Latvia

Latvia is the country where the confessional map of northern Europe is legible in a single frame. Lutheranism came with Swedish rule and German landowners and holds the centre and west. Roman Catholicism holds Latgale in the east, because that region stayed under Polish Lithuanian rule through the period when the rest of the territory was being Lutheranised, and the difference has outlived every empire since. Orthodoxy follows the Russian imperial and Soviet centuries and the Russian speaking population that came with them. The three are of broadly comparable size and observance is low across all of them.

The Baltic peoples were the last in Europe to be Christianised, and the conversion here was a conquest, carried out by the Livonian Order from the port of Riga founded in 1201. That lateness matters for what survived: Latvian folk song preserved a very large body of pre Christian imagery, and the collection of it became a national undertaking.

Church and state relations are handled by individual statute rather than a single framework. Latvia concluded an agreement with the Holy See in 2000 and has since passed separate laws for each of the largest denominations, an arrangement that gives a small number of historic churches a defined legal position that newer bodies do not have.

The most consequential recent act was political. In 2022 the Saeima legislated to declare the Latvian Orthodox Church fully independent of Moscow, settling by parliamentary majority a question that canon law regards as belonging to the churches themselves. The move was welcomed domestically and criticised as state interference in religious governance.

A daina is a short unrhymed Latvian folk song, usually four lines in a fixed metre, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. Krisjanis Barons spent decades from the 1870s receiving texts sent in by correspondents across the country, sorting each one onto a slip of paper and filing it in a purpose built cabinet of small drawers. The Dainu skapis, the cabinet of songs, is a physical object in Riga and it is inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The published edition ran to six volumes.

What the corpus contains is not a mythology in the narrative sense. There are almost no stories. There are figures who recur in a dense web of imagery: Dievs, the sky god whose name is simply the word for god; Mara, associated with the earth, cattle, birth and material provision, and thoroughly entangled with the Virgin Mary in ways nobody can fully disentangle; Laima, who determines fate at birth; Saule the sun, feminine, and her daughters. The material is agricultural and calendrical, organised around the working year and the life cycle rather than around a cosmogony.

Dievturiba was founded on this corpus by Ernests Brastins in 1925, as a deliberate attempt to reconstitute a Latvian national religion from the songs. It was suppressed under Soviet rule, Brastins died in the Gulag, and the movement re registered after independence. It remains small.

The wider inheritance is not the movement but the calendar. Jani, the midsummer celebration on the shortest night, is a public holiday observed by most of the country, with its wreaths, its cheese, its bonfires and its songs, and it is not principally understood as a religious event by the people keeping it.