Trip V3 - Latgale

An elder named Timofei invites me into his izba. He serves sbiten (a honey-spice tea) and shows me a handwritten prayer book from 1789. He asks: “Why do you come here, to the end of the road?” I say: “To understand slowness.” He nods. “Then you must stay three days. One day is curiosity. Three days is truth.”

I leave the bike at a wooden jetty near (Cloud Mountain). The hill is only 40 meters high, but from the top, Lake Rāzna spreads like a shattered mirror. Islands dot it – 13, according to legend, one for each of Christ’s disciples minus Judas. The water today is not blue. It is grey-blue , the color of a storm petrel’s wing, or a soldier’s winter coat. A cold wind from Belarus. I sit for an hour. No phone signal. No sound except the klunk-klunk of a distant fishing boat’s engine.

Later, a swim. October water is bracing, but Latgalians believe every lake has a ūdensmāte – a water mother – who heals joint pain. I emerge shivering, convinced my knees are younger. Placebo or magic? In Latgale, the distinction is irrelevant. latgale trip v3

I open my notebook. Words: clay, fog, rope, ferry, candle, rooster, silence. Not a travelogue. A lexicon.

I skip the city center’s chain cafes. Instead, I take tram #3 to , a working-class district on the old Polish border. Here, wooden houses lean into each other. A bar called “Pie Alekseja” serves piva (beer) and šprotes (sprats) on black bread. The clientele: factory workers, a retired KGB officer (he tells me; I don’t ask), and a young Latgalian poet named Zane. She recites a line from memory: “Mūsu valoda ir migla / Mēs elpojam cauri vēsturei” (Our language is fog / We breathe through history). She gives me a photocopied chapbook. Price: a promise to read it on the train home. Day 4: The Sacred Triangle – Aglona, Andrupene, and The Old Believers’ Island No bicycle today. A hired car (€35, driver Jānis, who chain-smokes and listens to Latgalian folk metal). Destination: the holy triangle of Latgale. An elder named Timofei invites me into his izba

Inside, V3’s first discovery: a room dedicated to . Not the polite folk pottery of tourism brochures, but fierce, glazed figures – horses with human eyes, demons with three heads, jugs shaped like pregnant women. A sign reads: “Keramika – runājošais māls” (Ceramics – speaking clay). I buy a small bowl, unglazed on the outside, cobalt-blue within. The vendor, an elderly man with one tooth and two world wars in his posture, says: “Tas ir Latgale. Smags ārpusē, dziļš iekšpusē.” (Hard on the outside, deep inside.)

Jānis the driver whispers: “My grandmother walked 90 kilometers here in 1944. Barefoot. For peace.” “Then you must stay three days

Rēzekne is often dismissed as grey, post-industrial, forgotten. V3 forced me to look again. The city’s heart is the – a towering, brutalist-symbolist sculpture of a woman holding a cross, erected in 1939 and defiantly restored after Soviet neglect. She stands on a hill overlooking the railway yards. From her feet, you see the real Rēzekne: not the crumbling factories, but the wooden houses with sky-blue shutters, the Orthodox church with a green dome, and – crucially – the new Latgale Culture and History Museum (reopened 2025 after a decade of renovation).

A final detour to the remote village of on the shores of Lake Peipus (the border with Russia is 2 km east). This is an Old Believer community that fled Tsarist persecution in the 17th century. They do not use electricity on Sundays. They pray in a chapel with no windows. They bury their dead in unmarked graves facing east.