Liepāja is the third largest city in Latvia, one of the nine
cities of national importance in the country. It is the largest city
of Kurzeme, located on the western shore of Latvia between the
Baltic Sea and Lake Liepāja, which is connected to the sea by the
Trade Channel. Liepāja is an important cultural, educational,
industrial and port city with the third largest port in Latvia in
terms of the amount of cargo handled.
It was first mentioned
in historical sources as the village of Līva (Latin: villa Liva,
later also Lyva, Live) in 1253, while city rights were granted to it
in 1625. The total area of Liepāja is 60.37 km², according to the
data of 2019, the city had a population of 68,945.
13-16. century
Villa Liva (Liv or Līva
village) in the coastal Curonian Spit was first mentioned in the
treaty of April 4, 1253, concluded by the Bishop of Kurzeme Heinrich
and the master of the Livonian Order. The name "Lyva" is mentioned
in various historical sources until the 16th century. A year later,
in 1263, the port of Līva was mentioned for the first time in
historical sources. For several centuries after 1253, Līva was a
large fishing village, the port of Grobiņa bogtiya.
In his
remarks in 1413, the knight and diplomat traveling from Prussia to
Riga, Gilbert de Lanuá, described the village of Līva as follows: So
I came to a town called Līva (une ville nommée le Live), which is
located by the Līva River, which divides Kurzeme from Samogitia, and
is twelve miles from Klaipėda to Līva.
Liv was an important
point on the way from the residence of the German Order in
Marienburg to the seat of the Livonian Order Master in Riga, but
trade in this port was still modest and in the 15th century was
limited to exporting wood, meat, fish and butter to some
northeastern German cities. As Līva was not fortified and was close
to the militant Lithuanians - the ancient enemies of the Order - she
could not wait and hope for a rapid influx of population. In 1418,
during the Leis attack, the village of Līva was burned down.
During the Livonian War, the master of the order, Gotthard Kettler,
pledged Grobina to the Duke of Prussia Albrecht in 1560. In less
than 50 years, when the county was under Prussian rule, Liepāja or
Libow experienced its first prosperity. Documents from the end of
the 16th century show that there were 60 German families in Liepaja,
so at the turn of the 16th - 17th centuries the population was
250-300, and it continued to grow. In 1581, the Prussian surveyor
Vozegīns Liepāja, who called himself a town, surveyed and described
it. Vezegīns mentioned 28 building plots. Liepāja returned to the
Duchy of Kurzeme together with the whole Grobiņa region in 1609.
17-18. century
On March 18, 1625, the Duke of Courland
Friedrich Kettler, while in Grobiņa Castle, granted Liepāja city
rights and on March 20, an act approving its borders. In 1626, the
legal document of the city of Liepaja was approved by King Sigismund
III Vaasa of Poland. The time of Liepaja's economic prosperity was
in the middle of the 17th century and the second half, when the port
was built. In 1646 and 1661, the city was threatened by the plague,
and the town council and merchants adopted the mayor's rules of
procedure. During the Second Northern War (1655-1660), the city was
weakened more by payments and less by damage. In November 1698, the
city burned down in an unprecedented and powerful fire. During the
Great Northern War (1700–1721), Liepāja became a regular stop and
transit point and a place for collecting contributions necessary for
war, after which it was hit by the Great Plague. After the
elimination of the consequences of the plague epidemic and the
completion of the construction works of the port (large ships could
also enter the port of Liepaja), in the 1730s Liepāja entered a new
stage of development.
In the 18th century, the Duchy of
Courland, as a semi-independent state, began to take the favorable
position of mediator between Poland, Lithuania, Prussia and Vidzeme.
The volume of trade became wider and more diverse. If at the
beginning of the 18th century, after the construction of the port,
Liepāja was visited annually by about 100 ships, then in the period
from 1739 to 1794, an average of more than 200 ships entered the
port every year. Crafts played a significant role in the economic
life of Liepāja. It grew with the city, initially serving only local
needs, but by 1799 the city already had 33 jobs, including
shipbuilding and barrel making for export.
On March 18, 1795,
the Knights of Kurzeme demanded the secession of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in their manifesto, and on May 27,
the Duchy of Kurzeme and Zemgale was incorporated into the Russian
Empire as the province of Kurzeme.
19th century
Around
1795, the city had 456 residential houses, 453 other buildings, 848
families and a total of 4,548 inhabitants. During the 19th century,
Liepāja became an industrially developed center. In 1823 D. F.
Zagers founded the first printing house in Liepāja, in 1825 F.
