We are heading back south thru the three Baltic States. We usually don’t like to back track but the ferries that depart from Tallinn don’t go in the right direction so we are following the same roads south. We are varying our stopping points so we are seeing new things as we go south. The most interesting thing on the drive was the amount of military traffic on the road. There is a full scale NATO training exercise going on in Estonia. During our stop for gas at a Circle K (yes the same Circle K as in the states) we saw two Canadian soldiers fueling up on coffee and snack food.
Our destination today was Rundale Palace. We are generally not palace people, but it was a nice distance for us to go today. The Palace was built by the Dukes of Courland between 1736 and 1764. Latvia was known as the Duchy of Courland during this period and was ruled by a line of German dukes. The palace was their summer home.
It is built in the Baroque style, and is referred to at least by the Latvian tourist organization as the Versailles of the Baltic States. When I told Ton this she laughed and said “We’ll see.” I was a little nervous about the availability of the campground near the palace as it is a weekend, and one of the major tourist attractions in the country. We swung into the campground first to find it empty except for a German couple, the office was closed but the Germans told us they would come by in the evening and collect our money.
It was pretty busy at the palace but we managed to squeeze into the bus parking lot. It was a short walk over, and the initial impression of the palace was good. It is much bigger than I expected with a very large courtyard just what you expect from a palace.
After Latvia was conquered by the Russians in 1795 the palace was taken over by a rich Russian family until WWI. This area was taken by the Germans early in WWI and it spent the war years as a hospital and headquarters for the German army. During the civil war at the end of WWI in which Latvia gained its independence part of the palace was burned. After independence most of the palace was used as a school and part was converted to apartments for war veterans. It continued to function primarily as a school until 1978 after Latvia was absorbed into the Soviet union. In 1972 the local communist government decided to restore the palace and work continued on it until Latvia gained its independence. After independence the work continued under the new Latvian government until the palace was declared fully restored in 2014.
While it is not Versailles it is an immense building with imposing and ornate rooms. If the intent of these palaces is to project an image of power, it certainly does that.
But every time we walk thru one of these all I can think about is the operating costs. The staff to maintain the hundreds of rooms had to be huge. In a northern climate the cost of heating the place would have been incredible.
Besides the palace there is a “French Garden” in the rear that is also ornate and immense. A large part of the garden is covered in ornamental bushes and stately rows of trees. A smaller part of the garden is geometric with small ornamental bushes and flowers planted. The flowers today were almost all Tulips as the roses have not yet bloomed.
We spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering thru the palace and the gardens. The exhibitions were really well done, and the computer displays explaining the contents of the rooms were well designed and informative. We caught it on a day with magnificent weather, probably the first day on this trip that I would describe as warm. But in the end when I asked Ton if it was up to the standards of Versailles, she said it was very nice, but not close to Versailles.
