Jelgava is a city in Zemgale, 43 km from Riga near the Lielupe and its tributary Driks. In the middle of the 13th century, the master of the Livonian Order, Conrad of Mandern, ordered the construction of a castle of the Crusaders on the Long Island in the land of Upmala, in order to establish a support point for the Crusaders to fight the Semigallians. The construction of the castle in 1265 is considered to be the moment of the founding of Jelgava. Jelgava gained city rights in 1573 and for a long time was the duchy of Kurzeme and Zemgale, later the capital of Kurzeme province. During the Second World War, almost all of the city's historic buildings were destroyed.
Jelgava Museum of History and Art named after Gedert Elias
Jelgava Museum of History and Art named after Gederta Elias
(Latvian: Ģederta Eliasa Jelgavas Vēstures un mākslas muzejs) is a
history, local history and art museum in Jelgava, located in the
former building of Academia Petrina - the first university in
Latvia. The museum also includes the house-museum of the Latvian
playwright Adolf Alunan on st. Philosophus, 3.
History
The
predecessor of the museum is the Museum of the Courland Province,
founded in 1818 by the Courland Society of Literature and Art
Lovers. After the eviction of the Eastsee Germans in 1940, the
museum was liquidated, and its collection was transferred to the
ownership of the State Historical Museum.
In 1952, the museum
returned to Jelgava, housed in the restored premises of Academia
Petrina and received about 6,500 archaeological exhibits from the
museum of the Courland province, which were taken from Riga to
Germany during the war, and later returned to the USSR.
After
the death of Gedert Elias in 1975, the museum was named after a
revolutionary painter and, by a special decree of the Ministry of
Culture of the LSSR, almost all of the artist's creative heritage
was transferred.
House-Museum of Adolf Alunan
The idea of
creating a museum arose in the 1960s against the backdrop of the
approaching 120th anniversary of the birth of the playwright and the
100th anniversary of the theater in Latvia. With the active
participation of the director of the Jelgava National Theater Lucia
Nefedova and Adolf Schwanberg, the grandson of Adolf Alunan, a
number of memorial exhibits were removed from Alunan's apartment in
Riga and handed over to Jelgava. It was also established that the
playwright spent the last years of his life in house number 3 on
Filosofou Street.
The Memorial Museum was opened on the
second floor of the building on June 6, 1968. Initially, the museum
was subordinate to the People's Theater, but later moved to the
subordination of the Museum of History and Arts. In 2010, the museum
underwent a significant restoration with funds from the European
Union.
The historical name of Jelgava is Mītava (German: Mitau).
It is a word of Latvian origin, which denotes a place of living or
changing. From the 17th century, the name of the city in Latvian is
"Jelgava".
The name "Jelgava" is most often associated with
the term "city". According to older linguists (including Jānis
Endzelins), the name Jelgava comes from the Liv language, which
means the city. Modern linguists admit that the word must be in the
Liv language is derived from the Latvian word "jelgava". According
to the most common view, "jelgava" meant a fortified, hard-to-reach
place, as opposed to "city", which meant a large, open settlement.
Other place names in Latvia are also associated with "jelgava" -
Jelgava hill (Turaida, Kalncempjos), Jalgava hill (Sēlpils),
Jelgavkalns (Rencēni), Jelgavkrasti (Liepupe), as well as
Jaunjelgava.
Jelgava got its coat of arms at
the same time as the city law in 1573, it depicted a red deer, later
an elk. In 1579, the coat of arms was supplemented with the coat of
arms of Stefan Bathory, the ruler of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth. In the description of 1925, the animal of the coat of
arms is called a deer, on its neck there is a shield with the small
coat of arms of Latvia. During the Soviet era, instead of a small
shield in Latvia, a wavy stripe was placed in the lower part of the
coat of arms, as in the flag of the Latvian SSR.
On July 11,
2002, the Heraldry Commission changed the description of the coat of
arms of Jelgava: "In a purple field, the head of a moose in natural
color, on the neck is the small coat of arms of the state (without
stars)".
