I WAS in Bauska this week. Every month I do a short travel column for Baltic Guide magazine, essentially a way for them to include coverage of something other than Riga in their Latvian edition.
I’ve been through Bauska quite a few times, usually on the way to Kaunas or Vilnius. The main A7 (aka the E67 Via Baltica) channels right through the centre of town, bringing a torrent of articulated transport through and away within a couple of minutes. There’s the River Memele as well, but these days that’s a far less important artery than the road.
The last few travel pieces have all been about towns in Vidzeme to the north of Riga or Latgale to the east, so I thought it was about time I headed south. Almost from a sense of guilt at the fact that I had never stopped there before, I chose Bauska. And in a sense, guilt became one of the themes of the day I spent wandering around.
I won’t pretend that Bauska is a particularly beautiful or stimulating place, but it is certainly interesting. It is clearly a town with some serious problems.
First there’s that road, which prevents any sense of calm or quiet in the centre. It also makes it more difficult to identify precisely where that centre is located. The main square seems obvious, but with trucks rattling down one side it is more like a layby than a civic space or piazza. The town market lies a couple of hundred metres off the main road down a cul-de-sac. The town castle (currently being ‘restored’ using the cheap and nasty-looking grey/white bricks so popular during Soviet times) lies a kilometre away up a hill but rather isolated and inaccessible.
And there’s a new contender for central status, too - or rather several - in the predictable shapes of a couple of retail parks. They may be on the fringes of the town, but that is where there is the clearest evidence of life on a grey, wet Friday morning.
Bauska feels like it is being pulled in several directions and might come apart at the seams at any moment.
But then I noticed an interesting-looking brick building down one of the potholed side streets. It was empty but had clearly been constructed around a century ago by people who knew what they were about and didn’t take the approach of the new shopping centres up the road which aim for maximum floorspace at minimum cost. The brickwork was first-rate, with all sorts of skilful touches. A plaque on the wall told me that this was the former kosher abbatoir built in the late 19th century by Bauska’s Jewish population.
I walked on and soon saw another building that stood out from the rest. It houses an estate agency. Then I noticed that it too had a little plaque, this time stating that it was the former synagogue.
After a quick walk around the church and the deserted market, I spied a third interesting building. A large, classical mansion house with the almost-gone lettering of ancient traders’ signs disappearing into its plasterwork, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Vichy or Baden-Baden. At the far end was another plaque. It was built as a dwelling house at the same time as the slaughterhouse and synagogue, presumably by a succesful Jewish merchant. It served as a Jewish school in the 1930s.
There is no great moral to this account. It was just all very sad. Bauska is certainly not alone in having had its Jewish population disappear, whether by its own hand, the hand of an occupying power or a combination of the two. Indeed Bauska deserves some credit for bothering to mark these sites at all.
But it felt as if the disappearance of the Jewish population had done something similar to the main road, only in an historical sense instead of a geographical one. It had destroyed part of the town’s centre, a loss that could never be put right, impossible to ignore completely but possible to become accustomed to over the years.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Latvia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hi Mike,
still keeping an eye on your blog. I lived in Lithaunia in the 90s in a couple of povincial towns not unlike Bauska. What I learned is that such towns have layers of history which you have to hunt out and peel away at. And the locals usually think you are nuts for wanting to scout around town. Most people living in provincial towns have fairly shallow roots in the towns, their grannparents all grew up in one of he surrounding villages. Hence, they have few historical links to the town (they rarely can say, this is the house where my grandfather was born etc)
Things to look out for in such towns include former Jewish buldings (as you saw), but these can be deceptively simple and easy to miss if you dont have Jewish heritage and know the tell tale signs of a synagogue, slaughterhouse or bathhouse.
Others include old pre-1914 Tsarist building (usually near the railway), such as a schools, the (old) post office, local government building. They are often red brick.
Interwar public buildings in the Baltics are usually lovely old Art Deco building which would not be out of polace in Miami Beach if they were painted salmon pink! Think Kaunaspost office
Also more difficult to find out about is what was lost. This includes large, modern squares, which often means that the houses originally there were destroyed in WW2 (again, often Jewish buldings).
Also, some towns have a large manor house or palace on the outskirts, though often these too have been demolished, and all you have left are tell-tale signs such as long, straigt, tree-covered roads, aritificial ponds, and brick stable buildings.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness ramble. Keep the good work
Found this blog accidentally, while looking for something else entirely, and was surprised to see an entry about my hometown here. Even if the post is old, I don’t have anything better to do, so I’ll comment anyway, especially because the quote “I won’t pretend that Bauska is a particularly beautiful or stimulating place, but it is certainly interesting. It is clearly a town with some serious problems.” is spot on.
Not that it can be helped.
And, as Richard said above, there really are a few layers of provincial history that only make sense to a local, but provide some useless background information.
The actual divide between the lower part (the old part) which you seem to have visited and the upper part of the town (nothing to see there anyway, except for apartment blocks, a few office buildings and cheaply built stores) and the decline of the old town centre took place quite some time ago, in the very early 90s, even before the main road was widened to accommodate the increase in traffic.
Offhand, the primary reasons for that seems to the competition to the downtown businesses from uptown counterparts established in the 90s, coupled with the low population of the town and Riga, with its shopping, entertainment and educational opportunities, being within easy reach.
That the lower part has all, but pronounced dead, is a direct result of the widened road and the change of the purpose of the town, from a minor and insignificant district centre to a minor and insignificant bedroom community for the capital, however.
The changes have made the town even more utilitarian than it was before and I don’t think that there’s any rural quaintness or provincial romance left to be captured and restored. It is just a place, whose only claim to fame is the mockery of a castle restoration attempt and, bizarrely enough, a country and western music festival held each summer.
So, if I had to point out the culprit, I’d say that it was the second hand car that killed Bauska.
Thanks very much for taking the time to write your comment, Random Visitor kungs/kundze!
It’s fascinating stuff, and particularly so as you provide real evidence about what was only a guess as far as I was concerned - namely that there is something really problematic about that road.
Part of me is pleased that a native isn’t saying “How dare you criticise my wonderful town” but unexpectedly another part of me is a bit sad that a hometown boy (or girl!) can be so brutally honest about somewhere that must mean something to them. But maybe somewhere in there lies Bauska’s future.
And at least it still has the most dependable beer in Latvia (it has officialy replaced Piebalgas in my affections)!