Viesturdārzs is Riga’s oldest park, and in spring 2021 it celebrated its 300th anniversary.

The park covers eight hectares. Its greatest assets are its old trees (as well as more recent additions), which are tended by the Riga Parks and Gardens Board. Until the First World War, it was called Ķeizardārzs – the Czar’s Garden – then during the first independent Republic of Latvia it was known as Viesturdārzs, in honour of the ancient Latvian ruler Viesturs. During the Soviet period, it was called Dziesmu svētku parks, or Song Festival Park, and today it is once again Viesturdārzs.

Three hundred years ago, most of Riga’s inhabitants lived in cramped conditions in the Old Town. So at the end of the 17th century, wealthy residents began building summer cottages with gardens in the area of Viesturdārzs. The city’s first plant nurseries also sprang up there.

Following a brutal siege, in 1710 the Russians conquered Riga and the Vidzeme region from the Swedes. These bloody events had a silver lining, because Czar Peter the Great wanted to modernise Russia and gain access to the sea. He built a fleet of sailing ships, and dreamed of observing his ports from grand palaces ensconced by elaborate royal gardens of the kind he had visited in Western Europe.&nbsp;

Peter decided to build a summer residence in Riga. It was to have a regular, Baroque-style garden based on a design by French architect Le Blond, adapted to the czar’s personal taste.

The ideal location for this palace was near the river and the port. Until large dams were built on the Daugava in the 20th century, this district was at the mercy of devastating spring floods. But having built his capital St. Petersburg on a swamp, Peter wasn’t afraid of the Daugava floodplain. At that time, nearby Andrejsala Island and the park’s territory were encircled by a river branch which today forms the large pond by Rūpniecības iela.

Planting began in the spring of 1721. Peter spent three months in Riga to ensure that nothing was left to chance.

Vidzeme’s landholders were ordered to bring 1,500 linden trees and 300 hazels to Riga. Another 4,000 trees and 12 baskets with shrubs and flowers were shipped in from Amsterdam. Orange trees, figs, yews and other fruit trees were planted, none of which survived the winter. Today, the park has around 600 trees, and it is hard to imagine where they found room for 6,000!

The work was initially done by 800 soldiers. But after a few months, it had become clear that military methods were inefficient, and management was taken over by Nikolai Legeband, the owner of the local nursery.

In the autumn of 1721, Peter personally planted an elm in the park. We’ll learn more about that tree at the next stop.

Viesturdārzs Park

We have arrived at the stone commemorating Peter the Great, which was laid beside his Elm of Peace in 1721. The inscription on the stone in Russian and German reads: “Czar Peter the Great, bringer of fame and wealth to Russia, planted a tree here with his own hands in 1721.”

The czar planted the elm on 28 September 1721, to mark the end of the Great Northern War and the Treaty of Nystad, under which Sweden ceded all of Livonia to Russia.

A descendant of the original tree was still growing here 15 years ago. Its replacement failed to thrive, so in 2018 an elm from a disease-resistant species was planted instead.

Usually, a garden reaches maturity 25 years after it is established. But since Peter died in 1725, he was not destined to see the fruits of his labours.

And now, let’s visit the cute little house with by Hanzas iela.

Image: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en">"Viesturdarzs PeteraI goba Riga"</a> by&nbsp;A.Buks is licensed under&nbsp;<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en">CC BY-SA 2.5</a>

The Monument to Peter the Great

This house was designed by Riga City Chief Architect Reinhold Schmaeling and built in 1900. Around 1910 it contained a newspaper kiosk, and shortly before the First World War it became a waiting room for the nearby tram terminus (and in the 1950s for the adjacent trolleybus stop). Since 1991, it has been a cafe and a champagne bar. After sitting empty for a long time, in early 2021 it was leased from the city by entrepreneurs Ivonna and Agris Pīrāgs, who have turned it into Riga’s smallest hotel.

