On Ludza - Latvia's oldest town

Ludza is the oldest town in Latvia - a country that has known occupation and catastrophe many times over. It is a town that was once more than half Jewish, whose synagogue survived a fire and a genocide yet is still standing. It is a town whose medieval castle tells a story of crusading ambition and ultimate ruin, and whose lakes still carry the legend of the bewitched princess waiting somewhere beneath the hill. Join me on a trip to Ludza.

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Transcript

On Ludza - Latvia's oldest town

Picture this. You're standing on a hill. On your left, a lake. On your right, another lake. Between them, the crumbled, red-brick walls of a medieval castle, roofless, open to the sky, and illuminated at night like something out of a fairy tale. Beneath your feet, somewhere, is the oldest layer of organised human settlement in the entire country of Latvia.

This isn't Rīga. This isn't Cēsis. This is Ludza. And over an April weekend, I finally made it here.

In this episode, we're going deep into Latgale, Latvia’s most eastern region, almost at the Russian border, to explore a town that holds more history per square metre than almost anywhere I've visited in this country. A town that is, by official reckoning, 849 years old this year. A town called Ludza.

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A history of Ludza

Let's start at the very beginning, and that beginning is, remarkably, the twelfth century.

Ludza holds the official distinction of being the oldest town in Latvia, and that title is even written into its civic identity: a key feature in the town's coat of arms, symbolising its status as keeper of Latvia's oldest roots. This year, 2026, Ludza celebrates its 849th birthday, which means we trace its founding to 1177. And that date isn't invented. It comes from one of the most significant medieval documents in Eastern European history.

In 1177, a Russian chronicle known as the Hypatian Codex recorded the birth and baptism of a son of the Rus chieftain Rurik, and it placed that event in Ludza. Think about what that means. Ludza was considered significant enough, a real, recognised place, to be named in a royal chronicle nearly nine centuries ago. At a time when most of what we now call Latvia was dense forest and Latgalian tribal land, this particular hilltop between two lakes was already on the map.

But human activity here goes back much, much further than the written record. Baltic Latgalian tribes settled in this region as early as the 1st century BC, and the evidence is everywhere underfoot: there are fourteen ancient settlements, more than twenty-five castle mounds, and around seventy burial sites across the Ludza area. These were people who understood this landscape: the lakes for fish and water, the forests for shelter, the hilltops for defence.

Around the castle hill between what we now call the Small and Great Ludza Lakes, a Latgalian wooden fortress rose as a border fortification. And from that fortress, a town grew. Locals will tell you that Ludza takes its name from a girl called Lūcija: the daughter of a castle lord or a king, depending on who’s telling the story. Lūcija derives from the Latin lux, meaning light. It’s a beautiful tale, and in a way it fits: this hilltop between two lakes really does feel like a place named for light. Historically, though, the town’s name is older and murkier than that. Medieval sources mention a settlement here under an earlier form of the name, Lučina, and linguists suspect the root may lie in old Slavic or Livonian words connected with water and lakes, rather than directly with Lūcija herself. So the legend is probably not the origin of the name, but a later story that people here created to make sense of it – taking an ancient, slightly mysterious place name and tying it to a person, a character, and an idea: a girl called Light guarding the oldest town in Latvia.

What followed those early Latgalian centuries was a story shared by much of the Baltic: a succession of powerful outsiders who recognised the strategic value of this position. Ludza sat directly on trade routes running east to Russia, and whoever controlled the hilltop between those two lakes controlled a key gateway.

The Livonian Order arrived in the 13th century and claimed the surrounding lands as early as 1264. Then came Polish-Lithuanian rule after the dissolution of the Livonian Order in 1561. In January 1626, during the Polish-Swedish War, Ludza was captured by Sweden, then recaptured by Polish forces. A town this contested clearly mattered.

When Russia annexed Latgale following the first partition of Poland in 1772, Ludza came under Tsarist rule. In 1777, Catherine the Great granted Ludza formal town rights, a significant moment in cementing its civic identity. By the early 19th century, it had become the administrative centre of its county and the second-largest town in Latgale after Daugavpils.

