Ventspils gets a new “ship” for the development of tourism

What is visible to the eyes can be treated according to the thoughts of the building’s architect Ijas Rudzīte about the silhouette of the building as a metal wreck of an old ship stuck in the dunes for life. It is also true that in reality the planks and logs used for the exterior decoration of the reinforced concrete building form patterns reminiscent of the fastenings of the plank hulls of the wooden boats exhibited in the museum. It is likely that many visitors to the museum will recognize such characters without being told. However, in this case, the language of architectural forms is used to stimulate fantasy or create associations, rather than to provide the most unambiguous information about what museum visitors will see. We wish the building and the museum a long existence for centuries, during which the museum visitors will be shown many things that we cannot even imagine today. The people who built the old exhibition and administrative building of the Maritime Open-Air Museum around 1970 could have imagined very little about our life today from the leftover building materials from the fishermen’s collective farm “Sarkanā bāka”. It may happen that in another 50 years, our life today will also be a distant, not always well-understood history, familiar in a museum. Including the Ventspils Museum with its exhibits in the Livonian Order Palace, the Seaside Open-Air Museum, the House of Crafts and the Herbert Dorbes (1894-1983) Memorial Museum.

We are starting the sea tourism season!

The opening of the new building of the Seaside Open-Air Museum to visitors coincides with the beginning of the 2024 tourism season. While the ship-shaped building built in Ventspils was cut on April 26, an anchor chain adapted to the role of the opening ribbon was cut and the doors were opened to the first visitors on April 27, the Riga Freeport Authority spread the news about this year’s first cruise ship being welcomed to the port on April 25. Here is a place for an explanation that now Ventspils, not Riga, has become the largest sea passenger port in Latvia. The Central Statistics Office has published estimates for the year 2023, when 287 thousand ferry passengers were served in Ventspils and 90.4 thousand in Liepāja, while Riga still has not recovered the ferry traffic lost in 2021. The list of relative successes of the Freeport of Riga includes a higher cargo turnover than in Ventspils and Liepaja and a much higher number of cruise tourists than in the two other large port cities of Latvia, where cruise ships arrive as exotics. But – in Ventspils and Liepāja there are still more sea passengers than in Riga, which in 2023 counted 81.6 cruise ship passengers.

Most cruise ships enter the port of Riga for too short a time, and it is almost impossible for their passengers to get to such a distant place as the Ethnographic Open Air Museum, which by its very definition requires its visitors to familiarize themselves with a territorially dispersed exposition. The open-air museum can be visited by those interested whose ships rarely spend the night in Riga. Guests of Ventspils could have more time to visit the Ventspils Museum, including the Seaside Open Air Museum, if they planned such a visit or, on the contrary, were forced to delay in Ventspils due to unforeseen circumstances. The open-air museum is less than an hour’s walk or a 10-minute drive from the Ventspils sea passenger pier.

One person has done a lot

The age of the Ventspils Seaside Open-Air Museum is about the same as the average lifespan of people today. The museum was founded in 1954 and opened its first exhibition to visitors in 1962. The first and only open-air museum dedicated to fishing was created thanks to the initiative and ability of the artist and museum worker Andrejas Šulcs (1910-2006) to implement this initiative.

In the 1930s, A. Šults studied painting at the Academy of Arts under Vilhelm Purvīš, after the Second World War he lived with the Soviets, first as a teacher, then as the director of the Ventspils Museum. He was able to achieve the expansion of the Ventspils Museum into a new museum, in the official terminology of the time Sea Fishing Open Air for setting up a museum. From the state side, the new museum received the forester’s house “Kazandzhi” and its surroundings in the Kazinu forest (the name does not refer to goats, but to the state forest designation “казённыѝ” during the time of tsarist Russia) with an area of ​​approximately 4ha (Ethnographic open-air museum in Riga boasts 87 ha). The support of the public has largely been maintained by the rich fishermen’s collective farm “Sarkanā bāka”.

Residential and farm buildings, windmills and fishing boats and cutters from the 19th century and even older have been collected on the museum’s territory from near and far surroundings. Among several fishing boats, the most famous is the boat of Oskar – the main character of the novel and movie “The Fisherman’s Son”, which can be seen in the 1939 version of the movie “The Fisherman’s Son”.

In 1963, the museum acquired a narrow-gauge steam locomotive with wagons built for the German army during the First World War. Initially, it could show itself on a track only 300 meters long, but now its track is extended for 5.5 km also outside the territory of the museum. The track is equipped with a real depot, a goods warehouse and a station building with a real cash register.

In this century, the museum’s exposition has been supplemented by the prayer house of the Baptist denomination from Lielirbe, which is especially important for the Ventspils region, and an example of a 19th century Ventspils suburban building – a house with all the household items that several generations of people have accumulated in the house.

The European Union, the Latvian state and Ventspils municipality have cooperated well

Only exhibits the size of buildings were not enough for the operation of the open-air museum. Another building was needed for the museum staff, for the storage of the museum’s funds and for the placement of the expositions. The museum was added to such a building in 1970. Thanks also to that building for serving for 50 years, even though it had no architectural value and its technical resource was completely exhausted by the year 2020. At least in the winters, it had become completely useless as a place for people to work and to store exhibits. Next, we must thank the European Union with its aid funds and the Ventspils municipality with the Ministry of Culture of Latvia, who in 2018 agreed on the transfer of money from these funds to the construction of a new museum building.

The architect of the new construction, Ija Rudzīte, has already been mentioned here because of what she said about the overall view of the building. The building was planned and re-planned several times in the direction of reducing the construction volume, in order to complete the project in general, despite the still-unforgettable events with Covid-19, the increase in the price of building materials and the shortage, etc. The contracted construction company “Ostas celtnieks” could not overcome such milestones and the work had to be given to SIA “Warss+”. Such events are typical, but always require a large investment of time and effort in order not to violate EU requirements and not lose its funding.

The construction of the museum’s new building was the most expensive, but not the only work in the project called “Cultural-historical and natural heritage preservation, exhibition and development of tourism offer of Northern Kurzeme”. The total cost of the project is set at 7,343,037 euros, of which the EU will cover 4,463,432 euros. Including the project works carried out by the museum in the new building and its surroundings cost 5,844,815 euros, of which the EU donates 4,235,294 euros.

The first exposure has its own specifics

The first exhibition opening the museum’s new building is called “By the sea and on the lands. The traditional way of life of Northern Kurzeme in the 19th-20th century, the nature of Northern Kurzeme”. In cooperation with Ventspils Museum specialists, it was created by the company “Ddstudio”, which under a different name, but basically with the same employees, created the first Ventspils Museum exposition in the Livonian Order Palace more than 20 years ago.

The interpretation of the highlighted words “By the sea and on the land” in the title of the exposition is that the exposition is made in comparisons of sea-land, fishermen-farmers and Libyans-Latvians. The forest of Kurzeme, represented by the animals living in it as stuffed animals, is treated as a part of the earth. However, the city is completely excluded from the exposition, the products of which are treated in the household of farmers/fishermen as having fallen from the sky, and not as having arisen from the interaction of peasants and townspeople. Therefore, neither Jews as townspeople with their synagogues, nor Germans as once legal lords and intellectual leaders figure in the exhibition. The Russians are represented as Soviet border guards, whose task was to ensure that even people living on the seashore did not approach the sea in unauthorized places and ways. To learn about Ventspils and generally about the history of the cities of Kurzeme, everyone is welcome to the Livonia Palace.

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