"Daugavpils... Dünaburg, Dvinsk,... " a Daugavpils Travel Page by daugavpilietis

[These pages are very much in progress... which isn't too swift....]

I've lived here since 1992, so I must love it....

This is probably the least visited city in Latvia, and many a guide (like Lonely Planet) gives it rather bad reviews (Reuters, too, recently wrote of a grimy Russian city living in an alcoholic haze [the drinking habits have a history, too -- in 1846 the Russian government prohibited the establishment of new taverns in the city because of the high level of vodka consumption...]). But there's a lot to see here, it _is_ off the beaten path, and the nearby countryside is delightful.

Daugavpils, which means "castle on the Daugava," was founded in 1275 by the Livonian Knights -- though the place of its founding is actually upstream, at Naujene. You won't find anything that old around here, unless you count things like ancient pagan altar stones (there are several such sites). Latgola (Latgalia, or Lettigallia; eastern Latvia -- Polish Livonia, or Inflanty) was governed by Poland from 1561 to 1772, after which it became part of the Russian Empire and was administered as part of Pskov, Polotsk and Vitebsk gubernii, separate from the rest of what is now Latvia -- Latgola was also part of the Pale of Settlement, and in 1897 ca. 46% of the population of Dvinsk was Jewish.

The city was heavily industrialized in the latter half of the 19th C, mostly because the St. Petersburg - Warsaw railway line was linked to Rīga here in 1861, preventing the capital from becoming a backwater. Prior to World War One, Daugavpils boasted a hundred factories. By 1904 the population had reached 113 000.

Eastern Latvia came under Bolshevik control during the War of Liberation, and in 1919 Daugavpils was the seat of the bloodthirsty Iskolat Republic, after the Stučka government was driven from Rīga. Republican Latvia's military alliance with Poland was concluded on 29 December 1919, and the joint attack on the Bolsheviks began on 3 January 1920 at 6.00 -- the Poles liberated Daugavpils by 15.00 (to the dismay of the Lithuanian forces downstream -- if Daugavpils hadn't been taken so rapidly, I'd be in Daugpilis in Lithuania now...).

A little over a decade ago, the Poles here erected a large cross to mark the graveyard that the Soviets had bulldozed and turned into a quarry and then a garbage dump in the 1960s. On 12 January 1920, the Latvian Army attacked
Abrene (now annexed to Russia). That day, all of Soviet Latvia's institutions were evacuated to Velikiye Luki. A new Polish-Latvian offensive began on 13 January (with Americans following to give aid to civilians) and took Preiļi.

Daugavpils had been devastated, and many homes stood abandoned whilst the authorities searched for their owners. The factories and their workers had been evacuated to Russia, and Liepāja overtook Daugavpils as the second largest city in Latvia; the transportation routes that had made the city a crossroads now ran across the Soviet and Polish borders. World War Two saw massive devastation and the Holocaust -- almost all of the city's Jews and many Gypsies were murdered -- and the aftermath of the war brought renewed industrialization and Russification.

By the time independence was restored in 1991, Daugavpils was for all practical purposes a Russian-speaking city. Industry declined precipitously, and massive Soviet manufacturing concerns like the synthetics plant languished. There has been some investment since (notably from French and German firms) and the city has seen considerable physical improvements in the past few years, but Latgola is the poorest region in the European Union and Daugavpils provides Ireland with more workers than any other Latvian town, per capita.