The modern story of Ludza is marked by catastrophe and resilience. In 1938, a devastating fire swept through the town centre, destroying 371 buildings and 80% of the town's shops. Almost half the townspeople were left without shelter. It was a disaster that effectively erased Ludza's historic wooden architecture in a single night, which is why what survives from before that fire is so precious.

Then came the Second World War, German occupation from July 1941 to July 1944, and the horrors we'll speak about in depth later in this episode.

Today, Ludza is a modest town of 7,667 people. But it sits, as it always has, between those two lakes, at the crossroads between Europe and the East, carrying all of that history in its stones.

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The castle on the hill

If Ludza's oldest story belongs to the Latgalians, its most dramatic physical landmark belongs to the Livonian Order.

In 1399, the German crusaders of the Livonian Order built a powerful stone fortress on the hilltop between the Small and Great Ludza Lakes. This was no modest garrison. The castle had three full storeys, six towers, three gates, and two defensive foreparts. It was constructed from grey boulders and red bricks, with decorative elements in black glazed brick: a combination that would have made it visually striking even against the surrounding forests and water. Built for Wennemar von Brüggenei, Master of the Livonian Order, its purpose was clear: this was the easternmost stronghold of Livonia, the last fortress before the Russian world began. It was built to control trade routes from Russia and to anchor the eastern border of the Order's domain.

When you stand on that hill today, you can still feel why they chose this spot. The views across both lakes are extraordinary, with defensive logic and natural beauty combining perfectly.

For over a century and a half, the castle served its role as an eastern bulwark. But the late 16th century brought the Livonian War and the steady collapse of the Order's power. Facing Ivan the Terrible's aggression, the Teutonic Knights handed over their Latgalian strongholds, including Ludza, to Lithuania in 1558 as pledged territories. From the union of Lublin in 1569, Ludza became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The castle clung to military relevance for another century, until 1654, when Russian forces under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich stormed and sacked it. Never fully repaired, the castle fell into the ruin we see today. What remains — a three-storey fragment of wall, the outline of towers, the castle mound itself — has been carefully preserved and enhanced for visitors. A viewing platform, a pedestrian bridge, and illuminated walls at night make it one of Latgale's most atmospheric attractions.

But no castle worth its name exists without a legend, and Ludza has several.

The one most associated with Ludza is connected to an older, wider tradition of Baltic folklore about the three sisters who founded the great Latgalian castles. According to legend, when the Lord Volkenberg died, his inheritance passed to his three daughters: Roze, Lūcija, and Marija. Each sister took her share of land and built a castle upon it. Roze built Rēzekne. Lūcija built Ludza. Marija built Vīlaka.

But the legend does not end there. Roze, and by the tradition's logic, her sisters too, became trapped, bewitched, enchanted in the underground realm beneath her castle. Every nine years at Easter, Roze leaves her underground kingdom to search for a young man bold enough to free her. To do so, he must take her golden cross and sprinkle it with sanctified Easter water. Many have tried. Each time they approach the church, the cross grows impossibly heavy, the road becomes unattainable, the young man drops it, and a low, sorrowful cry is heard as the princess returns to her subterranean prison for another nine years.

The castle at Ludza carries its own version of this enchantment: the prince and the bewitched princess whose story is told in the local legends and who, according to tradition, are still waiting somewhere beneath those red-brick walls.

I must admit, standing there at dusk, with the castle walls glowing and both lakes catching the last of the light, I didn't find it hard to believe that something magical was buried in that hill.

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The Jews of Ludza

Of all the stories Ludza carries, none is more significant, more tragic, or more overlooked by the casual visitor than the story of its Jewish community.

For much of Ludza's modern history, the Jewish population was not a minority. It was the majority. At the peak of its growth in 1815, Jews made up 67% of Ludza's population. By 1868, that figure stood at 55%. Around 1897, the Jewish population numbered 2,803 — still roughly 55% of the town. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, to be in Ludza was, overwhelmingly, to be among Jews.