Across the road is Vašingtona laukums, named in honour of the first US President George Washington in 1932. Before the Second World War, the building beside the square (recently given a striking black and yellow paint job) was the US Embassy. A plaque on the wall testifies that in August 1939, a young Harvard University student named John F. Kennedy stayed the night there during a summer vacation in Europe.

And now, head down the Hanzas iela sidewalk in the direction of the Daugava, where we will encounter Riga’s Triumphal Arch!

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Contact the Park Cottage: Ivonna Pīrāgs, phone 00371 29101099.

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The Park Cottage

Now, let’s take a closer look at the only Triumphal Arch in the Baltic States. It was installed in 1818 to commemorate Russia’s victory of Napoleon and stood on the corner of Brīvības iela and Klijānu iela, where the railway viaduct is today. Czar Alexander I attended the unveiling of the gate named in his honour. 
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On 1 May 1899, police attacked a group of striking workers gathered near the arch, including women from textile factories, killing 11 of them. This led to a wave of strikes and riots known as the Riga Rebellion. 
 
The arch is 10 metres high and just as wide, but the passageway for vehicles is only 4 metres wide. This made it unsuitable for a busy road, but moving a monument glorifying a czar is a delicate matter. Finally, in 1904, the construction of the railway provided a good excuse, and it was moved in sections by horses and carts further up Brīvības iela, near today’s Academy of Sports. There it continued blocking traffic, until in September 1936 - by which time Russian czars were no longer held in such esteem - it was shipped to Viesturdārzs. It was restored in 2018.

Now, let’s walk through the arch and stroll down the linden tree lane. Along the way, I’ll tell you more about Viesturdārzs in the 19th and 20th centuries. The story will take three minutes, so don’t rush!

Alexander Gate

The straight paths around the perimeter and the ponds follow Le Blond’s design. Peter and his Latvian-born wife Catherine certainly walked down the same laneway we are on now. Peter’s first residence was near the road and the tram tracks, opposite the small pond, while Catherine’s summer cottage was at the end of the path. Today, a building constructed in 2014 stands on the site. Despite its antique appearance is completely modern.

Legeband managed the park for its first nine years. Then for 25 years it was tended by Miķelis Šindlers, who is reputed to have made it a magnificent place. The plants had matured, the miles of hedges were perfect and the trees were stout and healthy. It was a true regular Baroque garden with strict geometry, straight paths, meticulously shaped hedges or bosquets, a large flowers bed opposite the residence and a fountain where the main paths met up. Today, there are several French-style bosquets in Ziemeļblāzma Park north of the city, while the Rundāle Palace Park is a superb example of Baroque-style landscaping.

You can see the layout of the park in the 18th century in the gallery.

In its18th century heyday, the park was a favourite recreation spot for city dwellers. But in the 19th century, it suffered a series of calamities - floods in 1807 and the deliberate burning of Riga’s outskirts to stall the arrival of Napoleon’s army in 1812.

In 1841, to save the Imperial treasury’s money on upkeep, Czar Nicholas I gifted Viesturdārzs to the city. At that time, the park was divided into two sections. Access to the area where we are standing now was restricted, because the governor general’s summer residence and several villas rented by city councillors were located at the end of the path. The rest was open to visitors from 6:00 am to 11:00 pm. In the 1840s, the park had a gardener and the city allocated funds to keep it in good order. But in 1851 the subsidy was withdrawn, and to fund the park’s upkeep, the council permitted concerts, theatre and circus performances and fireworks displays to be staged. A restaurant was opened in the 1860s, and in 1873 the arena for the First All-Latvian Song Festival was built.

Park History

While you were listening to the story, we arrived at a monument dedicated to the first All-Latvian Song Festival. In the summer of 1873, a timber concert arena was built here for 11,000 spectators top enjoy a concert given by 1,000 singers. I suggest you take a seat on the bench and let your mind wander back 150 years...

