Christmas Market in Riga

The Christmas Market in Riga, Latvia is an annual event that is now being discovered by UK travelers. Offering abundant old world charm in a calm, clean and friendly environment, the Christmas Market is particularly attractive to UK residents looking to schedule a short winter getaway. The strong points of the market are the delightful Christmas atmosphere, the excellent local crafts and foods, and the warm hospitality of the community.

The Christmas Market
The Christmas Market in Riga is not a huge market, and visitors should not expect a lot of glitz. There is no big push merchandising, just a collection of booths selling interesting products in a very charming setting. The market includes a group of eighty or so small wooden huts with openable fronts that serve as the store booths for the various craftsmen and merchants. The market is open daily from 10 in the morning until 8 at night, and usually runs from the end of November right up to Christmas day. Located in historic Dome Square next to the cathedral in the Old City neighbourhood, the market is always home to a few minstrels and unusual characters and the final week includes a busy schedule of jugglers, street entertainers, wandering elves and Santa Clauses.

Market Products
Most of the booths at the market sell hand-crafted products, and the low prices are definitely attractive to UK shoppers. Leather and wax products, painted silks and sheepskin clothing and lots of wicker and birch work fill the booths. The many types of basketry are both beautiful and useful, and remind one of the continuing value of old fashioned products in today’s modern world. The hand knitted gloves are superb and there are many unique sweaters available. Perhaps the most notable product is the large quantity of exquisite hand-worked linen products that charm shoppers with their elegant old world craftsmanship.

Local Food
As interesting as the crafts products are, the food may be the most immediately enjoyable aspect of the Christmas Market. Many booths sell food products and a variety of tasty snacks and hot mulled wine and potent Black Balsam cocktails are served in the tent bars that line the edges of the square. The booths feature a large variety of interesting salamis and other preserved meats and a dazzling array of artisan cheeses. Smoked eels are a local favorite and the market includes some rather spectacular events such as whole pigs being roasted on portable barbecue pits.

Riga
Riga is a wonderful place to visit for UK residents, as a passable amount of English is spoken, and English tourists are definitely made to feel welcome. Riga is not so distant from the UK and not difficult to reach by air, being a bit more than a two hour flight and about the same as a trip to Italy.
Riga is proud to claim that the tradition of decorating an evergreen tree for Christmas started in Latvia in 1510, when men in black hats gathered in the town square around a tree that had been cut from the forest. After decorating the tree, they set it afire and sang as they circled around the cheery fire. A plaque inscribed in many languages marks the location of this historical event and the English inscription reads “the first New Year’s Tree”.
Most of the buildings in the city centre are decorated with electric lights, and Riga residents are fond of burning Yule logs in order to burn away the bad spirits accumulated during the year. The climate is cold of course, and there will almost certainly be snow. But something about a white Christmas always seems to charm us, and this beautiful environment is filled with amazing gingerbread buildings that look like something out of a fairy tale. One of the most amazing, the recently rebuilt orange-pink House of Blackheads, is just a few blocks from the Dome Square.

photo credits: Jani Halinen