On Jelgava

This is the fascinating story of Jelgava, a city in Latvia that was once the capital of the Duchy of Courland for centuries, was destroyed during the Second World War, rebuilt as an industrial powerhouse under Soviet occupation, and is now transformed into a vibrant university city.

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Transcript

On Jelgava

The capital that vanished and the Soviet city that replaced it

This is the story of the ancient capital of the Duchy of Courland, now part of Latvia, which was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt as a Soviet manufacturing city. Since Latvia regained independence in 1991, Jelgava has transformed into a university city. You can look in one direction and see Soviet panel housing blocks, and turn in another to face the stunning architectural work of Rastrelli. 

Join me as we board a train from Rīga Central Station for the 50 km journey to Jelgava. We are on a new Vivi train, which is very comfortable but slow, as it stops at every station along the route. It gives us time to observe the flat Zemgale scenery of agricultural fields. Soon, we will see rising blocks of housing and some redundant factories. But peer through that and you will see a palace beside the river. We are about to arrive in Jelgava. I ask myself, how did this place go from a baroque ducal capital to a mostly Soviet low-rise city with only fragments of its past – and what does that feel like when you walk it today?

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From Mitau to Jelgava and a lost capital

A settlement existed here between the Lielupe and Driksa rivers from around the 10th century, in the lands of the Semigallians. In 1265, the Livonian Order built a castle on an island in the river, called Pilssala, as a southern fortress against the Semigallians and Lithuanians. The Livonian Order were German crusaders – the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Knights – who conquered and governed much of what is now Latvia and Estonia. Orders to construct a fortified castle had come from Bishop Wilhelm of Modena some 40 years earlier. However, the Semigallians were NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) and had resisted its construction on their ancient trading site. The castle was eventually built by the Master of the Livonian Order, Konrad von Mandern. A Livonian Rhymed Chronicle records that the Semigallians were so unhappy with this new castle by the Lielupe river that they ambushed the Order’s troops not long after it was built, and the castle - well constructed - “saved the life” of the Master of the Order. The castle became the residence of the District Governor of the Livonian Order and his subordinates, fellow knights.

The town became known in German as Mitau, and later in Latvian as Jelgava. It became the capital of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia in 1561, a semi‑independent state under Polish‑Lithuanian supremacy. Five years later, the Duke of Courland and Semigallia, Gotthard Kettler, chose Jelgava Castle as his residence and moved there with his court, after a few renovation works were completed. The dukes of Courland were absurdly ambitious for such a small duchy – they established colonies in Tobago in the Caribbean and Gambia in West Africa – and governed from Jelgava. This quiet city in Latvia was once the centre of a tiny colonial empire. The world’s smallest state to have colonies. You can listen to the full story in my podcast episode, ‘On Tobago’.

The Kettler dynasty ended in 1737, and Ernst Johann Biron was elected as the new ruler of Courland and Semigallia. He clearly disliked the idea of living in an old castle, so he had it demolished and replaced with a brand-new palace as his residence. This palace was built in two stages by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (famous for the St. Petersburg Winter Palace), featuring a U-shaped baroque/rococo design with sumptuous interiors. It is considered one of Latvia’s most outstanding surviving architectural monuments. Constructed by a renowned imperial architect, this provincial palace gives Jelgava a slightly “off‑brand St Petersburg” vibe. In the early 1980s, I visited St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Soviet Union tourism described the city as “the Venice of the north”. Buildings like the Winter Palace and Hermitage were very grand, and there were a few canals as well. As a diplomat in Moscow, I needed permission from the Soviet authorities to travel outside the city. This was arranged by the Embassy’s fixer, who also booked my accommodation. That turned out to be a suite in the grandest hotel in St. Petersburg. When I returned to Moscow and boasted about the suite, I was scolded by the Embassy leaders. Apparently, that suite was reserved only for Ambassadors and Ministers. Not my fault, guv!  

