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.
"You can't please all of the people all of the time," Abraham Lincoln said (quoting poet John Lydgate) back in the days when American presidents were renowned for their wisdom, broad reading habits and their way with words.
Foreigners love to moan about Latvia's roads and road users. The dangerous drivers, the disrepair, the lack of signs, the inability to parallel park. Let's imagine I've written all those pieces and you've read them and found them a bit disappointing.
Boiled eggs, mayonnaise, marinated gherkins: all of them I can eat, and all of them I don't particularly like. Combine them and you have the basic chemistry of the pre-eminent Latvian salad, rasols, so it is fitting that rasols was the thing that introduced me to an important but hidden concept within Latvian society: pretending to like things a bit more than you really do.
Pensioners and others with health problems are being targeted by unethical advertising campaigns in which fictitious medical professionals recommend the use of humble vitamin pills to cure everything from deafness to parasitic infestation, an LSM investigation reveals.
Nawras Riga, whose surname is shared with the Latvian capital, is a gray-haired radiologist in Syria's Aleppo. He wears a ring, almost two centuries old, on his finger. It's amber, and it's a souvenir from Latvia, passed from generation to generation in his family. He is also the owner of Riga Palace, a hotel in Aleppo, the only one currently kept open in the war-torn city.
There's a peculiar tradition on Miķeļi (September 29), known in English as Michaelmas, for kids to bring homemade trinkets, food and other things to school for sale. It could be seen as an attempt to instill entrepreneurial spirit among young people, but wherever there are children involved, things are bound to slide off course.