Riga Castle

The Brothers of the Sword had begun a first castle in Riga in 1202; the citizens pulled it down in the long civil war between the town and the Livonian Order, and the peace terms that closed that war in 1330 obliged the city to replace it. The ground allotted lay on the bank of the Daugava, held by the Convent of the Holy Spirit, a shelter for the poor; the convent was moved to the site of the demolished castle, and the Order, rather than rebuild inside a hostile town, took the river bank and the watch over its shipping.

The work was finished at the end of the 1340s, and the master of the Livonian Order moved his residence to Riga from Viljandi. It was a three-storey convent-type building, four ranges around a courtyard with a square tower at each corner and a danske — a fortified latrine block — on the river side. Historians know it as Eberhard von Monheim's castle, after the master under whom it was founded.

Relations with the Rigans never settled. In 1481 Master Bernd von der Borch left for Cēsis with the Order's archive and treasury, and the master's residence stayed there afterwards. In 1484, in the internal wars of the Livonian Confederation, the castle was destroyed outright and its stone carted off for the townspeople's own building. The Rigans eventually lost the fight and were forced to rebuild it; the new castle rose on the old foundations to the earlier plan and was finished in 1515. Two of the four square corner towers gave way to round ones — the Lead Tower to the south-east, the much larger Holy Spirit Tower to the north-west — following the latest developments in military engineering.

The Treaty of Vilnius of 1561 dissolved the Livonian Order, and in 1562 its last master, Gotthard Kettler, handed the Order's regalia over in the castle's chapter hall to Nicholas Radziwiłł, representative of the king of Poland. The castle became the seat of that representative — Lithuanian at first, and from 1569 Polish-Lithuanian — and on 12 March 1581 Stephen Báthory came here to receive the oath of loyalty of the free city of Riga.

Riga passed under Swedish rule in 1621, and the castle housed the Swedish administration and the governors-general of Swedish Livonia, who began repairing it. Spacious annexes went up in 1641, and under Governor-General Gustav Horn in 1652–53 the old ramparts began to come down and a bastion bearing his name was raised to the north-west. An arsenal was built on the east side in 1682, and before the century was out the northern ditch had been filled to enlarge the citadel beyond it.

After the city passed to the Russian Empire early in the 18th century the castle held the administration and courts of the Riga Governorate, which covered most of present-day Latvia and Estonia, and served as the residence of the governors-general. The arsenal was pulled down in the 1780s and a three-storey range built in its place for the governorate's offices. From 1795 the governor-general kept his seat here, and did so until 1917; the state rooms, the White Hall among them, were fitted out in 1818.

In the summer of 1919, during the Latvian war of independence, the Latvian flag was raised over the castle tower. The President's chancery and the prime minister's rooms were installed here, the President in the former governor-general's apartments, and from 1922 the castle was the President's residence. Between 1938 and 1939 Eižens Laube redesigned Kārlis Ulmanis's rooms, built the festival hall and raised the Three Stars Tower, leaving a set of Art Deco interiors; the government declared the castle its residence in 1938. Latvian statehood was destroyed in 1940 and the Council of People's Commissars of the Latvian SSR moved in; in February 1941 the northern part was turned into a Pioneers' Palace. The flag went back up on the tower on 11 November 1988, and the President returned in 1994.

Reconstruction work began in December 2012. On the evening of 20 June 2013 the builders left at 18:45; fire broke out at about 22:21 and was declared a top-level emergency after midnight. Seventy-nine rescuers were at work by one in the morning, and shortly before two the roof had gone. Some 3,200 square metres burned, the Red Hall almost wholly lost and the White and Coats of Arms halls damaged; President Andris Bērziņš called it a national tragedy. No collection was destroyed, though water damaged parts of several. The fire was out at 14:21 the next day, and President Raimonds Vējonis returned to his rebuilt office on 22 August 2016.