Hagedorns opened a savings bank in the city. From 1869 to 1876, the
Liepāja-Romnu railway line was built, which connected Liepāja with
Romniemi in the Poltava province. Direct railway connections with
the internal market of the Russian Empire and improvement and
expansion of the port of Liepaja 1870-1880. contributed to the
growth of industry in the city. About 50% of the city's workers
worked in the metalworking sector, the second largest group of
Liepaja companies consisted of woodworking companies. In 1880, the
statutes of the Liepāja Stock Exchange Committee were approved. In
1899, the traffic of Liepāja electric tram was started. In 1843, a
naval school was founded, which was initially a private, but since
1876 a public naval school.
During the Baltic Russification, Liepaja was also subject to the
city regulations of the Russian Empire of 1870, which provided for
an elected city council and a city board, the number of members of
which was freely determined by the council. The position of the
chairman of the council and the board was combined by the mayor
elected by the council, whose term of office was four years.
In January 1878, from January 16 to February 13, the first council
elections took place in Liepāja, in which out of 54 seats, the
Baltic Germans won 44, the Jews seven, the Poles two and the
Latvians one.
The head of the city of Liepaja from 1886 to
1902 was Hermanis Adolfi (1841–1924).
In the spring of 1899,
the project for the construction of the Liepāja Sea Fortress was
approved and during the next decade a war port was built, 8 shore
batteries and land fortifications were installed. As an imperial
city with a modern port, developed industry and access roads,
Liepāja occupied an important place in the military strategic
calculations of the General Staff of the Russian Imperial Army.
20th century
Industry and transit trade were the pillars of
Liepāja's economic life at the beginning of the 20th century. In
1910, 7,810 workers were employed in 52 large industrial enterprises
in Liepāja, which accounted for 8.4% of the total number of Latvian
workers. Direct traffic to New York from 1906-1914. was maintained
by the shipowner "Русско-американская линия, Russian American Line",
which owned four ships, then nine, finally - 11. In 1907, 56.5
thousand sailed through Liepaja, but in 1913 - 70.1 thousand
emigrants.
In 1914, Liepāja had a population of about 94,000,
but counting together with Karosta - more than 100,000.
The
First World War began on August 2, 1914 with the shooting of the
port of Liepaja, but the troops of the German Empire occupied
Liepaja in May 1915.
During the Latvian War of Independence,
on January 7, 1919, the Provisional Government of Latvia, headed by
K. Ulmanis, came to Liepāja, and until July 1919, Liepāja was the
residence of the Latvian Government, and on February 27, it issued
an order to supply landless land. On April 16, 1919, the April coup
took place in Liepāja, as a result of which the Brimmer-Borkovskis
cabinet, created by the coup, came to power, and on May 10, Andrieva
Niedra's Provisional Government of Latvia. Until June 27, the
legitimate Provisional Government moved to the steamer "Saratova",
which stood in the port of Liepaja under English military
protection.
On July 5, 1919, Liepāja was proclaimed the city
of Lejaskurzeme region, A. Bērziņš, a member of the chairman of the
Liepāja City Council, was appointed its head, and English
Colonel-Lieutenant Rovan-Robinson was appointed governor of the war.
On July 21, Andrejs Bērziņš, the head of Lejaskurzeme district,
issued an order on the use of the Latvian language in advertisements
and on signs. During the Bermontiad on September 27, 1919, the
mobilization of the Latvian Armed Forces was announced in Liepāja
and Aizpute districts. Parts of the Western Russian army fortified
around Skrunda and Priekule, but from Jelgava an attack was launched
in the direction of Tukums and Kandava. On October 30, the Liepāja
railway workshops handed over the first armored train "Kalpaks" to
the Liepāja garrison.
When the Bermont army attacked Liepāja
on November 2, a state of siege was announced. The commander of the
English squadron announced that he would militarily support the
Liepaja garrison. On November 3, the 2nd Prussian Guards Regiment of
the Western Russian Army, together with the Kuldiga Jaeger Regiment,
cavalry squadron and artillery units, launched an attack on Liepaja
and on November 4 reached the city fortifications. On the big
island, the battles for the defense of Liepaja continued until
November 14, but until November 27, the enemy was expelled from
Lejaskurzeme across the Latvian-German border. On November 29, the
siege status in Lejaskurzeme was lifted. After the appointment of
Andrejs Bērziņš on February 5, 1920, Jānis Goldmanis became the head
of Latgale district and the head of Lejaskurzeme district. The area
was liquidated in August 1920. The Lower Kurzeme region was renamed
the Kurzeme region.
