Impious behavior at memorial sites is not infrequent. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin had hardly been open a month when reports of children playing and lovers kissing among the pylons made the news. A report from this week's Baltic Times takes the cake, however: Apparently, more and more British nationals (presumably drunken male tourists) are getting caught peeing on the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga. For the first time the regional court handed down jail time to a British citizen: five days of administrative arrest. The problem has drawn comment from local politicians all the way up to the interior minister.

In the most recent case, the defendent claimed that he was not peeing, but just happened to be running around the statue when his pants fell down. His obviousely false testimony contributed to the decision to not give him the usual fine of 50 lats (about 70 Euros).

For my part, I am having difficulty understanding why anyone would relieve themselves directly on the monument unless they are blind drunk or actually intend to desecrate it. It is flanked on two sides by parks which offer much better opportunities. In addition, all the downtown bars and outdoor restaurants and cafes have facilities, some of them less than two blocks from the site.

Of the more than 90 memorials I photographed while in Riga in September, 55 of them are now online:

http://sites-of-memory.de/main/location.html#latvia

Some of the descriptions are only cursory and not all the inscriptions are translated yet. But the photos are now online for viewing. They include complete visual documentation of the famous Brethren Cemetery, the execution site memorial at Rumbula, Bikernieki forest, and the concentration camp memorial complex in Salaspils.

The rest should be up over the next several weeks. Among the missing memorials there are the centennial marker for the Latvian song festivals, the "white crosses" for Latvian deportees, and numerous memorials to individual persons or more minor events.

One of the conversations I had in Riga was with a Russian woman in her 60s. Since my goal in Riga was to research memorials, I asked her about them. She recounted what she knew about the memorial to the liberators of Riga in victory park - one of my favorite places in Riga. She told me that the alleged Latvian designer - Gulbis - was not really the man behind it. It was rather the Russian Bugaev. (Both these men are listed among the artists involved in the project.) She said they put Gulbis first to make the project palatable for the Latvians, but then when the political transformation came, Gulbis disconnected himself from the memorial. If any reader here knows more about this story, I would appreciate getting more details about it!

I asked her about the Lenin memorial and how she felt when it came down. She says she never had a relationship to Lenin that was positive. She considers him a criminal. But for her, the Lenin monument was a symbol of her connection to Riga and Latvia. She experienced the removal of the statue as a rejection.

If I could go back to that conversation, I would now ask her if the statue to Barclay de Tolly, which stands across the street from where Lenin once stood, and not only represents a Russian hero, but is also a rallying point for Russian political groups in the city, had since restored her sense of belonging. Did the renewal of the Russian-era de Tolly monument compensate her earlier sense of rejection? It would seem that if Lenin were somehow a symbol of the community, but not only or even at all a positively-laden symbol of ideology, then the de Tolly statue would be a much more positive, inclusive gesture than leaving Lenin standing could ever have been. Taking down Lenin rejects communism, restoring the 1912 statue of the Napoleonic-era Russian General de Tolly acknowledges the role of Russia in Latvia's past and the special place that some of Riga's Russians have in the history of the city.