Exhibition “800th Anniversary of Riga City Council”

To mark the 825th anniversary of the city of Riga and the 800th anniversary of the city’s self-government, the Town Hall Square will host an open-air exhibition “Riga Stories. Riga City Council 800”, created by the National Archives of Latvia in cooperation with the Riga City Council Department of Education, Culture and Sports. Visitors are invited to explore the history of Riga and its self-government through a remarkable historical source – the Riga City Council Minutes.

This unique collection of documents, covering the period from 1603 to 1890, has been included in the Latvian National Register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and reflects more than three centuries of Riga’s political, economic and social life.

However, the protocols are much more than administrative records—they reveal stories of everyday life, conflicts, achievements, and celebrations. In this exhibition, the map becomes a stage, while quotations from the protocols give voice to the people of the past, inviting visitors to discover Riga and its inhabitants from a fresh perspective.

QR codes placed throughout the exhibition allow visitors to listen to extended audio stories in both Latvian and English. The exhibition also features 18th-century drawings of Riga by Johan Andreas Ēzens (1762–1804), secretary of the Vidzeme Governorate Chancellery, which depict the city’s landscapes, historic buildings, and the people who lived there.