The abolition of serfdom in Kurzeme in 1817 and Vidzeme in 1819 – decades before the rest of Russia – was a landmark for the Latvian nation. Peasants gradually acquired land, and used the fruits of their labours to educate their children and develop their culture. And the Riga Latvian Society, founded in 1868 to unite the growing Latvian middle class in the city, decided to organise a song festival to highlight the nation’s musical traditions. It was funded and organised entirely by Latvians themselves.

In late June of 1873, Riga put on glorious weather to welcome 46 choirs and several orchestras from Vidzeme, Kurzeme and Zemgale (participants from Latgale would join them at later festivals.) On 26 June (8 July old style), the opening ceremony of the festival was held at the Riga Latvian Society house on Merķeļa iela, during which Kārlis Baumanis’ song “Dievs, svētī Latviju” (God Bless Latvia) was sung for the first time, which later became Latvia’s national anthem. The participants then made a procession through the city to Viesturdārzs. They sang 16 songs, including ten arrangements of Latvian folk songs and two original works by Baumanis.

The First All-Latvian Song Festival

In 1973, a monument was unveiled in Viesturdārzs to mark the centenary of the first song festival. Let’s take a closer look at it. At one end of the pond is a 36-ton stone with a granite plaque with the inscription: “On the centenary of the Latvian people’s Song Festival, 1873 – 1973.”

At the foot of the stone is a rectangular pool. This body of water features in maps of the park down the centuries. Initially, it was a canal stretching all the way to Hanzas iela. Today, on one side of the pool we see the sculpted portraits of composers Jānis Cimze, Jurjānu Andrejs, Jāzeps Vītols, Emīls Dārziņš, Emils Melngailis, Pēteris Barisons and Alfrēds Kalniņš, as well as fragments of their most famous choral works.

For political reasons, the Soviet-era monumental ensemble excluded Kārlis Baumanis. This was rectified during the 23rd Song Festival in 2003, with the addition of a portrait of Baumanis as well as the full text of the anthem. At the end of the gallery of portraits we see a cluster of bronze oak leaves with 100 in its centre. Over 150 years, the song festival tradition has flourished. Today, the concerts are held at a special arena in Mežaparks in Riga’s northern suburbs, with 13,000 singers on stage simultaneously.

Now, let’s stroll past the tennis courts while I tell you about master gardener Georg Kuphaldt, who revitalised the park before the First World War.

Image: <a href="https://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Att%C4%93ls:Diesmusvetki_100_1.JPG">"Diesmusvetki 100 1"</a> by&nbsp;<a href="https://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dal%C4%ABbnieks:Anon%C4%ABms" title="Dalībnieks:Anonīms">A.Buks</a>&nbsp;is licensed under&nbsp;<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">CC BY-SA 2.5</a>

Song Festival Centenary Monument

In 1857, changes in military technology meant that Riga’s medieval walls could finally be torn down. Then construction began on a new city of broad avenues and grand buildings, ornamented by lovely parks and gardens.

Born in Germany in 1853, in 1880 Georg Kuphaldt was appointed the chief gardener of Riga, a position he held for 34 years, during which time he transformed the natural landscape of the city. Kuphaldt lived beside Viesturdārzs, and it was his first reconstruction project in the city. If you have time, please listen to a five-minute story about this remarkable man.

Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Viesturdarzs_dikis_Riga.JPG">"Viesturdarzs dikis Riga"</a> by&nbsp;A.Buks&nbsp;is licensed under&nbsp;<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en">CC BY-SA 2.5</a>

Viesturdārzs & Georg Kuphaldt

Born and raised in northern Germany, Georg Kuphaldt was appointed chief gardener of Riga in 1880, at just 27 years of age. Kuphaldt recalled: At first, the appointment filled me with anxiety. I was afraid of working in a foreign place. I arrived in a dark and dreary town, with little street lighting and not even a horse-drawn tram.”

