Cēsis

I came to Cēsis on a recommendation from a woman I met at the Riga Central Market who had grown up there and still spoke of it the way people speak of places they associate with the best version of their childhood. She told me to go on a weekday, to bring enough time to eat well, and to walk to the castle in the evening when the other visitors had gone. I followed all three pieces of advice and they were all correct. The train from Riga deposits you in a small station that smells of old wood and engine grease, and from there you walk uphill into a town center that looks, at first glance, like an illustration from a book about how medieval towns should ideally have survived.

Cēsis Castle is a ruin in the truest sense: roofless towers, vaulted basements open to the sky, and a courtyard where the grass grows long between the remaining stones. The local authority hands out lanterns to visitors for exploring the dark interior passages, which sounds gimmicky but is actually wonderful — the passages are genuinely dark, genuinely medieval, and the wavering lantern light does something to the sandstone that electrical fixtures would ruin completely. I spent an hour in those passages and came out into the last of the afternoon light feeling mildly transported — the kind of transported that comes not from spectacle but from the quality of silence in an old stone space. The castle dates from the thirteenth century, was the main seat of the Livonian Order in Latvia, and was besieged and damaged so many times over the following four centuries that its current state of picturesque ruin is almost historically appropriate.

The town itself is the kind of place that makes the word “livable” appear unprompted in your mind. The main square has a handful of cafes whose terraces face each other across the cobblestones, and the one I chose was serving a venison ragout over local buckwheat that was exactly as rich and deeply flavored as the season required. Cēsis has a genuine craft beer tradition — there is a local brewery whose ales have earned something of a national reputation, and I drank a dark amber lager on that terrace and watched two cats navigate the square with total unhurried confidence. The cats clearly knew something about the pace of life here.

The rose garden beside the castle — next to the New Castle, an eighteenth-century manor that now holds the local history museum — is planted with hundreds of varieties and was still loosely blooming in early September when I visited, the flowers smaller and more fragrant than the large cultivated blooms you see in city parks. I sat on a bench in the rose garden for twenty minutes and did not think about anything in particular, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a place. The museum itself is worth an hour for its accounts of Cēsis’s role in the Latvian War of Independence — the town was the site of a significant battle in 1919, and the exhibits treat this history with seriousness and without bombast.

Walking the surrounding streets in the evening, I noticed how intact the wooden architecture was — nineteenth and early twentieth-century merchant houses with high gabled roofs and painted window frames, most of them still residential. The feeling was of a town that had been bypassed by both the Soviet development impulse and the tourist renovation impulse, and had emerged from both in better shape than either would have left it.

When to go: Late August into September is ideal — the castle is at its most atmospheric, the rose garden is still in bloom, and the town fills with Latvians on weekend escapes rather than foreign tourists. October is also beautiful, with the surrounding countryside turning gold around the castle ruin.