The Buildings of Daugavpils

The Old Town of Daugavpils is about 25 square blocks of early to late nineteenth-century buildings in various states of repair and disrepair. I'll be posting lots of more photos of them in the weeks and months to come, but this morning was sunny -- something that seems to be atypical of Latvia this time of year -- so I thought I had better take some photos while the taking was good.

Riga gets all the credit for having lots and lots Art Nouveau buildings, justifiably so. But Daugavpils also has some beauties, such as this wonderful building.

Daugavpils also has a pedestrian mall that's about eight blocks long, and it was one of the first in Latvia, apparently. It is lined with building after building with fancy brickwork and lovely scrolls and curlicues and anything else you could possibly imagine in mortar. Here are just a couple of random ones:

The first is just a typical street corner. The building itself sells mebeles or furniture. (This must be distantly related to the French meubles, "movables," which means the same thing.) The second is a tejas un kafijas veikals -- coffee and tea store where you buy teapots, expensive European coffeemakers, loose tea, and coffee beans. In general, if you want to translate something that you read on a store sign, go into the store, poke around and look at what they are selling, and you are likely to figure it out.

The upper stories of these buildings are flats that are generally occupied, depending on the state of the building. Some building clearly need work, but even if the ground level is unoccupied, often the upper stories are full of flats. So Old Town Daugavpils is full of people who live there; it doesn't empty out at night the way so many American cities do. The pedestrian mall is busy from sunrise till well after sunset. It is a pleasure to people watch on it, and will become more so when the weather gets better.

One of the pleasures of wandering around Daugavpils is looking at all the old buildings. Of course, here and there a building fell into such disrepair that it came down and was replaced by something more twentieth-century in design -- that is to say, plain, stark, and frankly not very interesting. But if the architecture does not always respect the streetscape that it is imbedded in, in general the scale of the architecture does. Thankfully, there are no enormously hulking buildings that are totally out of line with what is surrounding them. To its credit, Daugavpils got that right.