In 1795, Duke Peter Biron sold the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia to Russia, which absorbed the territory into the Russian Empire. The palace housed the administration of the Courland province of Russia until the early 20th century. Jelgava lost its sovereign court but remained an important provincial city and railway hub. The 19th century saw the development of broad streets and mansions owned by Baltic German nobility, resulting in Jelgava having one of Latvia’s best-preserved old towns before WW2. At that time, it had a multi-ethnic character, including Baltic Germans, Latvians, and a significant Jewish community from the 16th century onward. Several early Zionist leaders originated from Jelgava. By the 1930s, Jelgava was a prosperous regional centre with an elegant old town, cobbled streets, and churches like St Anne’s, alongside the palace as a landmark. Today’s largely Soviet-rebuilt city overlays these vanished layers. Standing on Pilssala island today, it’s hard to imagine that almost 90% of that city would soon disappear.

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Soviet Jelgava: a city rebuilt from ruins

The next chapter in Jelgava’s history is marked by destruction, occupation, and rebuilding in a completely different style and under a different ideology.

In 1940, following the Nazi‑Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Latvia. Jelgava was incorporated into the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, between 1941 and 1944, German forces occupied the city. During this period, German and Latvian auxiliary police carried out mass shootings of the city’s Jews, and the main synagogue in Jelgava’s centre was burnt down. The genocide of Jews in Latvia is, unfortunately, a forgotten part of the country’s history. Heavy street fighting and repeated air raids between the Red Army and German forces devastated the city in 1944, with around 90% of Jelgava’s buildings destroyed, including the Courland Provincial Museum and most of the historic city centre. Jelgava became a front line in the war from late July to October 1944. German counterattacks failed, and the front moved when the Wehrmacht retreated, leaving Jelgava in ruins. After the war, the Soviets faced a largely flattened city. Instead of reconstructing the old town, they rebuilt Jelgava in typical post‑war Soviet style: wide streets, functional apartment blocks, and monumental public buildings.

Jelgava became a significant industrial city: large factories were built or expanded, including a large sugar factory and assembly facilities for the Rīga Autobus Factory (RAF). The company relocated from Rīga to Jelgava to increase its assembly line capacity. You can imagine trains delivering workers and parts to assemble the RAF minibuses. The ruins of the factory still remain in Jelgava. Do listen to my podcast episode, ‘On the Latvija minibus’, for the story about this iconic and ubiquitous vehicle in the Soviet Union. Secretly, I love the van, and I took a trip in one during that podcast.

To power this new industrial city, Russians migrated there from across the Soviet Union, creating a very different ethnic dynamic than in the pre-War period. The Soviet policies of collectivisation and urbanisation were also promoted during this time. Kolkhozes and state farms reshaped the countryside, and many rural Latvians moved into towns like Jelgava for industrial jobs and to live in apartments with amenities. People left small single-farm homesteads, viensētas, for the concrete blocks of Jelgava.

There is a local legend that says what remained of Jelgava’s old town after the war was further destroyed when the Soviets used the ruins as a set for a film about the Siege of Stalingrad, blowing up surviving historic buildings for “authentic” scenes. Imagine: instead of carefully restoring 18th-century houses, they wired them with explosives for the perfect war shot. Although the lore may not be true, it sounds so very Soviet!

Imagine the scene in the 1980s: a Soviet city with broad avenues, standardised prefabricated housing blocks, a largely erased old centre, yet still anchored by the hulking, fire‑damaged, then-restored Rastrelli palace. This is where it gets interesting: when independence was regained, and the Soviet Union collapsed. The transition to a modern Jelgava as a place negotiating between its baroque aristocratic past and Soviet working‑class reality.  

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Present‑day Jelgava: student city on the Lielupe

Today, Jelgava is often called the “student capital of Latvia” thanks to the Latvian University of Life Sciences and Technologies, whose main building is in Jelgava Palace itself. The palace, once a ducal residence and later severely damaged in the Second World War, has been rebuilt and now houses the university’s administration and some faculties. In fact, since 1961 - during the Soviet era - it housed the Latvian Academy of Agriculture, which became the Latvian University of Agriculture, and since 2018, the Latvian University of Life Sciences. It provides a nice contrast: “You can watch students in hoodies cycling into a building designed by the Tsar’s star architect.”  

