Latgale Trip V3 Online

Thirty minutes east. Andrupene is not a museum. It is a living village of potters. I visit the workshop of , 84, whose hands are cracked like dry lakebed. He throws a bowl in 90 seconds, then explains the glaze: local sand, birch ash, and a secret he calls “zaļais spēks” (green power). I buy a jug shaped like a rooster. He laughs: “Tas dziedās tikai tad, kad būsi laimīgs.” (It will crow only when you are happy.)

Walk from the fortress to – an Orthodox cathedral of brick and five gold domes. Unlike Rīga’s tidy churches, this one is raw. Inside, no pews. Worshippers stand. Women kiss icons. A deacon chants in Old Church Slavonic. I light a candle for my grandmother, who fled Eastern Europe in 1944. The flame trembles. So do I. latgale trip v3

Rēzekne is often dismissed as grey, post-industrial, forgotten. V3 forced me to look again. The city’s heart is the – a towering, brutalist-symbolist sculpture of a woman holding a cross, erected in 1939 and defiantly restored after Soviet neglect. She stands on a hill overlooking the railway yards. From her feet, you see the real Rēzekne: not the crumbling factories, but the wooden houses with sky-blue shutters, the Orthodox church with a green dome, and – crucially – the new Latgale Culture and History Museum (reopened 2025 after a decade of renovation). Thirty minutes east

But V3 is not about despair. The fortress’s eastern wing houses the – because Rothko, the abstract expressionist, was born in Daugavpils (then Dvinsk) in 1903. The centre’s current exhibition: “Black on Grey: The Latgale Years.” Rothko never painted Latgale directly, but his late, dark canvases – those floating rectangles of maroon, charcoal, and deep blue – are Latgale. They are the landscape of lakes under storm clouds, of faith without dogma, of silence that speaks. I visit the workshop of , 84, whose