That figure stopped me. More than half the people who built this town, who ran its shops, raised their families here, worshipped here, were Jewish. And today, barely fifteen elderly Jews remain. The scale of what was lost is almost incomprehensible.

The Jewish presence in Ludza probably dates to the 16th century; there are records of Jews fleeing there from Ivan the Terrible's forces in 1577. A sustained, organised community emerged from the late 18th century, with the first rabbi, Zev-Wolf Altschuler, settling in the town around 1786.

What followed was the creation of a community of remarkable intellectual depth. Ludza became famous across the Jewish world for its rabbis and scholars, so much so that it earned the nickname "the Jerusalem of Latvia", just as Vilnius was called the "Jerusalem of Lithuania”. For 150 years, the rabbinic seat was held by members of the Zioni family, a dynasty of Talmudic scholars whose influence extended far beyond Ludza. One famous disciple, studying under Rabbi Eliezer Don-Yaḥya in Ludza, was the young Abraham Isaac Kook, who would later become the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine.

The community sustained seven synagogues by the early 20th century, and most Jewish children studied in a Jewish public school where lessons were conducted in Hebrew, a rarity even among Jewish communities of the time. There were libraries, mutual aid societies, Zionist youth movements, and printing presses. Jewish-owned businesses made up 191 of Ludza's 302 larger commercial premises by 1935. They ran pharmacies, clothing shops, bakeries, and grain merchants. The town's economic life was, in every practical sense, Jewish life.

Then came the fire. On the night of 11 June 1938, a catastrophic blaze tore through Ludza's town centre. Almost the entire wooden architecture of the old town was destroyed: 371 buildings in total. For the Jewish community, it was devastating: 95% of Jewish-owned stores and houses were consumed by the flames. Many families lost everything. The Great Synagogue, built around 1800 and the oldest in Latvia and the Baltic States, survived. It was one of the only buildings in the old centre left standing. The synagogue survived the fire. It survived the decades. What it could not survive was what came next.

On 3 July 1941, German forces occupied Ludza. The persecution began immediately. By 20 July, a ghetto had been established: a cramped cluster of abandoned streets on the edge of town, beside a lake. Thousands of Jews from Ludza and the surrounding villages were crowded in, sometimes eighteen people to a single room. They were forced to wear yellow patches on their chests and backs. They were banned from walking on pavements. Young women were taken from the ghetto and assaulted by German and Latvian guards.

About 1,500 Jews were living in Ludza before the war; some accounts suggest the number in the ghetto, including refugees from nearby villages and from Lithuania and other parts of Latvia, reached far higher.

On 17 August 1941, the majority of the ghetto's inhabitants, approximately 800 men, women and children, were marched or transported to the shore of Cirma Lake (called Zorba or Curba in some sources), approximately seven kilometres from the town. There, they were ordered to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables. They were shot by units of the German security police, assisted by local Latvian auxiliary police. Their bodies were buried in two pits, each one twenty metres by three metres.

The killings continued in subsequent months. On 27 August, approximately 120 more Jews were taken, including 40 young women who had been working in the German military hospital. In October, another 120 were transported to Rēzekne and murdered there. The last survivors, 25 Jewish professionals and their family members, were killed on 2 May 1942 in the Gorbrovski Forest near Ludza.

Of all the Jews of Ludza, a community that had been the lifeblood of this town for two centuries, only four people survived: a family of three who had found refuge with a local Polish resident, and one infant girl who had fallen from a wagon transporting Jews to their death. A local farmer had picked her up. She was baptised and raised as a Christian.

In total, approximately 1,250 Jews of Ludza were murdered during the German occupation.

The Great Synagogue of Ludza stands at the edge of the old centre, a wooden building covered with brick, built around 1800. It is the oldest surviving synagogue in Latvia and one of the oldest surviving wooden synagogues in all of Northern and Eastern Europe. Similar buildings disappeared across the continent during the 20th century; those that survive can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Opposite the synagogue, on the bank of the lake, is a memorial to the Jews from Ludza who were exterminated.

