Brothers Cemetery (Riga)
The Brothers Cemetery ( lett. Brāļu kapi ) in Latvia's capital Riga is a national monument to those who fell in World War I and the Latvian struggle for independence .
Location and importance
The memorial cemetery is a central part of a larger forest cemetery complex in the north-east of Riga. It is dedicated to the fighters who fell for Latvian independence between 1915 and 1920.
The area was largely shaped by the Riga garden director Georg Kuphaldt and his pupil Andrejs Zeidaks , who gave the complex the character of a park. The foundation stone for the construction of the memorial on the cemetery site was laid on November 18th, Latvia's Independence Day, in 1924; however, the design of the facility and its completion dragged on until November 11, 1936.
The sculptor Kārlis Zāle (1888–1942), who also created the Freedom Monument (Riga) , won the competition to design the cemetery. Except for the relocation of the main character, the mother with the fallen sons, from the center to the rear of the site, Zāle's design was implemented largely unchanged. Zāle found his final resting place here in 1942.
The forest cemetery, the Rainis cemetery and parts of the brothers cemetery border the forecourt. There the entrance portal leads to the memorial area for this world . To the right and left of the main axis, an avenue of lime trees symbolizes the mothers, sisters, brides and widows of the fallen; the linden tree symbolizes the female principle in the Latvian tradition. The avenue leads to a raised grove of 100 oaks , which symbolize a guard of honor; In Latvian folklore, the oak stands for the male principle. An Eternal Flame burns in the middle of the Grove of Honor . The beyond is connected to the grove of honor . The central burial ground includes 315 graves of people known by name who died for the independence of Latvia between 1915 and 1920, as well as a grave for 87 nameless fighters.
Surrounded by figures and walls made of tuff stone , the burial ground leads to the final wall , the Latvia Wall (Lat. Latvijas siena ). The upper end of the wall is formed by reliefs of warriors with the coats of arms of Latvian places from which the fallen soldiers come. In front of the Latvia wall are sculptures with bowing historical Latvian warriors from the four Latvian regions of Courland , Zemgale , Livonia and Latgale . The rear end of the memorial is the 10 m high statue of the mother with the fallen sons of Zāle on a 9 m high plinth.
Passages lead from the central burial ground to the surrounding cemetery area, which has been used for the burial of those who died in the First World War since 1915 . In 1917 soldiers were buried here who had been shot for refusing to fight in the tsarist army after the February 1917 Revolution . In 1919 Red Latvian riflemen were also buried.
In the interwar period , Latvian officers were buried in the brothers' cemetery. In the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic , fallen soldiers and partisans of the Second World War were buried here in 1958. Until 1989, the then Riga city administration organized funerals of members of the Communist Party of Latvia in the adjacent cemetery area , which provoked the growing protest of the population.
Individual evidence
Web links
- Brothers Cemetery (Riga) website
- Brāļu kapi at ailab.lv (lett.)
- Brāļu kapi at www.vietas.lv (lett.)
- Brothers cemetery spherical panorama
literature
- Vaidelotis Apsītis: Brāļu kapi , Riga: Zinātne 1982, 138 p .; 2nd, revised edition 1995, 196 pages, ISBN 5-7966-1111-9
- Vaidelotis Apsītis: Rīgas Brāļu kapi , Riga: Avots 1984, 32 pp.
- Aleksandrs Birzenieks: Brāļu kapi , Riga: Latvijas Valsts izdevniecība 1959, 141 pp.
Coordinates: 56 ° 59 ′ 20.4 ″ N , 24 ° 8 ′ 34.1 ″ E