Warning: all images in this post belong to other people - if you decide to copy them then please attribute correctly!
It came to me this morning that the first building in this Building Passions series of posts should be something of family significance.
This makes sense because it connects back to my first visit to Latvia with father and brother at the start of the 2000s. The plan was to do a guided tour of properties there that had either belonged to or had close connections with our family. We were fortunate to find a Latvian guide who already knew the properties and so could help us coordinate our route and permissions/timings for each visit. In the end we covered a lot of properties (and mileage!) in a tight schedule that included a walk around wonderful Art Nouveau Riga, as well as personalised tours of two national palaces at Rundale and Jelgava and the famous House of the Blackheads (yes …) in the centre of the capital. BTW: a distant relative of mine, Canadian photographer Ned Tobin has blogged about his tour of our family properties in 2012.
The focus of this post is on one of the family properties. I should clarify here that the von Behr family in Latvia had many branches to which different manor houses, churches and associated land belonged. There was a plan to ensure they all stayed within the family rather than get transferred out through arranged marriages or other political transactions. On the whole this was successful. However disasters still happened, not least wars, rebellions and revolutions in a disputed part of the world. The building featured in this post suffered as a result of one particular disaster.
The above map of Latvia is a bit blurred as it comes from a small one on Latvian Wikipedia. Riga is on the coast in the centre of the country. Most of our trip took place in the left half of the map in what is now known as Kurzeme, part of what used to be called in Old German ‘Courland’ and later ‘Kurland’ (this was because Latvia was once a German-speaking part of the world conquered by wandering crusaders many years ago). You can see the size of Courland in the below historical map - it stretched all the way across the southern part of Latvia.
The property in this post was located not far from the town of ‘Piltyn’. This was the old capital city of the Bishop of Courland, who originally governed the vast territory, but as often happens in history it became an insignificant little town with a church and the ruins of a castle. The below map of around 1830 is taken from https://enciklopedija.lv/ .
You can see from the map that Piltene, as it is now known, sat on the River Windau, now the Venta. A bit further up this river to the south east is the village of Zlekas. This is where my building story starts. The village has a sad claim to fame. It was near the site of a Nazi massacre of 160 civilians during the Second World War, ordered by the sadistic Friedrich Jeckeln, Obergruppenfuehrer of the SS in Latvia. He was known for his favoured method of burying Jews alive in mass graves. Well before such horrific episodes, a large manor house was constructed by the von Behr family on the outskirts of the village, which was at the time known by the German name Schleck. The building now lies in ruins and many photos (and a map) of the historic site taken up to the present day can be found on Google Maps. My wife and I took some photos of the property in 2008 but we seem to have misplaced many of these, so I’ve ‘borrowed’ a great photo from this blog post (which gives the correct attribution).
There are a number of photographs of the original building in all its beauty, one of which can be seen below. It is taken from the excellent book about the von Behr family titled Edwahlen und die Behrsche Ecke in Kurland (Lührs & Röver, Verden, 1979) written by my deceased relative Ulrich v Behr-Edwahlen. In the book we are told that the building was constructed in the early 18th century, probably by the respected French architects Jean de Bodt and John von Collas. De Bodt had completed Berlin’s famous Zeughaus in 1706, currently home to the Deutsche Historiches Museum. von Collas built a manor house in East Prussia that had similarities with Schleck.
The other sad story in this post is that the property was occupied by Soviet troops after the Nazis had left Zlekas. It appears that they were careless with their temporary home as there are rumours of an explosion followed by a massive fire. At any rate this partly explains the current state of the manor. Inevitably the site has deteriorated over the many decades since the disaster due to gradual damage by the severe Latvian winters. I hope one day to convince someone with access to substantial heritage funds that it might be a worthwhile project: either to prevent further deterioration or even to consider renovation of some kind, even though this would be a major undertaking.
That’s my first building done. I’ve tried to make the story a bit broader on the context and so perhaps sacrificed words on the building itself - this gets me slightly off the hook as there insufficient evidence about the architects nor have I seen any actual designs. But what matters to me is that I love the building for personal reasons and I wish it were still with us in its original form. There will be plenty of other buildings in this series about which, hopefully, there is considerably more information available.