hi everyone and welcome we're back in the baltics this is part two of my four-part series from
eastern europe specifically we're visiting the thoroughly interesting capital cities of latvia
and estonia in the previous video we checked out the beautiful and quaint riga old town strolling
in an icy december through narrow cobbled streets among a variety of art nouveau architecture
in future videos we're not only visiting europe's largest indoor market and unesco world heritage
site situated in a converted airship hangar but also visiting the gorgeous talon the city
i'd almost described as the polar opposite to riga we'll also be heading out of central talon
to explore an abandoned soviet-era concert hall used in the 1980 moscow olympics but as much as
riga is pretty equally it has a horrific past in today's video we'll be visiting the former
headquarters of the checker otherwise known as the kgb for a lesson which even has a connection
to my own family are you ready to explore riga once again i know i am
okay it's another cold december morning in riga and if you saw the last video you'll know that
i went to the old town in riga which i've got to say is absolutely beautiful it's one place
that i've actually genuinely been surprised with in a long time
didn't expect that at all in riga but today we are venturing out to some slightly different
areas of riga to explore a bit of the history of riga and indeed latvia as a country itself
and if you are latvian i just want to point out that you know i'm not one of these youtube
people that comes to a country and claims to know everything about a country because clearly i don't
and there's no way that i could do so what i'm going to do in this video is talk a bit about my
views my opinion the things i see and learn as a foreigner in riga so let's get going
and this is actually the road i'm living on i'm living up there
and one thing i have heard about riga before i got here three weeks ago is that many people refer to
it as the paris of the baltics and you know what i can see that i was in paris last year and i stayed
in an area that's kind of out of the city and the building star architectural style is very similar
and you've got these lovely cobbled streets and as you've seen already there are cats everywhere
beautiful angels as i call them yeah it's it's nice to come to an area like this
because you can kind of see how you know real people in riga live on a daily basis
okay we're heading to our first spot of historical significance now there are
two in this video um and i've got to say about the architecture you can see it behind me it's
so typically sort of european even a bit sort of scandinavian in feel as i said in the uh old riga
video you know there is that kind of chocolate box feel and yeah some of it might look a bit sort of
dirty and stuff like that but that's life you know things are always you know absolute perfection
and that's actually one of the things that i think is the charm of riga if you know what i mean
look at it lovely another little park and over there is where we're going next
this road is very france as in paris it feels like it's got like this tree-lined
bit in the middle and like a double road on the other side been like the champs-elysees
in a way um yeah we're going up there let me see in the distance is this an orthodox church
i can see mary on the wall there the reason i say is it orthodox because it's got the gold
domes at the top like the ones i saw in ukraine and moldova
and also you might want to stay over there in the distance it's like a glass pyramid thing
it's like the louvre in paris i've gotta stop talking about paris this is riga
okay let's try and do this bit without wind and people are going past on bikes and also trams but
we love trams right tram spam is the best in riga and we've got one coming right now there we go
tram spam brilliant anyway i'm at the freedom monument i know that for many of you it might
not seem like the most aesthetically pleasing monument in the world a bit like the victory
monument in minsk but actually it's one of if not the most important monuments in riga
and latvia because it commemorates people that died in the latvian war of independence between
1918 and 1920. if you look at the design of it it's got people around the bottom i believe
it's meant to signify like trade and industry in latvia fishing is one apparently i'm not sure if
that's right i did read it and also soldiers and army obviously because it's a military thing and
the interesting thing about it is that it was built in 1935 and obviously by that point latvia
was part of the soviet union so the soviet union apparently said that no it wasn't built in 1935
it was built later and the lady liberty up the top is actually mother russia and the
three stars are meant to signify the three soviet socialist republics latvia estonia and lithuania
and there have been many calls apparently to demolish this monument over the years i'm quite
surprised that it actually remains standing throughout soviet times because when you think
about about it you know soviet union was all about silencing people who were against their
regime if you know what i mean so it's surprising that something was allowed to remain standing that
signified latvian independence and then obviously you know in more recent times 1991 the breakdown
of the soviet union again independence in latvia became an important prominent thing and now latvia
is its own country and on the subject of soviet regime i'm putting my gloves on because we're
going to the former kgb headquarters and lastly i think i got a shot of them the other day when the
sun was out when the focus was going wrong on my camera but i'll put it over the top anyway
there are like guards that parade around the monument and i read that in order to get a job
as one of the guards at the freedom monument you have to be over six foot tall and you have to be
able to stand still for 30 minutes um it's a bit like the beefy is in london you know
and also this i love this this is just another thing of um you know the kind of architecture
in the history in uh riga that is a famous latvian um confectionary company i believe
dating back to 1870 as you can see the year up there chocolate caramel confectionaries they're
feared we're gonna have some of them in the next video hopefully it's a food video the next one
and i can't remember what the last word is i'm gonna have to look it up operation barbarossa
that was when the nazis invaded the soviet union right i was just thinking about it because
i said it before in serbia you know as a brit that was primarily taught about english history
in relation to the second world war and subsequent as well it's always quite interesting to come to a
place like latvia where you can learn about these sorts of things i don't really know much about the
kgb that's why i'm going to learn more and uh the thing i was going to say about latvia from
a foreigners point of view is that it feels like latvia and estonia and lithuania have always kind
of been the piggies in the middle in territorial dispute between germany and russia and uh you know
crap wind yeah piggies in the middle in terms of russia and germany and uh the interesting thing
