Why the Baltic states will always mean more to the Cold War generation

It was love at first sight. I’d been on the train from Berlin for 36 hours and was in a slightly delirious sleep-deprived state, but there was no mistaking as we crossed the River Daugava that the city of spires and steeples that was slowly emerging through the mist was something rather lovely. Faculties fully engaged, I stared in wonderment. So this was Riga, the capital of Latvia. It was not at all what I’d expected.

The year was 1992 and it was still less than a year since Latvia had reclaimed the independence it had first declared on November 18 1918 – exactly a century ago this weekend – and which had been so brutally removed by the Nazi and Soviet occupations.

Like many of the Cold War generation, I’d grown up with almost no sense of the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. They were simply part of that vast (and decidedly unwelcoming) mass of land known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They were not places that featured on anyone’s holiday wish list.

Little did we know. For that first visit, I was there as a foreign correspondent to report on how the Baltic states were adjusting to the independence they had so thrillingly won back in what became labelled the ‘Singing Revolution’. I wasn’t there to look at the sights, but the extraordinary beauty of Riga made a deep impression.

Those steeples and spires that so struck me so forcefully dated back to the much earlier periods of Scandinavian and Teutonic influence and their concentration in Riga’s magical medieval old town made for a feast for the eyes.

As I walked between meetings with one-time dissidents-turned-politicians and artists who had prayed for (but never really expected) freedom to come, I cast my eyes skywards - to the splendours of the Dom Cathedral, St Peter’s Church, the ‘Cat House’ – and to the treasures lining each of the old town’s (admittedly incredibly sooty) cobbled streets.

There were treasures beyond the old town too: the beautiful little park through which a small tributary of the Daugava runs and within which shots were fired, some of them fatal, in the heady struggle to regain independence in 1991. There was the city’s iconic Freedom Monument – a huge statue next to the park (and a popular rendez-vous spot to this day) which had remained throughout Soviet times despite the obvious challenge it presented to rule from Moscow. Further afield I discovered and gasped at the Alberta iela – a street containing an extraordinary concentration of Art Nouveau architecture – fantastical buildings with hugely ornamental facades incorporating human faces and lions’ heads, many of them the handiwork of Mikhail Eisenstein, father of the film director Sergei.

On that first trip I also paid fleeting visits to Vilnius – a city of baroque and gothic churches and green hills – and Tallinn – another city with a magnificent old town and a rich mix of Scandinavian, Germanic and Russian Orthodox influences – the capitals of Lithuania and Estonia respectively.

I discovered a people – or peoples – just beginning to raise their heads above the parapet, daring for the first time in decades to savour the sweet scent of freedom.

Sure there were still plenty of Soviet-era eyesores, but these were all cities that to my mind were as clearly European as Barcelona or Berlin.

I vowed to return, and have done many times since: initially as a correspondent reporting on the drive to join Nato and the European Union; later as a travel writer, exploring further afield – the beaches along the Baltic, the mystical ‘Hill of Crosses’ in Lithuania, the Estonian university town of Tartu (complete with ‘Kissing students’ statue) – and to reveal how much these fresh-faced but historically-rich countries have to offer the visitor.

I plan many more trips. There are still lots of places I’d like to discover – Muhu (the island that time forgot) in Estonia, the amber-rich coastline of the Curonian Spit in Lithuania; the hills of Sigulda in Latvia. And, besides, my heart still misses a beat whenever I think of Riga.