There is a face on the Latvian 100-lats banknote (the old one, before the euro) and on a granite portrait at Turaida and on a bronze monument in Vērmane Garden in Riga and on the wooden cabinet at the National Library of Latvia that UNESCO has registered as one of the Memory of the World. It is the same face, white-bearded and small-eyed, and it belongs to a man who spent forty years of his life on a single project that no one had asked him to do. His name was Krišjānis Barons. The project was to find every four-line folk song that ordinary Latvians had been singing to each other for the previous thousand years, write each one down on a 7-by-11-centimetre card, sort them by theme on his living-room floor in Moscow, and publish them in six volumes. He finished the project. There were 217,996 cards.

Short answer, before the long version

Early life: a country boy who went to university

Barons was born on 31 October 1835 in Strutele, a small village in central Kurzeme. His father was a farmer in his fifties when Krišjānis was born. The Barons farm was nothing remarkable, but it sat in a region where Latvian was the everyday language of the household, German was the language of authority, and Russian was the language of the Tsarist administration that had controlled Kurzeme since 1795. Like every educated Latvian of his century, Barons grew up trilingual.

What was unusual about him was that he kept going. After village school, he went to the gymnasium in Jelgava, then to the gymnasium in Tartu (then called Dorpat) in southern Estonia, and from there in 1856 to the University of Tartu, where he read mathematics and astronomy. He was one of the first generation of ethnic Latvians to take a university degree under their own name. Most rural Latvians of that era who reached gymnasium quietly Germanised, took a German name, and slid into the German-Baltic professional class. Barons did not.

The reason matters. He was at Tartu during the years when a small group of young Latvian intellectuals were inventing the idea of Latvia as a modern nation rather than a peasant rumour. The movement is now called the First Latvian National Awakening. The figure at its centre was Krišjānis Valdemārs (no relation; just a common Christian name in that generation). Around Valdemārs gathered the so-called jaunlatvieši — the Young Latvians — who argued, in print and in cafés and in late-night Tartu lodgings, that the Latvian language was a real European language with real literature, that Latvians were a real nation with a real history, and that none of this needed German or Russian permission. Barons was at the table.

He left Tartu in 1860 without finishing his astronomy degree. The biographies disagree on whether this was money or politics. Both are probably right. Either way, by 1862 he was in St Petersburg, working as a journalist on Pēterburgas Avīzes, the Petersburg Newspaper — the first Latvian-language newspaper of any consequence, founded by Valdemārs. Barons was its editor for stretches of its short life. The paper was shut down by Russian censors in 1865.

Then he disappeared into Russia for nearly thirty years.

The work: forty years, two index cards at a time

From 1867 to 1893, Barons lived in Moscow as a private tutor for the Stanke family, a wealthy Russian merchant household. He taught their children mathematics, physics, languages. He was, by all accounts, a competent and very quiet man. His Moscow employers had no idea that during his evenings, his weekends, and his holidays back in Kurzeme, he was running what was probably the largest folklore-collection project ever conducted by a single person in Eastern Europe.

The premise was simple, and it was not new. The Romantic-era European interest in folk material — the Brothers Grimm in Germany, Elias Lönnrot collecting the Kalevala in Finland, A. F. Pott working on Latvian language — had reached the Latvian intellectual world by the 1850s. People had been collecting dainas in a haphazard way for fifty years. What no one had attempted was to collect them all.

Barons did not do it himself, at least not the field collection. He could not have. He lived in Moscow. What he did was something more difficult and more useful. He set up a national network. From the late 1870s onwards he sent letters to schoolteachers, country pastors, and ordinary literate Latvians in every parish, asking them to write down the dainas they knew or could collect from their grandmothers, their neighbours, their travelling musicians, anyone. He gave them precise instructions: one daina per page, write it as it was sung, mark the singer’s village, mark the singer’s age. The letters described what to do with cross-referenced variants. They asked for honesty about lines the singer was unsure of.

