Daugavpils

Everyone told me not to bother. Daugavpils is Latvia’s second-largest city, they said, but it’s Russian-speaking, industrial, provincial, and a long way east. A six-hour drive from Riga, or a three-hour train through increasingly flat countryside where the villages get smaller and the birch forests denser. I went anyway, and I would go again. What I found was a city that had no interest in my tourist expectations and was therefore entirely free of the performance that tourist cities can’t help but put on. The streets were wide and Soviet-era and the shop signs were in Russian and people moved through their day with the purposeful efficiency of people who live somewhere real, somewhere the economy has not yet decided is picturesque.

The Rothko Art Centre is the reason most Western visitors come, and it is genuinely extraordinary. Mark Rothko was born in Daugavpils in 1903 — the city was then called Dvinsk, a Russian imperial town with a large Jewish community — and left for the United States as a child. The museum holds the largest collection of his work in Europe, including the color-field canvases of his mature period: those hovering rectangles of deep color that seem to breathe when you stand in front of them at close range. The centre is housed in a section of the restored Daugavpils Fortress, a massive Tsarist-era military complex on an island in a bend of the Daugava River, and the combination of Rothko’s intimately emotional painting and the brick-vaulted fortress rooms creates an effect that neither could produce alone. I stood in front of a large canvas — deep burgundy over orange, the boundary between the colors soft and uncertain — for perhaps ten minutes. A security guard sat in the corner reading a book. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us needed to.

The Daugavpils Fortress itself is worth several hours regardless of the art. Built in the 1810s to guard against Napoleonic invasion and subsequently used by Tsarist, Latvian, German, and Soviet military forces, it is one of the best-preserved nineteenth-century fortress complexes in Northern Europe, its star-shaped fortifications, brick gates, and internal avenues now being gradually reclaimed from abandonment. Cultural centers, artist studios, and cafes occupy some of the restored structures; other sections remain in Soviet-era dereliction, their plaster fallen, their window frames rotting, their floors open to the weather. The combination of active reclamation and preserved decay is more honest than any complete restoration would be.

The city center feels nothing like Riga. The architecture is a mixture of late nineteenth-century Russian imperial commercial buildings — some of them quite handsome — and Soviet reconstruction that followed substantial wartime damage. The demographic history here is complex: Latvians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Belarusians, and Roma all shared this city, and the city’s twentieth century was correspondingly violent. The Jewish community, once a substantial fraction of the population, was almost entirely destroyed during the German occupation, and the memorials in the city and surrounding forests are maintained with serious and quiet care.

I ate in a basement restaurant where the television played a Russian game show and three men at the next table were arguing about football with the comfort of people who have been having the same argument for years. The menu was in Russian and the dumplings were excellent and the broth was the kind of dark and serious thing you only find where winters are genuinely cold. It was the most ordinary and the most real meal I ate anywhere in Latvia.

When to go: May through September for the most comfortable conditions and the best weather for exploring the fortress grounds. The Rothko Art Centre is open year-round and is the primary draw regardless of season. June is ideal — long evenings, warm weather, and the fortress courtyard in full green with its unlikely combination of military architecture and summer calm.