Jelgava still retains much of its Soviet-era architecture. Many neighbourhoods are characterised by post-war blocks and functional civic buildings, giving them a more “nondescript” appearance than Rīga or Cēsis. However, there is an area of 18th- to 19th-century small buildings called the Old Town quarter in the west of the city; the streets have been recobbled, and some buildings have been restored, with information plaques for curious tourists. St Anne’s Lutheran Church nearby is the oldest surviving building in Jelgava.

A personal anecdote. I got married at Rundāle Palace (do listen to ‘On Rundāle Palace’ episode), which is a half-hour drive from Jelgava, or about an hour in the old Volga car we were in! The evening reception was at Hotel Jelgava, overlooking the baroque palace in Jelgava. To clear the cobwebs the next morning, we all went on a chartered boat trip and ate Solyanka soup, supposedly a hangover cure!

Jelgava has prioritised investing in public art and sculptures, especially on Pastasala, where three fireclay sculpture parks showcase works from international symposiums. There’s also the “Wheel of Time 100” – 100 stones marking 100 years of Latvian statehood – creating a physical timeline you can literally walk around. Latvia tends to commemorate time and history in its landscape. We visited the annual ice sculpture show featuring international artists.

Jelgava blends city and nature. There are boardwalks along the Svēte River and the Palienes meadows, where semi‑wild horses graze within sight of the city. There is also an observation tower where, on a clear day, you can look out over the floodplains and maybe spot those horses.

Modern Jelgava is an industrial city located on the flat Zemgale plain, with its historic centre almost entirely disappeared, a baroque palace now used as a university, Soviet-era blocks, and a growing mosaic of sculptures, memorial stones, and ecological projects.

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Another view

I wanted to find out what it was like to live there. So I had a chat with Joe Horgan, an American based in Jelgava who produces the Latvia Weekly podcast.

Me: Thanks for joining me, Joe. 

Joe: Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Me: I want to ask you, as a resident of Jelgava, what you like about living there? 

Joe: I like most things, honestly, about living in Jelgava. So, when I first came to Latvia in 2013, I was placed, as part of my scholarship that I was on, at a local school in Jelgava, Jelgava Spital, now a state gymnasium, and also the university there. And I've continued working there for the whole time I've been in Latvia. The year after my scholarship, though, I actually moved to Rīga, and I was travelling to Jelgava every day, and kind of hoping to get back to Jelgava. And I have people ask me, like, "Oh, don't you want to live in Rīga? Why do you want to live out there?" But no, I really love the size of it. I'm not a big city person. I love how relaxed things are. There aren't maybe quite as many tourism objects as there might be, in Rīga or Liepāja, but it's a very, very comfortable place to live. It's very, very relaxed, and pretty much anything that you need to buy, you can get there. And if not, it's only 45 minutes from Rīga. You can jump on the train. It's very, very easy to get to Rīga. And it's a great place to raise my kids. There's a lot of great playgrounds nearby. My daughters, who are seven and five now, can ride their bikes pretty easily. And it's a great place, I would say, to raise a family. I like it a lot. There really isn't anywhere else I'd want to live. 

Me: Thank you. For someone who's visiting Jelgava, as a tourist, on a day trip, any tips on what to do or go to or see or experience? 

Joe: Yeah, I mean, the number one thing I would say is definitely visit the Trinity Tower. So, as I'm sure you mentioned earlier in the episode, unfortunately, it was very badly damaged during World War II. And the communist officials running Jelgava after the war, during the occupation, being the not very romantic people they were, instead of trying to rebuild it in some way, most of the church, they basically took it down, aside from the tower and just built student dorms over it. But the tower itself was renovated in 2010 completely. And now it is a really, really cool, not just tourist information centre, but a viewing platform from the very top. And there's exhibitions, which change pretty frequently on every floor. And there have been restaurants from time to time. So hopefully by the time, whenever it is that you're listening right now, there'll still be a restaurant on the penultimate floor. But those can be kind of fleeting from time to time. But when there is a restaurant there, it's a really, really great place to eat. So definitely the tower is a great place to visit. You can get there like 10, 15-minute walk from the train station. And then, of course, going out to the Palace Island. The palace itself, although it's extremely impressive from the outside, the inside is basically just like a university building, which I work there, and I love working there and everything. But it's not like Rundāla when you walk around a massive work of art. So definitely the outside of the palace is great. But if you walk further past the palace, you can go to the major kind of like wooden tower where you can see the wild horses who live there, which please do not feed them. You're not supposed to feed the horses. So those would be kind of the major places I would suggest going out to visit. But also, the Gedert Elias Art Museum is great, art and history museum. The top floor is art museum with an exhibition from a recent artist, and then the left side is a permanent exhibition about Elias himself, and then the bottom floor is devoted to Latvian history. So definitely worth going out to see and visiting at some point if you're able to make it out to Jelgava.

