Every summer, my Latgalian grandmother, who I call baba, my mom, and I gather in a church in the Latvian border village of Ņukši. I kneel on my left foot, cross myself, and sit down on the lacquered pew, put there by some Polish monk who came from Vilnius, Kraków, or Vitebsk to spread the faith up north. The cold, half-lit room fills with incense, the gliding vowels of Latgalian, and the intoxicating smell of sweet, piney myrrh. My knees dig painfully into the wood as we are finally released by the priest with one last āmen.
Later that night, I flip through the plastic-covered albums at my baba's house, a 5-minute walk from the Ņukši church. Somewhere in the middle of the heavy book, baba points out her father, a Red Army soldier-cum-POW who snuck off of a Nazi prisoner transportation train somewhere in occupied Latvia. Right next to him, I recognize my grandfather, a lifetime smoker who died of cancer nine years ago. He worked on Soviet nuclear submarines in the Arctic during the Cold War. I still do not know whether it was his lifelong service or the filterless cigarettes that killed him.
*
For centuries, Latgale was at the center of imperial expansion from both the East and the West. In the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seized Latgale from the crumbling Livonian Order, a confederation of German crusader states that had survived for over three centuries. An extensive Polonization campaign followed, and Jesuits flooded in with Bibles in their hands to enlighten the local Latgalians. After the Commonwealth disintegrated in 1772, Latgale was brought under Russian rule. Its name was changed to Vitebsk, and the tsar severed Latgale's ties to the rest of Latvia by joining Latgale with the Russian Empire's Belarusian provinces. For three centuries, Latgale suffered the worst excesses of Russian colonial rule. Religious persecution, serfdom, and multiple bans on printing came to define how other Latvians registered this odd region in their collective memory, a place whose name bears witness to its own historical alterity: in Latvian, Lat-gale means “the end of Latvia.”
Memories, languages, and histories all converge on this name, Lat-gale, producing a convoluted border culture. The border estranges you with its references that do not seem to have a stable source of meaning; it is a place of many other places, times, stories. My family was Catholic because of the Poles, they spoke Latgalian because of the Lithuanians and to spite the Russians. Latgalian was the border’s kitchen language, outlawed during the Soviet times and spoken only in private. Mom and baba tried to teach it to me when I was little, but by that time we had already settled in Riga, the capital, a place where you would get laughed at if you spoke Latgalian.
*
For twenty one summers, I have made my way to the borderlands from Riga. As a kid, I stayed for long stretches, helping my baba milk cows and stack hay, wandering in the forests and picking berries. Last year, I returned to Ņukši, our village, for only two days to visit the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. We placed some fresh flowers on his grave – baba hated those plastic imitations – and picked up some rotten leaves that had been laying there for a while. My grandpa was here, in Ņukši, forever, his body in this one place and nowhere else. When my death nears, I will make sure I am taken to be buried alongside him; my final border homecoming.
When I was little, it seemed that no one in Riga had heard about Ņukši, and whenever I visited Ņukši, I never met anyone who was from the capital. Ņukši was a place that only existed for those who, for whatever reason, had to make their way there.
For the Rigans, Latgale was far too uncomfortable of a travel destination. If Latgale seemed remote, then Ņukši, the Latgalian village located some 30 kilometers from the border with Russia, was truly exotic for the urbanites. It used to take around four hours to get to Ņukši on roads in dire need of repair. Then Latvia joined the European Union. In 2004, the money started flowing in – money that the Germans and the French hoped would aid in the development of Europe's New East (or the East of the New East, Latgale). Just as quickly, for middle-class Rigans working nine-to-fives, Latgale became a destination for spiritual awakening. They organized esoteric weekend retreats, bought islands in Latgale's lakes to set up yoga camps, and meditated in abandoned Old Believer monasteries. In the minds of these Latvian New Agers, the border was primitive, backward, unfamiliar, stuck in a permanent state of nature; it promised them respite from urban life, an escape from civilization, and a chance to get lost in the past. Ņukši had become a fantasy full of people with weird accents and sad, gray faces, lush forests and deep lakes, rotting churches and abandoned family homes.
Then, in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine. The anxiety that accompanied the invasion of a country so close to us made Latvians turn Latgale into an enemy land. We suddenly realized that Latgale would be the Russian military’s first point of entry. Latvian security services set out to count and establish the identity of everyone who had the misfortune of still residing there – potential traitors, those seemingly Russianized Latvians – because who in their right mind would settle on a border? In the Latvian national imagination, this land became painted in Russian tricolor. Its proximity to Russia made those in the Ministry of the Interior, the Latvian Parliament, and the Armed Forces uncomfortable, but also those ordinary Latvians who were made to believe that Latgale was a lost cause, never a part of Latvia and never to be.
