Latgalian National Awakening & Congress

Russian imperial annexation, frontier governance and Orthodox/colonial integration.

1 chapter

1772 - 1904

The First Partition of Poland in 1772 transferred the Inflanty Voivodeship to the Russian Empire, folding Latgale into Vitebsk Governorate — severing it from the Polish-Lithuanian world that had shaped its Catholic identity and connecting it instead to an empire that treated Latgalian as a dialect to be suppressed. The 1865 printing ban, triggered by the January Uprising, forbade Latin-script publications in Latgalian — a prohibition that was simultaneously anti-Polish (punishing Uprising participants) and anti-Latgalian (creating a 40-year gap in literary production unmatched in other Latvian regions). Yet this era also brought the railway (1860, St. Petersburg-Warsaw line through Daugavpils and Rēzekne), aristocratic estate culture (the Plater and Borch families' palaces at Krāslava and Preiļi), and the construction of Daugavpils Fortress (begun 1810) — Russia's answer to Napoleon on the Latgale frontier. Church Hill in Daugavpils, where four churches of four denominations stand side by side (Lutheran 1893, Catholic 1902, Orthodox 1905, Baptist 1908), is the most vivid expression of the multi-confessional reality that neither the Polish kings nor the Russian Tsars could flatten. The Latgalian language survived the ban through oral tradition and handwritten calendars (Andryvs Jūrdžis), but the 40-year literary gap fundamentally shaped the region's cultural development differently from other Latvian regions.

1918 - 1940

Latgale's incorporation into independent Latvia in 1918 brought both recognition and suppression. The Latgales Māra monument (unveiled 1939) in Rēzekne celebrated the liberation of Latgale from Bolshevik forces — a woman symbolizing both the Māra goddess and the Virgin Mary, standing atop a Latgalian cross, the perfect synthesis of the region's layered identity. But Kārlis Ulmanis' 1934 coup downgraded Latgalian from a 'language' to a 'dialect' — a political demotion, not a linguistic determination, that still shapes how festival traditions are classified as 'regional variants' rather than expressions of a separately evolved culture. In the same era, Andrejs Paulāns won a gold medal at the 1937 Paris Exhibition for Latgalian pottery — transforming a domestic craft into national art, an act of Latgalian cultural assertion within the new Latvian state. Meanwhile, Daugavpils' Jewish community (nearly half the city, 32,400 people) maintained a vibrant calendar of Shabbat observances, High Holidays, and lifecycle rituals in the synagogue on Cietoksna Street — a festival landscape that would be entirely erased within a few years. The interwar period is the last moment when Latgale's full multiconfessional mosaic was alive.

1561 - 1772

When the Livonian Order collapsed in 1561, Latgale was absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Inflanty Voivodeship — a multi-ethnic frontier where Polish was the prestige administrative language but Latgalian remained the spoken tongue of the peasantry. This 211-year separation from the rest of Latvian territory is the crucible of Latgale's distinctiveness. The Counter-Reformation arrived through Jesuits (college and church founded in Daugavpils, 1626) and Dominicans (monastery at Aglona, 1699), who deliberately overlaid Catholic sacred geography onto pre-Christian ritual sites — the Aglona healing spring (svētavots) became a Marian shrine, the Office of the Dead (mirušo lūgšana) replaced ancestor worship, May Devotion replaced spring fertility rites. This was not accidental syncretism but strategic substitution, creating a Baltic-Catholic synthesis that still structures Latgale's festival year. The Catholic seminary at Krāslava (1757-1842) and the enshrined relics of Saint Donatus at St. Ludvig Church created a networked sacred landscape that has been maintained for over 300 years. Old Believer communities, fleeing Nikonian reforms in 17th-century Russia, settled here alongside the Catholic majority — adding a parallel liturgical calendar that persists to this day.

1940 - 1991

The Soviet occupation of 1940, interrupted by the German invasion and Holocaust (1941-44), then restored in 1944, brought the most catastrophic rupture in Latgale's festival landscape. The Holocaust destroyed nearly all of Latgale's Jews — approximately 9,000 murdered from Daugavpils alone, with fewer than 100 survivors from the ghetto. An entire calendar of Jewish holidays and lifecycle rituals that had structured urban life for 200 years vanished. The surviving synagogue on Cietoksna Street stood as a mute witness through the Soviet era. Meanwhile, Soviet industrialization brought large Russian-speaking populations to Daugavpils and Rēzekne — not primarily Old Believers (who pre-dated Soviet rule) but new industrial migrants housed in the Daugavpils Fortress (the DVVAIU military aviation engineering school occupied it 1948-1993). The 1958 Latgale Culture Week was explicitly designed to counter Russification and the fear that Moscow might detach Latgale to Belarus — but the post-1959 purge restored Russification policies and banned Latgalian publishing. Yet Catholic practices survived: the Aglona pilgrimage continued even under state atheism, the basilica was elevated in 1980 for its 200th anniversary, and the 1986 Christianity anniversary was celebrated with state permission. Old Believer communities in villages like Slutišķi maintained their pre-Nikonian liturgical calendar in parallel with both Catholic and Soviet calendars — a third rhythm of worship in a region where three systems of time competed.