After the end of the war, compared to
1913, the cargo turnover in the port of Liepaja had decreased more
than 12 times, however, the economic and cultural life gradually
recovered. Until 1930, the Danish shipowner "Baltic America Line"
maintained regular traffic on the Liepāja-Danzig-Copenhagen-New York
route with passenger ships Latvia, Polonia, Estonia and Lituania.
In 1920, the State Liepāja Technical School started operating, in
1921 the Liepāja Real Gymnasium became the Liepāja State Secondary
School, in 1926 the first art and craft school in Latvia was opened.
The Liepāja Opera was founded in 1922, and the Latvian Dramatic
Theater has existed in the city since 1907. In 1922 the Liepāja
Conservatory was founded, in 1927 - the Liepāja Philharmonic.
Starting from 1928, all Kurzeme choirs gathered at the Lejaskurzeme
Song Festival in Liepaja.
The Liepāja-Glūdas (Jelgava)
railway line, opened in 1929, played an important role in
stabilizing the city's economy. On September 22, 1931, the
construction of warehouses in the Freeport of Liepaja began.
According to the 1935 census of industrial and commercial
enterprises, there were 267 enterprises with mechanized propulsion
or at least 5 employees in Liepaja and 1576 enterprises without
mechanical propulsion with at least 4 workers. On June 15, 1937,
Liepāja was connected to Riga Spilve Airport by regular air traffic.
After the conclusion of the 1939 Pact of Mutual Assistance
between Latvia and the USSR, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers were
stationed in Liepaja. Already at the end of October 1939, the
commander of the city of Liepaja announced that "traffic through
Tosmari for private persons will be closed until further notice." On
October 22, 1939, the Soviet Navy cruiser "Kirov" arrived in the
port of Liepaja, which during the Winter War on December 1 attacked
the Finnish coast guard battery on the island of Rusare from
Liepaja, destroying the berth, barracks and lighthouse.
In
1940, an uncontrolled influx of USSR military personnel began in
Liepaja, some of which are NKVD agents with the task of demolishing
the existing equipment and preparing for the occupation of Latvia.
During the deportation on June 14 and 15, 1941, about two thousand
civilians were deported from the vicinity of Liepaja to Siberia and
the remote Arctic regions of the Soviet Union. On June 23, 1941, the
battle for Liepāja began, during which a large part of the city
center buildings were destroyed.
At the end of World War II,
in early October 1944, the Red Army reached the Baltic coast of
Lithuania and trapped about 200,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and about
half a million civilians, including refugees, in Kurzeme. In
October, Liepāja was flooded with kilometers of refugees: people,
carts, cars. The battles for the so-called Kurzeme fortress will
continue for seven months. The city was systematically and brutally
bombed. Only on May 9, 1945, at 2 pm, Soviet radio announced "Soviet
Latvia Free".
After the war, the economic development of
Liepaja was subordinated to a unified economic plan of the Soviet
Union. In 1946, the Liepāja fishermen's artisan "Bolsheviks" was
founded, but in 1964 the Liepaja base of the Ocean fishing fleet was
established. In 1965, the construction of a new district began in
the southwestern part of the city. In December 1974, the city's
population exceeded 100,000.
In November 1987, the first
action organized by the Helsinki-86 group took place at the Northern
Cemetery, which was brutally dispersed.
During the August
1991 coup, an extraordinary meeting of the Liepāja City Council was
held, calling on the population to show civil disobedience in the
event of a military civilian committee seizing power. A strike began
in Liepaja companies, tram and bus traffic was stopped, and the next
day the strike was stopped. On August 23, LTF board members, militia
and prosecutor's office employees took over the LCP property at 50
Graudu Street and dismantled the Lenin monument.
It was not
until 31 August 1994 that the base of the Russian navy was
liquidated. On February 18, 1997, the Saeima passed the Liepaja
Special Economic Zone Law.
The Holocaust
In July 1941,
with the consolidation of the Nazi German occupation regime in
Liepaja, the Germans began to introduce their "new order", which
provided for the complete annihilation of the Jewish community.
Already in the summer of 1941, the commander of Liepaja issued a
special order to all Jews in Liepaja. It involved restricting
freedom of movement, handing over household appliances to the German
authorities, and wearing special insignia on clothing. The first
massacres also began. Jews were killed in the Liepāja port area, in
the territory of Rainis Park and in other places. The worst
massacres took place on December 15-17, 1941, in the dunes of Šķēde,
where the Nazis exterminated about 7,000 Jews. The surviving Jews
were placed in the Liepāja ghetto, which was located in the city
center in the quarter between Apšu, Kungu and Bāriņu streets. The
ghetto was abolished in October 1943. The Jews there were
transferred to the Mežaparks concentration camp.