Here's a story that almost nobody outside the Baltics knows, and it's one of the strangest in European history: for nearly 700 years, a small German-speaking elite ran Latvia. They built the castles. They owned the land. They governed the cities. They shaped the culture. And then, in October 1939, they all packed up and left. About 60,000 people. Six weeks. Gone.
If you visit Latvia and wonder why a tiny Baltic country has baroque palaces, crusader castles, and an Old Town that looks like it could be in northern Germany — this is why. The Baltic Germans made Latvia look the way it looks. And their story is written into every landscape I show visitors on my excursions.
The Uninvited Guests (1201)
It starts, as many European stories do, with men in armour arriving somewhere they weren't invited.
In 1201, Bishop Albert of Bremen sailed up the River Daugava with a small army of crusader knights and founded the city of Riga. The official purpose was to convert the pagan Baltic peoples to Christianity. The unofficial purpose was land, power, and the very lucrative fur and amber trade.
The local peoples — the Livs, Latgalians, Selonians, Curonians — had been living here perfectly happily for thousands of years, thank you very much. They had their own languages, their own gods, their own sophisticated culture. The arrival of the German crusaders was not a welcome development. But the knights had better weapons, better organisation, and the institutional backing of the Pope, so within about 50 years the entire territory was conquered.
The castles you can visit today — Bauska, Cēsis, Sigulda, Turaida — date from this period. They were built by the Livonian Order (the successor to the original crusading brotherhood) as fortresses to control the territory. When I take visitors to Bauska Castle, I always point out that these weren't just defensive structures. They were statements. The German knights were saying: "We're here. We're staying. Get used to it." And they meant it — for seven hundred years.
The Duchy of Courland: When Latvia Had Colonies
Now here's the part that genuinely surprises people.
After the Livonian Order collapsed in 1561, the southern half of Latvia became the Duchy of Courland — a small state run by Baltic German nobility under the loose authority of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. You'd expect a tiny duchy on the edge of Europe to be a sleepy backwater. You would be spectacularly wrong.
Under Duke Jacob Kettler, who ruled from 1642 to 1682, Courland became one of the most ambitious small states in European history. Jacob built a merchant fleet. He established ironworks and textile mills. He developed the port of Ventspils into a trading hub. And then — and I still find this remarkable — he acquired overseas colonies. Courland colonised part of the Gambia River in West Africa and the Caribbean island of Tobago.
Let me say that again: Latvia had a Caribbean colony. Tobago. The island where they now make rum and host cricket matches. For a few decades in the 17th century, there were Courlanders building fortifications on a tropical beach, thousands of kilometres from the Baltic. Duke Jacob's shipyards at Ventspils produced hundreds of vessels to support this improbable empire.
It didn't last — the colonies were lost to larger powers, and Jacob himself was captured by the Swedes and spent several years as a prisoner of war (a recurring theme with Baltic rulers and involuntary relocation). But the ambition of it! A duchy the size of a medium English county, reaching for global power. You have to admire the audacity, even if the whole enterprise had the faintly comic quality of a terrier picking a fight with a Great Dane.
The Glass Ceiling in the Russian Empire
After Courland was absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1795, the Baltic Germans found themselves in a peculiar position. They were the local elite — they owned the land, ran the provincial administration, dominated the professions, and maintained their German language, Lutheran religion, and separate legal traditions. The Russian tsars largely left them alone, because the Baltic provinces were well-run and profitable.
But there was a ceiling. A very real, very German glass ceiling. Baltic Germans could rise high in the Russian imperial system — many became generals, diplomats, and administrators — but they were always, ultimately, foreigners in someone else's empire. They were German-speaking Protestants in an Orthodox, Russian-speaking world, and no amount of loyalty or competence could fully bridge that gap.
This is exactly where our friend Ernst Johann von Biron comes in (you can read his full story in my Rundāle Palace guide). Biron shattered the glass ceiling through sheer force of personality — and his close personal relationship with Empress Anna. He became the most powerful man in Russia, and the Russian nobility never forgave him for it. A Baltic German stable boy's grandson running the empire? The scandal! The indignity! The fact that he did it anyway, for a decade, tells you something about both the ambition and the vulnerability of the Baltic German position.
The Manor Houses: 1,200 of Them
If you drive through the Latvian countryside today, you'll see them everywhere — manor houses. Some magnificently restored, some crumbling quietly behind overgrown hedges, some converted into schools or municipal offices. There are over 1,200 of them across Latvia. Each one was the centre of a Baltic German estate, the big house where the German-speaking family lived, surrounded by the Latvian-speaking peasants who worked their land.
The relationship was feudal and, for most of its history, deeply unequal. Latvian peasants were serfs — legally tied to the land, unable to move or marry without their landlord's permission. Serfdom wasn't abolished in Latvia until the early 19th century, and even then, economic dependence continued for decades afterwards.