The pages came back. Bundles of them, every week, year after year, addressed to Barons in Moscow. He copied each daina onto a small standardised card — 11 centimetres by 7 — and filed it. Then he sorted the cards by theme. The theme structure was his own invention, and it is what makes the collection a coherent work rather than a heap of paper. Cards about cradles went in one drawer. Cards about weddings went in another. Cards about the spring sowing, the autumn slaughter, the spinning of flax, the death of a parent — each got its drawer, sometimes its sub-drawer.

By the time he stopped, in 1915, the cards numbered 217,996. The cabinet had grown to 70 drawers. He had personally received, copied, and sorted every one. Many of the dainas existed in dozens of variants from different parishes; Barons recorded all of them and noted the variation. The work was the kind of close, repetitive, file-clerk labour that kills the patience of most people in a year. It killed Barons’s in forty.

The publication was a separate project on top of the filing. Between 1894 and 1915 he edited and published the six volumes of Latvju Dainas — The Latvian Dainas — printed in Jelgava and St Petersburg. Each volume was a brick. The whole edition is about 8,000 pages. It is the founding document of Latvian literary scholarship and the foundation that every Latvian poet since has stood on, whether they knew it or not.

By the time the sixth volume came out in 1915, the First World War was on, the German army was advancing through Kurzeme, the Russian Empire was three years from collapse, and Barons was eighty.

The cabinet itself: 217,996 cards in a wooden box

The Dainu skapis — literally “the daina cabinet” — is the physical artefact that comes home from this story. It is a piece of dark-stained wooden joinery, broadly the size of a substantial chest of drawers, with 70 small horizontal drawers. Each drawer holds a few thousand index cards. The cards themselves are small — 11 by 7 cm — and the handwriting on them is mostly Barons’s own, in dense black ink in a precise, slightly leftward-slanting script. Some cards are in other hands — the original collectors’, or his daughter Lota’s in his last years — but most are his.

The cabinet survived the First World War, the Latvian War of Independence, the inter-war republic, the Soviet occupation, the German occupation, the Soviet re-occupation, the long stagnation of the Latvian SSR, and the Singing Revolution. It is now displayed in a glass case at the National Library of Latvia — the Māras pils, the Castle of Light, on the western bank of the Daugava in Riga — lit from above, with rotating drawers open so visitors can see the cards inside.

In 2001 the Cabinet of Folk Songs was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. Latvia’s only entry on that list at the time. The citation noted not just the size and completeness of the collection — though both are remarkable — but the methodological achievement of organising 217,996 short anonymous oral fragments into a navigable taxonomy.

What is in those 217,996 cards is a particular kind of knowledge. The dainas are not stories. They are not narrative folk-tales. They are very short — almost always four lines, usually in trochaic tetrameter, often with internal rhyme — and they were sung from memory by women, mostly, at the work of the day. Each daina is a snapshot. Cumulatively they are a 1.2-million-snapshot photograph of how Latvian peasants thought about their world from roughly the 13th century to roughly the 19th. The pre-Christian gods are in there. The agrarian calendar is in there. The cosmology of the spinning wheel and the threshing barn and the bee-hive is in there. The way a mother spoke to her daughter on the morning of her wedding is in there. None of these things were written down anywhere else, because the people who held them were not the people who wrote books.

The cabinet is the storage. The dainas are the contents. Barons is the man who decided neither could be allowed to be lost.

Last summer: the steep trail at Turaida, 1922

By the time Latvia became independent in 1918, Barons was 83. He was a national figure, but a quiet one — not a politician, not a public-facing intellectual, simply the old man who had done a lifetime of work that the new country was now finding it owed everything to. He moved between Riga and various country places, mostly in Vidzeme and Kurzeme. The summer of 1922 he spent at the “Dainas” homestead on the slopes of the Gauja above Turaida, in a wooden farmhouse that the museum reserve still preserves.

His daughter-in-law Ieva Stamerova wrote a memoir of that summer. The line that everyone in Latvia who reads it remembers is not about the cabinet or the dainas. It is about an old man on a steep trail.

