I met wonderful people there, the current Head of the school Anna Ivane (Ганна Іванэ), the first Head of the school well-known artist Vjačka Celeš (Вячка Целеш), ex-chairman of the Latvian Association of Belarusian culture “Svitanak” Taciana Kazak (Тацяна Казак).

By the way, not long ago I visited a nice exibition Vjačka Celeš organized. A number of famous Belarusian Latvians, Latvian artists and representatives of different national minorities cultural organizations greeted him. Here you can see some photos of the event.

Coming back to the school

In these latter days 97 pupils study at Rigas Baltkrievu pamatskola, as it sounds in Latvian. That is a tiny fraction of the Diaspora, as the number of Belarusians in Latvia reaches 100 thousand persons. Besides, not all of those kids are Belarusians. Some Latvian, Tatar, Jewish parents send their kids to this school, as it’s well-equipped and groups are comparatively small.

In 30s not less than 50 school with Belarusian as language of instruction functioned in Latvia.  Since then the situation changed dramatically. The biggest secondary school has to carry out austerity measures without considerable support from Belarusian government. Actually, that is comprehensible, as current dictatorship in Belarus is anti-national in its essense, and the present illegitimate president is the only one head of state in the world, who does not speak a native language (he uses Russian).

In 90s Belarusian government transfered just 10 thousand US dollars for the school renovation. This sum barely covered classrooms reconstruction expences. For instance, Ukranian school in Riga got 1 mln dollars for the development purposes from the Ukrainian government. Hard to draw a parallel, ha?

Ceremonial school-leaving event in 2006. Anna Ivane.

Vjačka Celeš, the same event.

and learnt more than a thousand Latvian words in process, at least now I am able to recognize them in text)

In Latvian it’s available here. The author, named Ilmārs Mežs visited all the villages (except two), where big Latvian Diaspora used to live and interviewed some Latvians, some of them still Latvian-speaking. He also presents a historical background of the issue.

When I have free time, will definetely go those villages (Uņa and Galičmuiža) he didn’t visit – it gonna be fun!

Luckily they are situated in my region, a couple of hours from my native city.

Still, some inaccurancies might be in the translated text.

Download the article in English in .pdf format

On the picture:  road sign with the name of Belarusian village “Латкалонія”, that means “Latvian colony”.

Historical background: in late 18 century a common Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian state called Reczpospolita was divided between Russian Empire, Kingdom of Prussia and the Habrsburg Monarchy. The lands inhabited by Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians became Russian Empire’s colony.

In 1773 Russian empress Katherine II presented some villages  in the area (I put it in a small circle on the map below) to one noble Russian family called Tolstoy (famous for his soup operas Leo Tolstoy is in fact also of this family tree).

In the 90s of XIX century that lands were inherited by countess Alexandra Tolstaya.  She transported the whole village of masters (!) from Latvia to erect a large summer residense: two-floor palace with a dome, columns, main staircase and a summer terrace. That’s in a village called Hrudzinauka (Грудзінаўка) at present times. The photo is just below. Some more pictures are available right here.

Hard to believe, but this abandoned residense just m.b. 50 km far from my town was constructed by Latvians more than 100 years ago!

I’m translating an article from Latvian into English about Belarusian Latvians. One guy went to that area to see how the descendants of those Latvians live. Once i’ve finished, i’ll place it here – it gonna be interesting!

By the way I know that my great-grandfather being a good architect worked in Riga for some period of time.

It seems, a century ago there was plenty of joint Latvian-Belarusian  Work & Travel programs)))