Latvia

Latvia wraps around a broad gulf of the Baltic, with a long, sandy shore and the resort strand of Jūrmala. The Daugava crosses the country from the east to reach the gulf. Forest covers about half the land, with bogs and meadows between. In Vidzeme the Gauja has carved a valley of red sandstone cliffs around Sigulda, Latgale in the east is dotted with lakes, and Kurzeme ends at Cape Kolka, where the gulf meets the open sea.

Curonians, Latgalians, Semigallians and Selonians lived here beside the Finnic Livs, who gave their name to Livonia. German crusaders founded Riga in 1201, and a German landowning nobility held sway for seven centuries under Polish-Lithuanian, Swedish and finally Russian rule. Duke Jacob of Courland even sent colonists to Tobago and the Gambia in the seventeenth century. Independence was declared in November 1918; Soviet and Nazi occupations followed from 1940, with mass deportations to Siberia, and independence was restored in 1991.

Latvians gathered their folk songs, the short dainas, with near-religious care: Krišjānis Barons filed hundreds of thousands of them in a wooden cabinet of drawers. Every five years tens of thousands of singers meet for the Song and Dance Festival, and at Jāņi, the midsummer feast, people wear oak-leaf wreaths, eat caraway cheese and stay up through the shortest night. Mark Rothko was born in Daugavpils. Timber, plywood and wood pellets lead exports, and Black Balsam, a herbal liqueur, comes in clay bottles.