Midsummer Makes Summer Memorable for B&B Travelers

With summer soon drawing to a close, it might lift our collective spirits to reflect on how summer begins in the Baltics–and Latvia in particular. For as long as anyone can remember, Latvians have celebrated Midsummer’s Eve, with feasts, seasonal cheese and beer, music, dancing, bonfires, and “Līgo” songs sung all night by people with stupendous memories. 

Men wear oak leaf crowns, women wildflower crowns, and failing to stay up until daylight (4 a.m. at this latitude) is frowned on. Midsummer, like any other holiday, has transformed over the generations, but its current iteration in Latvia, where it is an official public holiday, seems to hit the sweet spot. Baltics and Beyond travelers enjoyed Midsummer’s Eve in the Old Town, which included plenty of great food and drink, live music and dancing, and many artisans offering everything from fine linen dresses to candles, flower wreaths, hand-made knitted items and much more. 

The traditional countryside Midsummer’s Eve celebration is described in the dainas (short oral folk poems), and includes wandering from farmstead to farmstead for feasting and merry-making, and – in a joke as old as the folk songs – the young people going off to find fern blossoms. The dainas carry great authority, because they detail many pre-Christian practices, lost in countries without such an oral tradition. (Our own Peter Kalnin is one of many people who has eaten roasted pig snout around the winter solstice because a daina told him to!).

Although the Soviet regime in Latvia was officially hostile to Christianity, this did not make it friendly to neo-paganism, which it suspected (rightly) of being a hiding place for anti-Soviet sentiment. Midsummer’s Eve was never banned, but it was removed as a public holiday, midsummer’s cheese was removed from cookbooks, and-- from what people have said-- for many it became little more than a night of drunkenness. The Latvians who fled westward at the end of World War II celebrated Midsummer in exile; but, as the generations who could remember Latvia died off, the celebrations felt increasingly museum-ish. We suspect the same is true for Estonia and Lithuania,

When Latvia regained its independence in 1991, Midsummer returned to the holiday calendar. For many the revival of a folklore-centered Midsummer felt authentic and family-friendly, free from Soviet-era ideology and also from commercialized, greeting-card holidays that arrived with free(r)-market economics. 

One advantage of the city scale and setting is that nationally known performers, including Iļģi and Ducele, play danceable tunes until sunrise. In Riga, at least, Midsummer’s Eve seems to have become the just-right holiday that you hope for when you read the dainas.

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