These days, you mostly hear about Latgale – if at all – because of Russia. In 2009, following the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Latvian government passed a law making it illegal for anyone owning property in the borderlands to reside there without obtaining a special residence permit. The border effectively became an exclusion zone – now, one cannot build anything, even a shack, without state permission bridges and roads periodically close, and one must always carry an ID. After 2014, politicians doubled down on the border – they militarized the boundary line, started talking about mining the entire exclusion zone, and proclaimed multiple states of emergency.
The “border problem” started to crystallize: the border was suspicious, unruly, in need of discipline and close observation. The existence of the Latvian state hung on securing the border, from the very bottom to the top, and making its residents loyal subjects of the Republic. The ideal borderland resident, after all, should be more likely to take part in Latvian Independence Day celebrations than to watch the Victory Day parade in Moscow on banned Russian TV channels. They disturbed the harmony of the nation-state which tried to order reality into simple binaries: Latvian-Russian, citizen-noncitizen, developed-developing. Accordingly, the permit system became a simple solution to this border problem. The permits sought to identify, track, and punish those living on the border as the state officially rendered every single borderland resident suspicious and untrustworthy; for the government, the permits were a victory against the sickness of Latgale. For the residents, the possession of this piece of paper had the power to turn one's life into a bureaucratic and existential nightmare.
To be Latgalian in Latvia is to burn with an illness that cannot be purged nor eradicated. If you are like my grandpa, the border makes you self-medicate with alcohol, spend your evenings sitting on tractors in former kolkhozes – Soviet collective farms – and reminisce about a time that somehow seemed much gentler, a time that imbued life with at least some purpose. He had lived through the violence of the 1990s and spent his time doing the odd job repairing trucks in his final years of life. I wonder if the submarine he commanded was ever on his mind as he was withering away in the oncological ward.
Rigans have always cared about the identity of those living in Latgale more than Latgalians themselves. I guess I am guilty of doing that as well. Latgalianness is an identity impossible to understand if you do not come from the border. In Riga, we love to point out what is wrong with Latgale: we say that Latgalians are leaving the borderlands because there are no jobs. Villages are emptying, and ancestral homes are being abandoned by young Latgalians who see a future for themselves in Ireland or Germany, not in the borderlands. Others, like my baba, still remain. They are mostly older. Would they leave if they could afford it, if their joints were not inflamed and hurting, if their children were still there to help them out?
Journalists and academics now write articles about these grandmas, about bringing Latgale back to Latvia. The grandmas will never read those articles. And why should they? Their existence has been rendered ideological, their tending to their borderland a crudely political act.
Battered by colonial empires and nation-states, their way of being resists any attempt to confine them. To be on the border is to lead a life that cannot make sense to those leering at this line of separation from the outside.
*
My mom left Ņukši shortly after the Latvian independence in 1991 to go study in Riga, where she met my father. She got married, moved to a typical Soviet middle-class neighborhood, and gave birth to me – not in Riga but in Jūrmala, a resort town popular among the New Russian crowd.
When I brought up my place of birth to her, this city that did not mean anything to me, she calmly recounted that she did not want to take a gamble by going to one of those massive hospitals in the capital, which she called konveijeri. The country having freshly emerged from the rubble of an empire, all rules and laws were rapidly breaking down in the 1990s. Every evening, news reports showed a carousel of faces of local racketeers, terrorists blowing up our synagogues and shopping malls, gang members, ex-Soviet soldiers convicted of murder or rape. In the antiseptic hallways of konveijeri, the new capitalist economy was functioning particularly well: if you wanted better service, you were expected to bring the doctors a nice box of imported chocolates and a large bottle of cognac. If you chose not to follow these rules, the doctors were capable of anything: touching a mother inappropriately during childbirth, or mishandling the baby, such that he died from asphyxia.
