Latvia Weekly

At the beginning of last summer, my wife became interested in possibly painting some of Latvia's abandoned churches. We began reading as much as we could on the internet in both Latvian and in English about them, and made a map of the 27 that we could find. Although my wife wasn't planning on painting all of them, she became determined to visit each and every one of them over the course of the summer. We did so over the course of five trips, the first three of which lasted a day each, and the last two taking two and three days respectively. Although her art project never quite came to fruition, knowing that many of you out there are interested in exploring abandoned places, I decided to write a series of articles about our experiences traveling to them, and what we found. Each of the articles will document one of our five trips, which just happen to have vaguely coincided with Latvia's cultural regions. Today's will look at our first journey which took us through the ea…