#dundaga

Dundaga Shire, Latvia

I thought I’d learn a bit more about Latvia by looking through the different regions. I particularly want to pick someone associated with each place to make it personal. To make it even more personal I’ll look for opportunities for linking to my parents’ lives, but that will not be always possible since there are lots of nooks, and my parents didn’t really travel widely.

I start with Dundaga - the pointy bit sticking out into the Baltic Sea - in the western Courland region (Kurzeme in Latvian). In some ways it is an odd place to start, since it is one of the least Latvian, since the majority of people living there were not Latvian, but Livonians, speaking the Livonian language, very different to Latvian, and instead much more closely linked to Estonian and Finnish.

The Livonians were great sailors, and the marshlands below Dundaga isolated them from Latvian farm communities helped them maintain their identity into the 20th Century. By sea they connected with their Estonian cousins. However the world wars, and Soviet cultural movements aimed to erase the Livonians as a distinct ethnic and lingustic group.

To some Livonian is now an extinct language. In the top right we see Grizelda Kristiņa (1910-2012) who was the last fluent Livonian speaker alive.

Bought these from BeakersWorld on Etsy.