His first task was to reconstruct Viesturdārzs:

&nbsp;“In my first year in Riga, I was given the assignment of refurbishing the overgrown Czar’s Garden in the Dutch style. Where the linden tree avenues, regular ponds and squares were still somewhat recognisable, they could be restored in their original form. But most of the park had changed beyond recognition. Near Pētersala at the northern end, it had been severely damaged by roads built later. The plans for reorganisation had to be scrapped on account of the city claiming they were too expensive and residents accustomed to driving straight through the park.

However, insofar as possible, the long-neglected park was restored in its original form, and partially transformed in the English style. Boggy areas were meliorated, new trees were planted, lawns were laid, a fountain was installed, and a restaurant was opened. Now, the Czar’s Garden is amongst the most popular parks in Riga, both in winter and summer.”

In a career spanning 34 years, Kuphaldt turned Riga into a city of splendid parks, and he was also active in Tallinn and Parnu. He also designed over 100 manorial and city gardens from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

On the edge of Viesturdārzs where today we see new apartment blocks, Kuphaldt created a tree nursery where he tested the winter hardiness of rare species, and he also built a palm house. The adjacent registry office (Ziemeļu rajona izpilddirekcija) has a luscious, more recent orangery where newlyweds can pose for pictures after tying the knot.

Kuphaldt’s botanical arrangements were of such a quality that they attracted visitors from all of Europe, and his green endeavours are still thriving today. In 2019, the Riga Parks and Gardens Board won an international award for its sustainable and tireless work in tending these green areas.

In 1910, Czar Nicholas II visited Riga and gave Kuphaldt a gold watch with a diamond-studded eagle. This czar also visited Viestudārzs and was served coffee in a restaurant located where the Song Festival monument is today.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was a cataclysmic event for all of Europe, and it profoundly affected Georg Kuphaldt. For two centuries, the Russian state and Latvia’s German minority had peaceably coexisted. But after the kaiser declared war on the czar, ethnic Germans became enemies of the state. Refusing to believe that the Russian aristocracy for which he had designed so many parks and gardens would do him harm, Kuphaldt did not flee to Germany. Unfortunately, he was accused of spying and thrown in prison. “In the middle of March 1915, I was finally given permission to depart for Berlin. I was dismissed from my post in Riga, my property was confiscated and I was left with nothing. Late in life, I had to start all over again, somehow, somewhere.”

Kuphaldt returned to Riga for a six-week visit in 1934. The warm welcome from his former colleagues eased the pain of the wartime injustices. The Kuphaldts departed from Riga on a passenger liner, and as it glided down the Daugava, Georg and his wife Marta viewed their old home by Viesturdārzs, where they had raised their five children, for the last time. Georg Kuphaldt passed away just before his 85th birthday on 14 April 1938. He left his mark on every park in Riga.

Georg Kuphaldt

Go to the artwork with the green ducks. This is “Mala (The Edge), an artwork by Brigita Zelča-Aispure, which examines how perception operates – as you move your viewpoint, the message also changes. Here we see both a realistic and a minimalist aspect of the same phenomenon. So toy ducks are playing with real ones!

Artwork Mala - the Edge

On 18 November 1918, Latvia declared its independence, and following a struggle with Bolsheviks and renegade German forces, a free country was born. Many place names which served as reminders of German and Russian domination were changed. So, the Czar’s Garden was renamed in honour of the ancient Latvian King Viesturs, who in the 13th century led the Semigallians and Curonians into battle against the German crusaders.

The talented Andrejs Zeidaks was appointed as the new chief gardener of Riga. Zeidaks was born in Kuldīga, and for seven years he was worked under Kuphaldt, before travelling to Russia where he designed parks in St. Petersburg, Kiev and Kharkov. After returning to Riga, he made Viesturdārzs a pleasant place to relax, with sunlit lawns, a children’s playground, and regular fairs and concerts. He also thinned out the birch grove by the big pond, where one can still see divots in the earth, reminders of decomposed linden stumps.

Besides the Triumphal Arch, there were plans to move other monuments to the ancient regime to Viesturdārzs, such as the Victory Column which once stood opposite Riga Castle and the equestrian statue of Peter the Great which stood where the Freedom Monument is today. But this was halted by the Soviet occupation of 1940.