I don't tell this story to vilify the Baltic Germans. Most of them were simply living within the system they were born into, as people do everywhere. Some were genuinely benevolent landlords who built schools and churches for their Latvian tenants. Others were... less so. The point is that when you look at a beautiful Latvian manor house, you're looking at a system — and the beauty and the injustice are inseparable. That complexity is part of what makes the history so compelling, and I think visitors appreciate hearing the full story rather than a sanitised version.
The Latvian Awakening: "Actually, This is Our Country"
The 19th century changed everything. As serfdom ended and Latvians began to urbanise, educate themselves, and develop a national consciousness, the old order began to crack.
The First National Awakening of the 1850s–1880s was a cultural revolution. Latvian-language newspapers appeared. A national literature emerged. The Song Festival tradition began — massive choral gatherings where thousands of Latvians sang together in their own language, and the emotional power of it was enough to make you cry, even if you'd been a Baltic German baron watching nervously from the balcony.
By 1900, Latvians were the majority in their own cities for the first time in seven centuries. The tension between the old German elite and the rising Latvian middle class produced extraordinary creativity — the National Romantic architecture I describe in my Art Nouveau walking guide, where Latvian architects carved folk symbols into the façades of buildings on streets that had been German-speaking for hundreds of years. It was revolution by architecture. Very Latvian.
When Latvia declared independence in 1918, it was the first time in 700 years that Latvians governed their own country. Think about that. Seven hundred years. And then, suddenly, the Latvians were in charge, and the Baltic Germans — still wealthy, still owning much of the land — were a minority in a country their ancestors had built but never considered theirs to share.
The Exit: October 1939
The end came with devastating speed and the surreal quality of a historical event so strange it would be rejected as fiction.
In October 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler called the Baltic Germans "home to the Reich." It was presented as a voluntary repatriation. In practice, it was an order. Leave Latvia. Come to Germany. Now.
Within six weeks, approximately 60,000 Baltic Germans from Latvia packed up centuries of accumulated life and left. Imagine the scenes at the port of Riga: families loading trunks onto ships, saying goodbye to houses they'd lived in for twenty generations, leaving behind graves, churches, beloved landscapes. Some families had continuous records in Latvia going back to the 13th century. They were leaving the only home their family had ever known — to go to a "homeland" most of them had never actually visited.
They were resettled, mostly in occupied Poland, on farms confiscated from Polish families. The bitter irony of displaced people being settled on the property of other displaced people was apparently lost on the regime organising it.
The manor houses were nationalised. The churches lost their congregations. The guildhalls fell silent. Within a year, Soviet occupation would transform Latvia further, and the world the Baltic Germans had built became a memory preserved in stone, in architecture, in the shape of the countryside itself.
What They Left Behind
Everything. That's the short answer.
The medieval street plan of Riga's Old Town — German. The House of the Blackheads, the most photographed building in Latvia — the guildhall of unmarried German merchants. St Peter's Church — a German Lutheran congregation. Rundāle Palace — commissioned by a Baltic German duke. Bauska Castle — built by German crusader knights. The 1,200 manor houses across the countryside. The Lutheran church spires that punctuate the skyline of every Latvian town.
Even the Latvian language carries traces. Words for everyday objects borrowed from Low German centuries ago, so naturalised that most Latvians don't realise they're German. The legal traditions. The administrative structures. The very layout of farms and fields in the countryside. Seven hundred years is a long time. You don't erase it in six weeks, even if you try.
Gå gennem denne historie med mig
On my day excursion to Rundāle Palace and Bauska Castle, I bring this 700-year story to life. From the crusader fortress at Bauska to the baroque ambition of Rundāle to the Latvian countryside shaped by centuries of Baltic German influence — it's history you can walk through, touch, and taste (we stop at a local brewery too).
Se udflugten →How Latvians Feel About It Now
This is the question visitors most want to ask and are too polite to bring up. So I'll answer it.
Modern Latvia's relationship with the Baltic German legacy is remarkably mature. There's pride in the architectural and cultural heritage — Latvians have invested enormously in restoring Rundāle Palace, the Old Town, the manor houses. There's an honest acknowledgement of the centuries of inequality. And there's a kind of philosophical acceptance that history is complicated, that the people who built beautiful things were not always good, and that the people who suffered under unjust systems could still appreciate the beauty that emerged from them.
I'm a Latvian. My ancestors were the serfs, not the barons. And yet I spend my working life showing visitors the palaces and castles that the Baltic German elite built, telling their stories with genuine enthusiasm, because those stories are part of my country's story — and they're extraordinary.
The Baltic Germans were colonisers who became locals who became exiles. They built a world and then lost it. They left behind castles, palaces, churches, and a landscape that still bears their fingerprints. And the Latvians who inherited it all have done something rather wise: they've kept the buildings, learned the lessons, and added their own chapters to a story that's still being written.
That, for me, is the most Latvian thing of all. We don't tear things down. We don't pretend the past didn't happen. We just quietly get on with making it ours.