Today I landed in Riga and saw the city for the first time in six years (minus about two weeks). I am here doing research on the transformation of the memorial landscape in the city since the fall of communism. I will be talking to people and going to archives and libraries to dig up all I can about how the communist memorials fell or did not fall and how new memorials have sprouted up or old ones revived and what people who think about that think about that.

When I arrived, I was surprised how little has changed. After visiting Tallinn last spring, I thought Riga would be much more developed. Instead, it made the same impression on me it did in 2001. The changes I saw between my visit in 1991 and 1995 were enormous. The changes I saw again in 1999 were also significant. I saw more and more renovated buildings and repaired sidewalks, more and more shops. Now, my superficial, first glance impression of the city is that they are still where they were in 2001: an odd mix of delapidation and new or renovated real estate down town, with the ratio about the same as six years ago. The sidewalks are the same, some of the shops have survived, others, including my favorite used bookstore, are gone and have been replaced.

It is odd, and perhaps unfortunate, to have seen all the new construction going on out on the edges of town while flyng into the Riga airport only to discover that there are still ruins of 20th century architecture within the old city itself.

In the bookstores, it looks like much has improved. There is a wider variety of literature available, including the historical literature I am most interested in. There are also lots and lots of foreign authors of both fiction and non-fiction available in Latvian translation. The books are quite impressive for such a small market, including lots of hardbound books with color illustrations and photos. I didn't go into any other shops yet.

My Latvian is working better than I expected after such a long hiatus, but I am still glad my hosts speak such good German so that I can at leastcome home in the evening to a language I am much better at. I am staying in a renovated old house on the Pardaugava side of the river, right down the street from the St. Martin church (a congregation which is featured in my dissertation, by the way), very near the archives.

I photographed several memorials on my first expedition into town, including a memorial to the christianization of Armenia of all things! I am serious. In downtown Riga they have one. It also recalls the Armenian genocide of 1915. I will be reportng more thoroughly on memorials in a few weeks, after my return, over at http:\\sitesofmemory.twoday.net. Here, I expect to be posting first impressions of those and updates on other things that life throws at me while I am here.

Today I was standing in front of one of the main memorials, a communist-era memorial to the Latvian Riflemen, and picked a woman about my age out of the crowd of people waiting for the bus to ask about the memorial. We had an interesting conversation about her memories of various events and memorials. It turns out she has met the designer of one of Rigas most prominent war memorials, which I had just photographed, and might be able to put me in touch with him.