Me: Thanks for those tips, Joe. But anything you dislike about Jelgava? 

Joe: Yeah, I mean, I'm very patriotic about Jelgava in my own podcast. I try to point out that we are a Jelgava podcast. My former co-host also was a lifelong born and bred Jelgavian. So I don't like to air out any grievances of Jelgava. But, anywhere that you live, obviously, it's not a utopia. And I would say definitely the biggest kind of sticking point that people have about Jelgava, for those of us who live there, they've been building a market for many, many years, which you can read about in Latvian media, which supposedly was finished a few months ago, but still not open. And it was supposed to be finished, I don't even know how many years ago. So that's a big sticking point. It'd be nice to have this new market. Also, no movie theatre, so although it's easy to get to Rīga and watch the movies there, it is frustrating when we go to Liepāja or even like Sigulda, which is much smaller than Jelgava, and there's a movie theatre there. But that's okay, it gives us a reason to go to Rīga. But no, for the most part, I don't have really much to complain about. If I need something that isn't in Jelgava, then I can just get to Rīga pretty quick. 

Me: Thanks for joining me, Joe. 

Joe: Yeah, thanks, Alan, for having me. 

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A perfect day trip to Jelgava

Jelgava is easy to reach by train, car, or coach. This is a short one-day walking tour. 

Start in the centre at the Holy Trinity Church Tower, which is over 400 years old and now functions as an exhibition and viewing tower rather than a working church. Inside, you’ll find modern, interactive historical displays about Jelgava and the surrounding region; at the top, a 37‑metre‑high viewing platform offers a panoramic view of the city, rivers, palace, Soviet blocks, and meadows.

From the tower, walk across the river towards Jelgava Palace, the big Rastrelli baroque ensemble on the river island. Even if interior access is limited due to the university, you can see the façade, stroll in the park, and, if possible, visit the Vault of the Dukes – the crypt where the Courland dukes are buried. The facade of the Palace is the best bit - simply stunning!

Cross the Mītava Bridge to Pasta Island. There is a tunnel beneath the road bridge. The bridge itself offers scenic views and has become a minor attraction. It’s a spot to pause, take photos, and look back at the palace and city. On the island, explore three distinct fireclay sculpture parks created during an international symposium. Each sculpture tells its own story, some abstract, some figurative. Check them out. Don’t miss the Jelgava Student sculpture near the bridge, where locals say you can make a wish if you touch it – a charming little ritual for visitors.

Then head into the Old Town quarter in the western part of Jelgava to see the remaining 18th–19th‑century low‑rise buildings with restored cobbles and plaques. Also, visit St Anne’s Lutheran Church, the city’s oldest building, and imagine what the pre‑war streets must have felt like when they extended far beyond this remnant.

If the weather and time permit, take a quick trip to the Svēte River boardwalks or Palienes meadows, maybe combined with a visit to the Jelgava observation tower, where you might see semi-wild horses grazing on the floodplain. You will notice how close nature is to the city – one foot on cobblestones, the other in wetlands.

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The lost capital that can still be felt

Jelgava is a place where a once‑grand ducal capital was nearly erased by war and ideology, then reconstructed with concrete and industry, and now gradually layers on students, sculptures, meadows, and memories. If Rīga is Latvia’s shop window, Jelgava is its attic trunk – some things lost, some salvaged, and a few treasures that only reveal themselves if you take the time to look. If you have the opportunity, do take that day trip to Jelgava and see how much of the lost capital you can still feel beneath your feet.

[Image of Jelgava Palace in 1857 by Wilhelm Siegfried Stavenhagen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Music by Alana Jordan from Pixabay]