The Christmas Market in Riga, Latvia is an annual event that is now being discovered by UK travelers. Offering abundant old world charm in a calm, clean and friendly environment, the Christmas Market is particularly attractive to UK residents looking to schedule a short winter getaway. The strong points of the market are the delightful Christmas atmosphere, the excellent local crafts and foods, and the warm hospitality of the community.

The Christmas Market
The Christmas Market in Riga is not a huge market, and visitors should not expect a lot of glitz. There is no big push merchandising, just a collection of booths selling interesting products in a very charming setting. The market includes a group of eighty or so small wooden huts with openable fronts that serve as the store booths for the various craftsmen and merchants. The market is open daily from 10 in the morning until 8 at night, and usually runs from the end of November right up to Christmas day. Located in historic Dome Square next to the cathedral in the Old City neighbourhood, the market is always home to a few minstrels and unusual characters and the final week includes a busy schedule of jugglers, street entertainers, wandering elves and Santa Clauses.

Market Products
Most of the booths at the market sell hand-crafted products, and the low prices are definitely attractive to UK shoppers. Leather and wax products, painted silks and sheepskin clothing and lots of wicker and birch work fill the booths. The many types of basketry are both beautiful and useful, and remind one of the continuing value of old fashioned products in today’s modern world. The hand knitted gloves are superb and there are many unique sweaters available. Perhaps the most notable product is the large quantity of exquisite hand-worked linen products that charm shoppers with their elegant old world craftsmanship.

Local Food
As interesting as the crafts products are, the food may be the most immediately enjoyable aspect of the Christmas Market. Many booths sell food products and a variety of tasty snacks and hot mulled wine and potent Black Balsam cocktails are served in the tent bars that line the edges of the square. The booths feature a large variety of interesting salamis and other preserved meats and a dazzling array of artisan cheeses. Smoked eels are a local favorite and the market includes some rather spectacular events such as whole pigs being roasted on portable barbecue pits.

Riga
Riga is a wonderful place to visit for UK residents, as a passable amount of English is spoken, and English tourists are definitely made to feel welcome. Riga is not so distant from the UK and not difficult to reach by air, being a bit more than a two hour flight and about the same as a trip to Italy.
Riga is proud to claim that the tradition of decorating an evergreen tree for Christmas started in Latvia in 1510, when men in black hats gathered in the town square around a tree that had been cut from the forest. After decorating the tree, they set it afire and sang as they circled around the cheery fire. A plaque inscribed in many languages marks the location of this historical event and the English inscription reads “the first New Year’s Tree”.
Most of the buildings in the city centre are decorated with electric lights, and Riga residents are fond of burning Yule logs in order to burn away the bad spirits accumulated during the year. The climate is cold of course, and there will almost certainly be snow. But something about a white Christmas always seems to charm us, and this beautiful environment is filled with amazing gingerbread buildings that look like something out of a fairy tale. One of the most amazing, the recently rebuilt orange-pink House of Blackheads, is just a few blocks from the Dome Square.

Located on the Gulf of Finland about 80 kilometers south of Helsinki, Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, and also its largest city. Today the population of Tallinn is over four hundred thousand but mankind has been inhabiting this area for about five thousand years, as evidenced by excavated shards of pottery dating to three thousand B.C.

Tallinn played an important role in history. It was an important sea-port town and integral to trade between Russia and Scandinavia, and by the mid fourteenth century it was a well populated and fortified town.
Several turbulent centuries of rule followed, with Estonia changing hands several times until August of 1991, when the independent state of Estonia was established and very quickly developed into a modern European city.

Such a wealth of history can clearly be seen in three distinct parts of Tallinn, one of which is home to the famous Tallinn Christmas Market. The Old Town was the epicenter of trade in medieval times, and the foundation from which the wealth of the city grew. Today, it is an important historic center as many of the buildings and much of the architecture has been preserved in the historical core of the city.

credit

The Tallinn Christmas Market is among the most popular in Europe and was founded in the year Estonia regained its independence. Since 1991, this market has flourished until today it is visited by over two hundred thousand visitors per season.

Located in one of the oldest parts of Tallinn, the market is held on the historic Town Hall Square. The Town Hall is the oldest medieval town hall still in existence in Northern Europe. Built in the fifteenth century, this architecture lends a semblance of magic to the Christmas Market as the entire site is infused with antiquity.

The Tallinn Christmas Market runs from the last week of November through to the first week in January. This is to accommodate the Julian calendar whereby Christmas Eve falls on January 7th in the Russian Orthodox Church.

The market is called joulutorg by the locals, and not only can traditional Christmas crafts and goods sold during the market, but one can also find slippers, ceramics, glassware, wood and wickerwork, quilts, candles and more. In addition there is a plethora of food to be had: soups, sausages, sauerkraut, gingerbread, nuts, cookies, marzipan and other sweets to name a few, all washed down with traditional mulled wine.

A giant Christmas tree is in the center of the square, and lights and festive music create a magical atmosphere. Every weekend during the market there are cultural events planned such as traditional singing, dancing and poetry recitals.

For the children there is a house and post office for Santa where Christmas desires can be whispered in his ear or letters posted for him to receive via mail. If he’s not holding court in his house, then Santa can often be found wandering around the market having his picture taken with the kids or just discussing Christmas dreams.

The Tallinn Christmas Market is a infusion of history and modernism; there is no doubt that the history of Tallinn plays a large part in creating the ambiance. Long cold snowy nights of strolling through the cheerily lit Town Hall Square are certainly reminiscent of medieval times, but this is blended well with a city that has rushed to modernize since regaining its independence as a separate European country.