive and restricted border zone, and these reaches, barely a hundred miles from Swedish territory, were the most closely monitored of all. It was only in 1989, with perestroika and its consequences well underway, that he finally received permission from the KGB to dive and investigate the sunken ships of the Baltic Sea.
As with the Jūrmala exhibition, many of the finds assembled at the Museum of Storms come from Rains’ personal collection, including the scuffed, rusted and discoloured ship’s bell of the Elbing, a German steamer which ran across a mine in the Irbe Straits in 1941. This was turned up by Rains in the Baltic Sea in 1995, on the directions of a local fisherman who knew of multiple wrecks in the area. Either other divers had previously reached the sunken ship, or something rather mysterious had taken place during its wartime career, as it was discovered that the swastikas printed on the underside of the onboard plates had been scratched off.
A study by Swedish scientists concluded that there were around 80,000 ships at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, and much of the exhibition concerns itself with famous vessels that found their doom on this alluring but deadly coast.
Most intriguing among them is the Saratov, which may well hold the title of the only boat ever to have been a seat of government (as well as constituting the entirety of the territory controlled). In early 1919, the leaders and military of the nascent Latvian state were pushed back by Soviet advances to the far western port of Liepāja – then, just a few months later, subject there to attacks from German forces with designs of their own. With their backs already to the wall, the only option was to take to the water on the Saratov – a Danish-built and Liepāja-registered steamship that before the war had worked the line to the eastern English port of Hull – which then moored close by under British naval protection.
They remained there for two months, with the Saratov becoming, in writer Kārlis Skalbe’s words: “a republic on the water…”.
We also learn about Latvia’s tiny interwar submarine fleet, composed of just two vessels, Ronis (“Seal”) and Spīdola. Both were commandeered by the Soviets after their occupation of Latvia and then sunk in order to block access to the port of Liepāja for the invading Germans. After successfully taking the city, the Germans raised the submarines from the depths and used them for scrap metal.
The Saratov met a similarly inglorious demise nearby. Handed over to Soviet Russia in 1920, it ran aground three years later in the unfamiliar waters around Akmeņrags, just 20 miles south of Jūrkalne. The passengers and crew were rescued, but the funnel and masts remained looming above the waves for some time afterwards, within view of the state it had assisted to bring into existence. The museum holds fittings from the heroic vessel.
In interviews, the now-retired Rains has repeatedly spoken about his wish for a maritime museum to be created in Latvia, and frustration at the apparent lack of local interest (Estonia has two comparable museums). The Museum of Storms, opened to some fanfare in 2017, seems to be a bit of a placeholder for that idea, and now has a slightly forgotten air – although Plēsuma tells me they do periodically receive donations of visitors’ own aquatic discoveries, pointing to an intact-looking storm lantern.
Relatively remote and indisputably tiny Jūrkalne is in logistical terms an eccentric choice for a museum with a wide intended audience – while a popular day trip and camping destination in summer, in the winter months visitors must be few and far between. But thematically it’s pretty on point.
And this isn’t just because of it lying alongside one of Latvia’s most notorious “ship graveyards”. A popular legend claims that the forerunner to the church just across the way was erected by a sailor caught in a tempest nearby – promising that he would build a church if God spared his life, on being delivered to safety in Jūrkalne he had to deliver on his vow. Appropriately, it’s said that both this and an earlier church, both closer to the beach, were washed away by the waves. In the current church, which dates from the 19th century, a sizeable model ship is suspended in the air alongside the altar. There is evidently a history here of things saved from the waves being granted a second lease of life ashore.
(In 2017, Latvian Television reported on the museum, as you can see below.)