that i have read about is about the fact that many many latvians and obviously there was a whole
thing with jews and holocaust and everything many many latvians were deported to siberia and the
interesting thing is my grandparents were deported to siberia from poland so there's that sort of
shared history if you like so the corner house is up there here we are we're at the corner house
it's called that unsurprisingly because it's on a corner it's the ex-kgb headquarters in riga and a
word of warning this may be slightly grim there are cells in there where people were killed and
there is an exhibition and a museum a guided tour at the moment during covert time this is december
2020 you can only do it within one household i'm one person so it's essentially a solo tour
you can't film in there but they have told me that i can film some shots and i'll do
a voiceover afterwards so let's get going right past god by the way it's 10 euros for one person
oh my god
okay it's the next day let's talk about this tour it's very difficult to talk about but i'm going to
try and do my best there are three words i would use to describe it initially all of them beginning
with h horrifying harrowing and heartbreaking quite honestly when i left i think it had
the same kind of emotional impact on me that auschwitz or saxonhausen did it's grim history but
i think it's grim history that's we need to know about that's important to learn about so you go
in there's like an exhibition you learn about the riga central prison it talks about how people were
taken to gulags or hard labor camps in the ussr people were deported from latvia to siberia to
camps there as i said just like my grandparents were deported from poland in the early 40s
it talks about the checker which is the latvian name for kgb didn't know that that's something
i learned among other things and it gives like a list of crimes that people supposedly committed
and really a lot of them were ridiculous there was no way out there were no loopholes the czecho were
very meticulous in their manner you know you couldn't really get out of anything there was
always some sort of crime that you're committing against communism or the soviet regime you then
start the tour and i've got to say the tour guide was incredible absolutely brilliant informative
educational you start off in like a registration room where people were initially taken people that
were taken were initially people like teachers educated people scientists it then developed
into like wealthy people people were against that whole communist equality thing and then it
developed into like partisan resistance resistance groups so people like the forest boys i learned
about which was a group of resistance fighters or partisans that were against the checker people
that were taken there they were stripped naked they had buttons and shoelaces taken off a very
degrading experience and that was done so they couldn't commit suicide obviously with a shoe like
shoelace or whatever there were photos of them on the wall and you then go to an interrogation room
um which she talks about in there about physical and psychological torture obviously and um
i didn't realize the physical torture thing was such a huge aspect particularly in the earlier
days that's my naivete and ignorance i'll come back to that in a later point the psychological
uh torture was mainly sleep deprivation so in the cells where you go into next
there are these lights and you know they would have been ridiculously bright
to stop people from sleeping during the day and during the night and the cells were
there were basically three types of them there were rose street lord street and the third one
is mud street that was it and they were basically given those names to highlight
the level of comfort in them and obviously none of them were comfortable even the lord ones were
up to you know 20 30 people in the room sleeping in crap they've got a bucket of their excrement in
the room that was only emptied once a day boiling hot the heating was turned up intentionally
no windows no fresh air a lot of disease and illness obviously you then go downstairs into the
basement where they had like the exercise area and you go into the other um some of the other cells
underneath which you know were slightly more horrific you then go to a kitchen the kitchen was
very odd it had like these pots and um i'd read about before about the fact that the food that
was produced was very much moldy and gone off and disgusting and everything was cooked in the same
pots but the weird thing was there were photos on the wall of like the kitchens in the 70s or 80s
and it was almost weird because the the photos on the wall it looked like a modern like 80s kitchen
and it looked like my mother's kitchen from the 80s that's an indicator of how things did
change there obviously the the checkers way of working and regime remained the same but
it also slightly changed in its level of severity in terms of the the treatment and the torture
that people were put through you then go to an execution room this was the harrowing part there's
bullet holes on the wall as you would imagine about 186 i think people were
shot there and there's a photo on the wall of like a horizontal wooden panel on the wall but then on
in real life you see the vertical panels and when they were investigating this they thought that's
weird so they took the vertical ones off and found all these other bullet holes on the horizontal one
behind it and what they're doing there is very worthwhile because as with many people as with
my grandparents people left those countries to go to countries like the uk the us and australia
and now they're going back there and there was the story of a latvian woman from australia that
went back there and she saw a photo of someone on the wall and said oh that's my grandfather
so she was able to get a bit of closure if you know what i mean to and find out what actually
happened to her family members which is great so there's there is a you know worthwhile side
coming out of this and um overall you know for me as a as someone that was born in the early
80s obviously i know a bit about you know what happened with the breakdown of the soviet union
and mikhail gorbachev and boris yeltsin but there's always been of a mystic been a bit of
a missing link you know as i said education for me about the war and after that was all
about the uk there was nothing about the soviet union and even though my grandmother wrote a
book about her experiences and her treatment at the hands of the soviet union and my mother has
told me things that my grandmother told her i still feel like there's always been of a
missing link and i've had a bit of naivety and ignorance if you know what i mean so
going to someone like this really kind of filled in the gaps for me so um overall 100 recommend
this you know i think people don't go to places like this they don't know about places like this i
didn't know about it until i went here so um yeah awesome the next video is a food video i'm going
out to film it now so i will see you in the next one thanks for watching and i'll see you next time
in this video we are exploring a unesco world heritage site
it's the thing i want above anything else i've come full circle
you