The story goes that a young man hiking up the steep path of Turaida hill stopped at the top to catch his breath, looked back, and saw an old man following him up — slowly but steadily, never stopping. The young man was startled. The old man kept coming. He reached the top, looked out over the Gauja valley, paused for a moment to take in the view, and walked on. The young man only realised afterwards that this was Father Barons. He was eighty-seven and was still climbing hills.

That story, more than the publication of the six volumes, is what Latvians keep about Barons. Steady, durable, slightly bemused, unfussed about his own importance, still walking. The trail he is supposed to have hiked is now marked as the Krišjānis Barons trail, 300 metres of forest path running from the “Little Cloud” sculpture on Folk Song Hill down to the “Dainas” homestead by the river.

He died in Riga the following March, on 8 March 1923, in his ninth decade. The funeral was a state event. The new Latvian republic he had outlived the empire of buried him with full national honours.

Where you find his face today

Almost everywhere in Latvia, if you know what to look for.

The cabinet is in the National Library of Latvia on Mūkusalas iela, Riga. Free to visit; the cabinet is in a permanent exhibit on the upper floors. Allow at least 30 minutes there. It is one of the few cultural objects in Riga that genuinely repays a slow look.

The bronze monument is by Teodors Zaļkalns, unveiled in 1985 in Vērmane Garden in central Riga, on the 150th anniversary of Barons’s birth. Zaļkalns shows him seated, not standing — an old folklorist with his hands resting on a notebook, looking down. It is one of the most restrained public sculptures in the city. A short walk from the Freedom Monument; covered in our Vērmane Garden post.

The granite portrait at Turaida is on the central Dziesmu tēvs sculpture (number 7) on Folk Song Hill, with three generations of singers carved around it. A second smaller portrait of Barons sits inside the iconography of the Stone of Spīdola (sculpture 14). The full sculpture catalogue is in the Dainu Kalns field guide; the political backstory of the hill is in the long history of Dainu Kalns.

The museum to his life is on Krišjāņa Barona iela in central Riga — the street is named after him — in the Riga apartment where he spent his last decades. Open most days; check the schedule. It is small, quiet, and exactly the kind of writer’s-house museum that almost no one goes to and that everyone should.

His face on currency. The pre-euro Latvian 100-lats banknote, in circulation 1992–2014, carried Barons’s portrait. A nation that puts a folklorist on the highest-denomination note is making a particular argument about what its values are. Latvia made that argument for twenty-two years.

My honest take

Latvia is a small country with a long memory. The reason the memory is long is that someone wrote it down. Specifically, someone spent forty years copying small index cards in a Moscow apartment between paid tutoring sessions, on a project no one had commissioned and no one would have noticed if he had given up on. He did not give up.

If you only have time for one Barons-related stop in Latvia, make it the cabinet at the National Library. Stand in front of the wooden case for a few minutes, look at the open drawers, read the small handwriting on the cards. The thing in front of you is the reason there is still a Latvian language with deep roots, and not a thinner survivor that lost its underground layer in the 19th century the way many small European languages did. The Brothers Grimm did this for Germany. Elias Lönnrot did it for Finland. Barons did it for Latvia, alone, in a foreign city, in his own time.

If you have time for two stops, the second one is the Turaida hill. The Krišjānis Barons trail there is short and easy to walk. At the bottom of it is the “Dainas” homestead where he spent his last summer. There is no fee, no queue, no audio guide. Just a path through a forest with very old trees in it, the small Dainupīte River alongside, and at the end the ordinary wooden farmhouse where an eighty-seven-year-old folklorist once sat in the August sun and watched the Gauja go past.

Frequently asked questions about Krišjānis Barons

Where his work lives today: the cabinet is in the National Library of Latvia. The portrait sculpture is at Dainu Kalns at Turaida; the field guide to all 26 sculptures there is here. For the wider context of how Latvia survived the long century in which Barons was working, see A Brief History of Latvia.

Barons’s “Dainas” homestead and the Krišjānis Barons trail at Turaida are part of every Sigulda & Gauja Valley day we run. If you would like a half-day at Turaida with a licensed Latvian guide, the route includes the National Library cabinet on the way back to Riga if the timing works. €85 per adult, year-round.