After the Holocaust, the synagogue was used as a meeting house through the Soviet era, then as a car repair workshop. Its Torah ark, reading platform, women's gallery and original benches survived remarkably intact. In November 2013, it was designated a national cultural monument. A major restoration, funded in part by European Economic Area grants totalling over €200,000, was completed in 2016. Today, the synagogue operates as a museum with permanent exhibitions on Jewish life and culture, the history of the Ludza Jewish community, and the Holocaust. It is the only synagogue in Latvia to preserve an inner cupola.

Please go in. Don't just pass by. The building doesn't announce itself dramatically from the outside, but inside, standing beneath that cupola, knowing what this building witnessed and survived, is one of the most quietly powerful, emotional experiences you can have in Latvia.

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What to see and do in Ludza

Ludza is not a place that immediately overwhelms you with tourist infrastructure. It is a small town, and it wears its history quietly, in the way that places do when the history belongs to the stones and the landscape rather than to museums and signage. But for those prepared to look, it offers an extraordinary amount.

I had a wonderful weekend there: the kind where you keep rounding a corner and finding something unexpected. A ruined tower. A lake glittering through a gap in the buildings. A painted Orthodox church. Let me walk you through what I found.

Begin, as almost every visitor does, with the castle ruins. The hill between the Small and Great Ludza Lakes is the physical and spiritual heart of the town. The red-brick and grey-stone remains of the 1399 Livonian Order fortress loom above you as you approach, and the restored viewing platforms, pedestrian bridge and night illumination make this a genuinely beautiful heritage site.

At the top of the castle mound, you get one of the finest panoramic views in all of Latgale, both lakes stretching out on either side of you, the Catholic church towers of the old town below, and forest rolling away in every direction. A new observation platform integrated into the castle's northern ruins allows you to look down through the original castle windows, a beautiful piece of contemporary heritage design. The tourist information centre offers guided excursions if you want the full historical treatment.

At the foot of the castle hill, the old town rewards a slow walk. Ludza's historic centre, its narrow streets, one- and two-storey wooden buildings with closed yards, verandas and decorative wooden elements, is a designated town-planning monument. It survived both the 1938 fire (just about, in parts) and the Soviet decades relatively intact. Many newer buildings in Ludza's old town feature wooden cladding in the old style and are painted in pastel colours. Although the lime-green-painted ones did not meet my colour approval! The Market Square was historically the beating heart of the town. The Catholic Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, rebuilt and restored, opened its doors again in 1995 after a long restoration. Look for the chapel of the Polish noble family Karnicki (Earls of Eversmuiža), built in 1738, featuring a conical wooden roof and a cross.

On Latgales iela, the Ludza Orthodox Church of the Assumption of the Most Holy Mother of God is a beautifully preserved piece of 19th-century Russian ecclesiastical architecture. Built in 1845, it was elevated to cathedral status in 1878. Its architect was A. Zaharov, and the building is a state-protected architectural monument. Ludza has always been a genuinely multi-confessional town — Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Old Believer — and the church is a visible reminder of the Russian and Slavic cultural threads woven through Latgale's history.

As discussed in our previous chapter, the Great Synagogue is a must-visit. It now operates as a museum with permanent exhibitions on Jewish life and the Holocaust, as well as a travelling exhibition on Latvian-Jewish history. There is also a dedicated exhibition to the Ludza photographer Wulf Frank, one of the few visual witnesses to pre-war Jewish life in the town.

The Ludza Local History Museum, one of the oldest museums in Latgale, with origins dating to 1918, occupies what was once the family seat of Major General Yakov Kulnev, a hero of the 1812 war with Napoleon. Sitting on the shore of the Small Ludza Lake, the museum is a genuinely charming site with seven exhibition spaces, an open-air ethnographic department, and more than 35,000 items in its collection. The history exposition runs from prehistoric hunters on the shores of the Great Ludza Lake through Stone Age finds, Latgalian burial jewellery and weapons, and into the medieval period and the Russian Empire era. The open-air department reconstructs rural Latgalian buildings from the 19th and early 20th century. It's the kind of place where you can spend a surprisingly happy hour absorbing daily life from another era.