For my mom, Ņukši seemed an escape from the terrors of this new post-socialist nation-state, slowly approaching the border. She always made sure that I returned to the village with her. During the Ņukši summers, I would wake up in a room full of icons: figurines of Jēzus and Marija, rosaries, dictionaries, and pictures of popes. For breakfast, baba always made fragrant semolina porridge with just the right amount of butter. Whenever I visited baba, it felt like I spent more time eating than doing anything else. Porridge for breakfast; for pre-lunch snack, a freshly dug-up carrot and a slice of bread with butter and sausage whose ingredients remain unknown, then multiple handfuls of berries from the bush, then asuškas – little dough balls in sour cream sauce; then came a massive lunch with everything from potatoes, soup, and meats to cold cuts, beet salads, and an entire loaf of rye bread that resembled a brick – we actually called it the “little brick,” ķieģelītis – that we had to finish before getting up from the table, all of which we washed down with copious amounts of kefir and morss, a sour drink that baba and I used to make from the currants that grew in her garden. And I always remembered to cross myself after I had finished the meal.
I spent my breaks from eating behind baba's house, walking down the path that led to an abandoned bathhouse. The bathhouse stood there silently, covered in black soot, its floor rotting under my feet. In the absence of souls that once frequented this place, a colony of ants had made their home.
Bathhouses have always been central to Latgalian culture. They were the only places where serfs, after toiling the land for hours, could gain what little privacy they could and clean their bodies, away from the gaze of their masters. Children were born here, people were healed, herbs were dried. People hid in them during wars and occupations. To this day, almost every farmstead in Latgale has preserved its own bathhouse.
If this bathhouse could speak, what would it tell me? It has always been here, but I have not. It knows more about the border than I ever could.
When I came back last summer, the bathhouse was not there. It had collapsed under its own weight. Its wooden frame, soaked in history, had become soft and started to decompose.
*
My mom never made Latgalian food at home in Riga. She did not speak to me in Latgalian after I had stubbornly refused to learn the language because it felt embarrassing for a Rigan to even know it, and she never made me go to Catholic mass, about which my baba was particularly furious. Whenever baba came to visit my mom, they always engaged in a shouting match in Latgalian. The Ņukši way of life seemed incompatible with the life my mom was leading in Riga.
Growing up, I often wondered if my mom had tried to rid herself of her Latgalianness whenever she was back in Riga: she had managed to unlearn her Latgalian accent when speaking Latvian, knew the ins and outs of city life, and stopped going to church on Sundays. She worked as a project manager at a large marketing firm and often went out with her girlfriends to drink beer and watch ice hockey.
But whenever we went to Ņukši, it was as if she had never left. The Latgalian sibilants rolled out of her mouth, in the direction of baba, who directed a similarly soft stream of consonants back at her. She shuffled the hard y sound with an array of uo's and ō's, ejecting heavy diphthongs that weighed the entire room down. The ground would then crack under them, and history would start seeping in like black, bitter tar. Germans, Poles, and Russians would start marching in, bodies of serfs would be thrown in the river, the tsar would issue another ban on printing and reading in Latgalian, another village would be burned down and massacred, another Nazi population transfer plan – 100% of Latgalians to be resettled for being sub-human, untermensch – signed by the Reichskommissar would appear nailed on the village message board; some Soviet drunkard would pee on the roadside shrine, and a guy from the Ministry of Interior would interrogate baba. Drowning in the shrieks from our past, my mom was performing the border by speaking the text of this godforsaken place.
*
The border was both familiar and distant to me. In an attempt to maintain homeostasis between being Latgalian and Latvian, I had to become neither or both. I did not know if there were any other Latgalians at my school, and I never asked. Rigans would refer to Latgalians as čangaļi – yokels, hillbillies, uneducated countryside folk.
My mom had somehow found a way to live on this boundary line between Ņukši and Riga, be both; codeswitch, crawl out of her urban shell and emerge as Latgalian every time she pulled up to my baba's house after our three-hour-long trips. She never made me be both because it was much easier to just be one, Rigan, not Rigan and Latgalian. I often think if this was to protect me from this violent border existence.
My mom comfortably straddled the border while I became content with my place among the city folk. The city was where my life was, and my trips to Ņukši were simply moments of escape from Riga, I thought. I was not born there, nor did I live there. Ņukši was a place to spend time with baba, with whom I could not even communicate in her native tongue.
Will tanks roll over the border one day? Instead of mushrooms, will my baba find mines lodged deep into the borderland soil? Will the hedgehogs that I fed milk to during warm summer nights be replaced by spiky metal anti-tank obstacles arriving from Riga? I would like to think not, but I am probably wrong. My mom and I will still make our trips, visit my grandpa's grave, and pray in the church. Baba will stay and witness the border slowly falling apart. In Riga, politicians will smugly congratulate each other on finally solving the border problem. The border tumor will finally be excised, and the biopsy results will be conclusive: malignant but not metastatic.
2025