At a charmingly named “festival of conversation” in Latvia over the weekend, sideshows included a pair of armoured military vehicles with mounted guns.
They were part of the local, Canadian-led Nato mission, but their involvement in an event devoted to talking echoed the doctrine of a former US president, Teddy Roosevelt, when he summed up his foreign diplomacy strategy once as “speak softly and carry a big stick”.
The latest annual Lampa Conversation Festival (Lampa means lamp, implying the enlightenment its audiences hope for) featured 400 discussions in 70 marquees set around a picturesque lake and castle in the rural town of Cesis.
Subjects ranged from the purely philosophical – “Am I who I am?” was one title – to debates about consent in relationships or bullying in the workplace.
But, as always in an event also described as a “festival of democracy”, Latvia’s neighbour to the east loomed large in exchanges. Another discussion was inspired by recent events here, asking: “Algorithm or soldier: can Europe entrust its security to artificial intelligence?”
No stranger to harsh lessons about national security, Latvia is still working through a political crisis precipitated by drone attacks on its energy facilities earlier this year.
Ironically, they were Ukrainian drones, flown the wrong side of the border by mistake. And Ukraine was not blamed, except by some pro-Russian populists.
But a perception of incompetence brought down the existing government and forced the temporary formation of a “4 x 4 x 4” coalition: so named because it comprises four parties, with four ministers each, holding power for four months until a new general election in the autumn.
One of the more surprised participants at Lampa 2026 was the Irishman’s diarist. How this came about was that, to mark Ireland’s EU presidency, Irish Ambassador to Latvia Marcella Smyth decided to host a debate on the (Monty Python-inspired) theme: “What has the EU ever done for us?”
Then she realised this had been the headline of a piece I wrote a while back to mark the 50th anniversary of Ireland’s accession to the EEC. And while my list of 50 ways we had benefited from the EU was not in all respects serious, it did meet the “jargon-free” criterium Marcela was hoping for from her Lampa event.
So I ended up on a panel alongside Lucinda Creighton – minister for European affairs during the last Irish EU presidency – and two equally-expert Latvians. And I think I got away with it, apart perhaps from a small faux pas during the Q & A, when I referred to the audience as “Lithuanians” before apologising profusely.
The questioner took it well. Demonstrating the skills honed from years of attending festivals of conversation, he told me not to worry about it, because he wouldn’t expect any better from the “English”. That got the best laugh of the day.
Back in the Latvian capital, Riga, no longer laughing, I visited two related museums that feature the country’s truly grim history in the middle decades of the 20th century.
One documents “the Occupation”: a three-part horror that began when the Soviet Union overran the Baltic States at the start of the second World War.
The Russians were soon ousted by the Germans for several murderous years, then returned in 1944 as part of the Iron Curtain that hung over eastern Europe for half a century.
Latvia lost one third of its population in the war: to death, deportation, and exile. But after that came the long reign of terror imposed from what is now an offshoot of the Occupation museum: the “Cornerhouse”.
A handsome, art nouveau building in downtown Riga, it hints of an era early in the last century when this was a prosperous, confident city: a latter-day descendant of the Hanseatic League. The building was one of Riga’s best addresses once. But under its euphemistic nickname, it later became a place nobody wanted to go: the local headquarters of the KGB, aka the Cheka.
Just inside the narrow entrance door, still, is a wooden post box marked “complaints and petitions”. There, once, you could post formal requests about prisoners. You could also make anonymous denunciations: about neighbours who listened to foreign radio broadcasts, or co-workers who told stories critical of the communist regime.
The paranoia cultivated by the Cornerhouse was all-pervasive and justified. Beyond the banal offices that now house a museum, a guided tour brings modern visitors to the cells, and to a former execution chamber, windowless with padded walls.
Elsewhere in today’s Riga, meanwhile, the old city is a tourist theme park, full of young people flown in by Ryanair in search of a good time. “Shots” of a different kind are ubiquitous there, advertised aggressively in pub windows. Bartenders fire off whole fusillades of Jägerbombs and B-52s, at cheap prices: 10 for €15, and 40 for €20. The mood is permanently festive, although around midnight, an occasional victim of one shot too many may be spotted slumped down in a doorway or being helped back to a hotel by friends.