The settlement has been known since 1226, the castle of the
Livonian Order was founded in 1265. At this time, he received his
first, German name - Mitau (German Mitau), in Russian and Polish
spellings - Mitava (Polish Mitawa). In 1573, Mitava received the
rights of the city and its coat of arms. In the same year, the first
Lutheran church was built - the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, and a
little later the second Lutheran church of St. Anna. In 1640, the
King of Poland ordered the Duke of Courland to build a Catholic
church. During the reign of Duke Jacob Kettler, Mitava reached its
heyday: the only mint in the duchy operated in the capital, a
printing house, a hospital, a pharmacy and several industrial
factories were built. In 1648, earthworks were erected around the
city, ditches were dug and bastions were built, and in 1664 a canal
was dug connecting the Driksa and Svete rivers and providing the
city with fresh water. In the 17th-18th centuries, a Jesuit mission
and a school operated under the only Catholic Church in Mitava.
In 1578-1795, Mitava was the capital of the Duchy of Courland,
later (1796-1920) the main city of the Courland province. In 1705,
during the Northern War, the city was besieged and taken by Russian
troops. In December 1792, riots broke out in Mitava - the "rebellion
of the millers", the uprising of the urban lower classes, suppressed
with the help of artillery. In 1795, the city became part of the
Russian Empire, and was administratively part of the Doblensky
district. During this period, the exiled king Louis XVIII lived in
Mitava for a short time. In 1799, he was paid a visit by Alexander
Vasilyevich Suvorov, who was following through Mitava to Vienna,
where he was supposed to take command of the Russian-Austrian army.
On the bank of the river stands the Mitava Palace, built for
Ernst Biron by the architect of Empress Anna Ioannovna Bartolomeo
Rastrelli in 1738-1740. The city is home to the Orthodox Cathedral
of Sts. Simeon and Anna, built by the order of the widow of Duke
Friedrich-Wilhelm Anna Ioannovna in the 18th century and rebuilt in
the 19th century.
Mitava was the first foreign city that N.
M. Karamzin saw during his trip to Europe (1789), described in the
"Letters of a Russian Traveler" as lands that left ambiguous and
contradictory impressions on the author.
During World War II,
from June 29, 1941 to July 31, 1944, Jelgava was occupied by German
troops. During the fighting in 1944, the city was almost completely
destroyed and the historical buildings were not restored (90% of the
pre-war city was lost). After the war, a complete reconstruction of
the city was carried out, new multi-storey buildings, a new
self-government building (the old town hall building of the 18th
century was destroyed during the bombing), and a house of culture
were built. Of the old buildings, only the largest ones have been
restored, such as the Mitava Palace, the Catholic Cathedral of the
Immaculate Virgin Mary, the Lutheran Cathedral of St. Anne and the
faculty buildings of the LSU.
With the support of the EU, food processing plants and
woodworking enterprises are being built in Jelgava. At the beginning
of 2015, more than 3000 commercial enterprises and companies were
registered in the city.
The traditional spheres of production
are the food industry, the production of metal and metal products,
mechanical engineering, woodworking and furniture production. The
development of these areas is also facilitated by such a factor as
the presence in the city of the Latvian University of Agriculture,
which trains specialists in these areas of production.
Since
1926, a sugar factory operated in the city, which ceased production
in 2007. In 2013, in its place, with the participation of
Uralvagonzavod, a carriage building plant was laid, but its
construction was suspended due to complications in international
relations.
Until 1997, minibuses and trucks under the RAF
brand were produced in Jelgava.
Since 2010, the production of
buses has been launched at the AMO Plant. In 2015, the company was
declared bankrupt; most of its production area was acquired by the
German engineering company AKG Thermotechnik Lettland.
There
are branches of more than a dozen different banks in Jelgava,
industrial enterprises Evopipes, food industry enterprises - “Rīgas
miesnieks”, “Trikatas siers” and others, as well as supermarket
chains Maxima, Rimi, Iki, Elvi.