This is the last Thing of Latvia. Looking back, we have written about more than 30 different Things of Latvia. Some have proved popular, some not. Some have been well written, some less so. But of one thing we can be certain, in one thing we can take some pride: we have never stooped to writing about the "caurvējš".
While we may not have much in the way of oil reserves (excepting Norway) or gold deposits, the Baltic states and the wider Nordic region do have other valuable resource on which to draw. One of them is not even a physical thing, but is instead a concept: trust, says Ulf Andreasson from the Policy Analysis Department at the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Markus Meckl is a professor of history at the University of Akureyri in northern Iceland. He formerly taught in Rīga at the Latvian Cultural Academy, arriving in the year 2000 and staying for two and a half years. He still teaches each year at Rīga Stradiņš University in the media department.
By year-end, Latvia is to publish a trove of KGB (Soviet secret police) files that remained in the country after the collapse of the USSR. The process, known as 'lustration' and similar to that undergone in other countries with a communist past, will conclude with the index cards concerning about 4,300 agents being published, and researchers working with the documents have hinted that many well-known people are on the list.
In the 1970s and 1980s the United Kingdom had an amazing list of colossal and incomparable rock stars dominating the charts: David Bowie, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury et al.
Following parliamentary elections on the October 6, a record number - 31 - of the 100 seats in Saeima will go to women, which is above the EU average (30.4%) and well above the average in the rest of the world's parliaments (23.6%), writes Anna Ūdre for LSM.
If you happened to notice there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week, and you were in the mood to guess why, it would be reasonable to speculate that we at LSM were ill, lazy, drunk or out of ideas. Such surmises might be correct in one, several or all respects. However, we could quite easily maintain our dignity and reputation by answering that there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week tehnisku iemeslu dēļ or due to technical reasons.
A great deal of research has been done on the behavior of crowds, their psychopathology and their tendency to express the more regressive aspects of the human psyche, but as far as I am aware, none of these studies have focused on clapping in Latvia.
Pope Francis visits Latvia on September 24. The day has been declared a public holiday by the Latvian parliament. So here's a quiz about our visitor, the history of the Catholic church in this part of the world and some other Popetastic facts.
A couple of weeks ago our colleagues at the LSM Latvian-language service unveiled a new project they had been working on for a long time: a multiple choice quiz devised to give voters in the forthcoming Saeima elections some idea of their general political affiliation.
A bar-room acquaintance once told me that while travelling many years ago in Eastern Anatolia, he made the mistake of "tut-tutting" during a conversation. While a local was complaining at length about the difficulties of life in a remote village, he delivered what may even have been a tut rather than a full tut-tut as a gesture of sympathy and understanding at the many trials with which life likes to torture us.
LSM brings you another piece from the #3 issue of the Centenary Magazine made by the Satori.lv culture website and paid for by the Culture Ministry. In this one, poet and culture connoisseur Aivars Madris looks at Latvian drinking culture as recorded in local literature.
We bring you another piece from the #3 Centenary Magazine made by the Satori.lv portal and paid for by the Culture Ministry. This article by Jeļena Solovjova looks at ten Latvian startups - from the early 20th century to the present day - unearthing Latvia's diverse manufacturing history.
In cooperation with the Satori.lv culture portal, LSM is publishing pieces from their recently published centenary magazine. This piece probes one of Rīga's most colorful neighborhoods, the Maskavas priekšpilsēta or Moscow suburb. With a dark past and high crime rate in the 80s and 90s, it remains very much a "a city within a city", as described in this neighborhood profile by Agija Ābiķe-Kondrāte.
Seemingly without care and without anyone to care about them, street cats are legion across Latvia's cities.
In cooperation with the Satori.lv culture portal, LSM is publishing pieces from their recently published centenary magazine once a week. This piece, which appeared in the magazine under the title, On Latvian Parenting, delves deep into the search of what constitutes a Latvian upbringing. Author: journalist Santa Remere.
In the past we have written at length about the mighty dižkoki or "great trees" of Latvia. Huge, majestic, long-lived and (and if you believe all the way) serving as repositories of folkloric power, they are rightly venerated.
Journalists passing through Latvia occasionally ask me who is the most influential person in the country. I have little hesitation in replying: "Roberto Meloni."
"This is to certify..." begins a typical Pateicības raksts, or, perhaps the marginally inferior "This is to recognize..." or "This is to acknowledge..."
April 10 sees the opening of a major exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris dedicated to the art of the Baltic states. Titled Âmes Sauvages: Le symbolisme dans l’art des pays Baltes. (Wild Souls: Symbolism in the art of the Baltic states), it runs until July 15 and forms one of the cornerstones of Estonia's, Latvia's and Lithuania's international celebrations of their founding centenaries.
I've never studied Russian at school. I first made real friends with Russians a few years ago, at the age of twenty one. Nevertheless, I understand Russian on a good level and was recently able to translate a Russian short story into Latvian.
Discussions about the activities of Latvian soldiers in World War II are extensive but less is written about the post-war fates of combatants. While those who fought - willingly or unwillingly - for the Red Army were lauded as heroes by occupying Soviet forces, the fate of former
Latvian Legionnaires was quite different: incarceration in filtration camps and camps in the Gulag and decades of restrictions on work and various other aspects life.
Latvian Legionnaires was quite different: incarceration in filtration camps and camps in the Gulag and decades of restrictions on work and various other aspects life.
Latvia's non-resident banks -- financial institutions with a large proportion of clients based in other countries -- are attracting a lot of international attention at the moment, for all the wrong reasons.
It is a small step from being a sun worshipper to being a fire worshipper, which may go some way to explaining the popularity of candles (sveces) in Latvia. In summer there is the sun. In winter there is no sun capable of burning you very severely, so we must rely on candles.
Seeing as laiks, the word for time, also means 'weather', Latvians obviously have an intimate relationship with the elements and eternity.
Not many people know much about Latvian literature. My stranger, could you be an exception?
Children like to spot trucks from other countries and even adults get a little tremor of pleasure from seeing such things.
When Latvians move abroad they become perfect and carefree. This is something they would never say out loud, but it is what can be inferred from the tales of those left behind.
In Latvia, where a chain of round-the-clock liquor stores is branded Fuel (Degviela), it's no surprise that gas stations, too, cater to people wishing to tank up in more ways than one.
"I know only Latvian well," says the renowned translator and polyglot Dens Dimiņš.