Metravel city quest
City Riga: free walking route “quest: the city that will never be finished” along the sights. 12 points. Approximately 2 h 50 min. Quests and legends
Riga has a superstition that even people who do not believe in superstitions believe in here. Once every hundred years, either a devil or a gigantic fish rises from the waters of the Daugava and asks the first person it meets: “Is Riga finished?” Answer “yes”, and the river will immediately rise and drown the city. So there is only one right answer: “No, not yet.” Ever since, Riga has always had something being completed, rebuilt or restored: being unfinished is not the city's misfortune, but its insurance against a flood. Hence the saying repeated here for eight centuries: “Riga will never be finished.”
While people keep this secret, other guardians watch over the city: the golden roosters on its spires. They were placed on Riga's churches for centuries: they turned in the wind, showed sailors whether they could enter the harbour and, if the legend is to be believed, noticed more than an ordinary weather vane ought to. Today we will pass several of these roosters, as well as houses, town halls and gates that the city has rebuilt so many times that none of them is truly “finished” even now.
Our route loops around the Old Town: from Town Hall Square by the river, through Cathedral Square and the Three Brothers to the guilds and the Cat House, then out through the last surviving fortress gate to the Freedom Monument. About two kilometres, at an unhurried pace.
What to do: 1) Read the story and task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk up to it. 3) Look around and answer the question.
We will begin at the city's most photographed façade: the House of the Black Heads on Town Hall Square.
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
This house was first mentioned in 1334 as the Great Guild's new building. At the end of the 15th century it was rented by the Brotherhood of the Black Heads, an association of unmarried foreign merchants named after their patron saint, the dark-skinned Maurice.
St Peter's Church is Riga's oldest structure by the date of its first mention: documents name the year 1209. Over eight centuries its spire has been destroyed and reborn several times.
By the churchyard wall stands a bronze pyramid of four animals: the characters from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, caught in the moment when they peer through a window at the robbers in the forest. Riga's twin city Bremen gave the sculpture to Riga in 1990.
A short detour from the route, for anyone who would enjoy a local legend in liquid form. In 1752 the Riga pharmacist Abraham Kunze devised a recipe for a strong herbal balsam made from more than twenty herbs, roots and oils, initially as a medicine.
Bishop Albert von Buxhoeveden laid the cathedral's foundation in 1211, and construction stretched over decades: it was broadly completed only by 1270. Even afterwards, the church was never left alone.
Riga's residents have long called these three houses in a row on Little Castle Street brothers. The eldest, the “White Brother” at No.
Until 1334 Riga's merchants and craftspeople belonged to a single guild, that of the Holy Cross and Trinity. Then it split: the merchants formed the Great Guild, and the craftspeople the Small Guild, under the patronage of one of the most revered saints of the New Testament, whose feast falls in midsummer.
The Great Guild united merchants, and this truly wealthy class admitted only one group of craftspeople into its ranks: master goldsmiths, whose trade was considered lucrative enough for the merchants' club. The guild's medieval hall survived until the mid-19th century, when it was rebuilt in the spirit of English Tudor Gothic.
The apartment building on the corner of Līvu Square was built in 1909 by the architect Friedrich Scheffel. According to legend, a merchant named Blumer commissioned it in revenge for the Great Guild's refusal to admit him.
Of Riga's eight historic gates, only this one has survived in its original form. In 1698, during Swedish rule, a passage was cut straight through the wall of a residential house on the city's edge.
Of the fifteen towers in Riga's fortress, this is the only one to survive as part of the city wall. It was first mentioned in a chronicle in 1330, when a cannon shot deliberately opened a breach in the wall so that the master of the Livonian Order could enter the conquered city with due ceremony and pomp.
From the Powder Tower, across the boulevard where the fortress moat once lay, you emerge where the Old Town ends and the new, 20th-century Riga begins. Here, on the boundary between two eras, stands the Freedom Monument, perhaps the foremost symbol of independent Latvia.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.