In addition to that bleak event, the record cold winter of 1939/1940 destroyed many introduced species in Viesturdārzs.

In the Soviet era, Viesturdārzs was a beloved spot for Riga residents to relax. To make it easier to get here, the terminus of trolleybus 1 was installed near the Park Cottage.

In the 1950s new garden beds were created, then in 1973 new benches, paths and children’s play areas were formed as part of the construction works for the Song Festival centenary. Although Viesturdārzs was officially renamed the Park of the First Latvian Song Festival, nobody could be bothered with so many words. So Latvians continued to call it Viesturdārzs, while local Russians preferred the name Peter’s Garden.&nbsp;

And a few more facts:

In the 1970s, all of the surviving wooden buildings in the park were torched in the middle of the night by a notorious pyromaniac.

In 1886, the first All-Russia Cycling Championship was held on a specially built track where the tennis courts are today. In 1986, a stone commemorating the centenary of this event was unveiled opposite Secondary School 66.

You will never see the park that you are enjoying today a second time. It is a living work of art, constantly growing and changing as the stout trees age and storms topple even healthy-looking specimens. Saplings grow tall and mighty. The flower arrangements in the beds change every year. New seasons bring fresh impressions.

The park was last refurbished in 1999, when the pathway surfaces were repaired, new benches were installed and the lighting was upgraded. In 2016, the perennial beds were expanded, and summer flowers are added to them every year. In springtime, crocuses bloom on the lawns and around the trees. In 2017, several species of hydrangeas were planted, which flower in July. Rhododendrons bloom on the other side of the path in June.

The garden beds are tended by the Riga Parks and Gardens Board’s Viesturdārzs team, led by Guntis Nerets. Guntis has a great talent for meticulously trimming hedges and bushes – look closely and admire his work throughout the park!

Arborists strive to save the old trees until the very end, as they are both beautiful and full of cavities in which birds, squirrels and bats make nests. Many species of moss and lichens grow on them. The trees are witnesses to the history of the park. The younger trees which quietly grow until they are ready to replace the old ones are less conspicuous. Every year, new trees and shrubs are planted in Viesturdārzs.

The most common types of linden trees in Viesturdārzs are of a Dutch variety. Although Dutch lindens were first brought to Riga 300 years ago, none of those have survived to this day. Dutch lindens are ideal city trees, as they are frost resistant, resilient after pruning, cover any scarring with bark, produce a lot of nectar and shed all their leaves in a single day in the autumn.

Common chestnuts were also introduced to Latvia in the spring of 1721. By the pond, the willows, black alders, poplars and aspens look good in all seasons. There are also many beeches. The dark fir tree with the long needles by the tennis courts, growing in a cluster with the larches, is a Weymouth pine.

Viesturdārzs Rename

Two fearsome beasts lurk in the middle of the park, near the big pond... The two Leopards were created half a century ago by sculptor Viktorija Pelše as her diploma project at the Art Academy.

The Leopards

Welcome to Viesturdārzs - Riga’s oldest park which&nbsp;in spring 2021 celebrated its 300th anniversary!

The park covers eight hectares. Its greatest assets are its old trees (as well as more recent additions), which are tended by the Riga Parks and Gardens Board. Until the First World War, the park was called Ķeizardārzs – the Czar’s Garden – then during the first independent Republic of Latvia it was known as Viesturdārzs, in honour of the ancient Latvian ruler Viesturs. During the Soviet period, it was called Dziesmu svētku parks, or Song Festival Park, and today it is once again Viesturdārzs.

Let's stroll together along this&nbsp;fabulous place while learning about its history, famous figures, and the first Latvian song festival. You will visit monuments, several open space artworks and the only triumph arc in the Baltic states!&nbsp;

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Three Centuries of History in Viesturdārzs

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Three Centuries of History in Viesturdārzs

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