A Walk Around Riga, Latvia Part 1

This statue of Lenin's Rifleman is one of the few that survived the Soviet occupation and Latvian Independence. The soldiers were from Latvia.

 St Peter's Lutheran Church was built in the 13th century. The steeple was struck by lightning and destroyed in 1719. It took more than 20 years to reconstruct. It was a tradition for the master builder to place the final stone at the top of a structure in a ceremony. The master builder would drink from a special glass of wine that was made for the occasion. The tradition was that the glass would be thrown from the top of the steeple and shatter. The number of pieces it shattered into were supposed to represent how many years the structure would stand. This master builder threw the glass and it landed in a haystack! It only broke in two pieces, so the builder claimed that it would be two centuries not two years. Well, 200 years later in June 1941, German artillery caused the tower to collapse. It has since been rebuilt.

The steeple is so tall that it can be seen throughout the old medieval city. It is very helpful for navigating the narrow, windy  streets of cobblestones.

The Dome Cathedral, Riga Dom, was built in 1211 by Bishop Albert, the founder of the city. The city was founded when Bishop Albert was sent to the region on a mission to spread Christianity. It is the largest cathedral in the Baltic states and had the largest organ of its time with 6,700 pipes in the organ. During the Soviet era, it was used as a concert hall but returned to a church in the 1990s.