Latvia: “Halves”

Peteris Cedrins, a Latvia-based blogger who took this picture of a house in Daugavpils, writes:

One house, two worlds. Many of the older houses in Daugavpils are being transmogrified by cheap plastic windows, poor cores wrapped in the dull facades of a poor and tasteless modernity.

Daugavpils is the second-largest Latvian city, pop. 108,260 people. It used to be called Dinaburg from 1275 to 1893, Borisoglebsk from 1656 to 1667, and Dvinsk from 1893 to 1920.

More of Cedrin's Daugavpils photos are here.

His blog, Marginalia, is here.

2 comments

  • Wow – it looks, and sounds, oddly enough, like New Orleans.

  • Interesting that you would say that — New Orleans is my favorite American city by far (though I haven’t been there since Katrina). I wouldn’t compare Daugavpils to New Orleans, however — but I bet people here will be highly amused to hear that! If you go to my blog and click on “Travel” in the right margin, it links to Virtual Tourist, where I’ve put some travel tips and a brief history of the city. Under “Prose,” there are a couple of descriptive extracts from a longer work that’s set here.

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