In the centre of town, the Ludza Town Park dates back to the second half of the 19th century, when it was laid out as a garden divided among three local families. Much has changed since then, but the park retains its essential character as a place for quiet walks and moments of calm. Apart from the noisy neighbours, so many crows’ nests on top of the park trees, with the birds making quite a racket! Today, the park contains a monument to nine soldiers killed in the Second World War, a children's playground, a small pond with a "Love Bench" — apparently a fixture on the local romantic landscape — and an open-air stage where concerts take place in summer. It's a very Latvian kind of public space: unshowy, genuinely pleasant, and used with easy familiarity by the people who live there.

Ludza is, above all, a lake town. Five lakes surround the town itself, and the wider Ludza region contains more than 200. The two central lakes, Small and Great Ludza, define the town's geography and give it its distinctive silhouette. It is also a town full of cats. We saw so many while walking around town. The inhabitants of Ludza must love cats as pets!

The beach at "Radziņš" by the Small Ludza Lake is the local favourite swimming spot. The Great Ludza Lake has seen exciting new development: a promenade has been built along its shore, creating a fresh attraction for visitors and residents alike. It was brand new as of this spring 2026. For those wanting a longer walk, there is a 24-kilometre circular trail around the Great Ludza Lake, taking in the hillfort at Ķīšu, viewpoints across the water, and other historical sites. It's a genuinely beautiful walk on a clear day, I’m told. There is no way I could persuade my family to walk a 24 km trail! However, we did walk the new promenade, and it was exactly what you want from a lakeside walk: calm water, a few locals quietly sitting and enjoying the peaceful view, with the castle visible behind. The kind of place you find yourself lingering longer than you had planned.

How to get there? We took the Vivi train from Rīga central station. The journey is a few minutes over three hours. It is possible to go to Ludza on a day trip, as there are three trains each way. We decided to slow travel and stayed in Ludza over the weekend. I can highly recommend the Aesthetic apartment on Booking.com and Airbnb. Situated in the middle of Ludza near the Town Park and a short walk from castle hill, it gets wonderful reviews from delighted guests.

Where to eat? Two recommendations. Kafejnīca Kristīne on the town square by the tourist information centre serves well-cooked Latvian food at very reasonable prices. And the small, square, brick building nearby, Pizza Villaggio, serves wonderful pizza. Just be prepared to eat your pizza al fresco in the small park alongside, as the pizzeria has very few tables. There are many benches in the park to accommodate pizza lovers!

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Closing reflections

Ludza is, in many ways, everything that makes Latvia quietly extraordinary. It doesn't shout. It doesn't perform. It simply exists, with nine centuries of accumulated history lodged in its stones, its surviving buildings, its lakeshores and its legends. It also has a deep Latgalian identity, a people who are the butt of many sarcastic jokes by Latvians from other regions. Even my beloved Latvian news source, LSM, in its April Fools Day spoofs, had two on Latgale that I’m still not sure were serious reporting or Fools Day spoofs. First headline, “Sit in car, honk all day. Latgale’s farmers try to scare away geese”. And the second headline, “Latvian startup in Latgale develops AI therapist to boost company profits”!

Walking around Ludza, I was impressed with how the local administration of this small border town looks after the wellness of its residents. Of course, there is the new lakeside promenade. However, the street pavements have recently been made in colourful bricks. There is a swimming pool and sports facilities. Even the three-storey Soviet-built housing blocks have lots of newly made car parking. The town was spotlessly clean.

Ludza is the oldest town in a country that has known occupation and catastrophe many times over. It is a town that was once more than half Jewish, whose synagogue survived a fire and a genocide and is still standing. It is a town whose medieval castle tells a story of crusading ambition and ultimate ruin, and whose lakes still carry the legend of the bewitched princess waiting somewhere beneath the hill.

Coming here, I found that the places you least expect to move you are the ones that do. Ludza moved me.

849 years old this year. And still very much alive.

[Illustration by an Englishman in Latvia. Music by Sounova Music from Pixabay]