Paper short abstract:

The paper will provide a critical analysis of urban folklore narratives from Riga, Latvia. A focus on narrators’ anxious bonds with the city, the geography of distress (locations marked by emotionally disturbing collective or individual experiences) will be highlighted.

Paper long abstract:

The paper seeks to analyse the sense of a place, as it shows in urban folk narratives with a special focus on the narrators’ anxious bonds with the city. The study will illuminate Riga, capital of Latvia, its ambivalent everyday heritage and geography of distress virtually mapped by these stories. The critically examined source of the research is the wide body of folk narratives recorded and stored by the Archives of Latvian Folklore, ILFA, UL, during the 20th century and in the first decades of 21st century.

The personal experience stories, urban legends, and other narratives told both by townspeople and city guests reveal a variety of place-related disturbing experiences, such as as getting lost, being robbed or deceived, encountering with the supernatural in an uncomfortable way among others. On one hand, these stories, which lack neither the narrative elements of traditional ghost stories nor the poetics of criminal news and rumours published in the evening newspapers, represent Riga’s modern city dynamics and inherent social anxiety. On the other hand, they reveal the collective memory of burdensome historical and political events which Rigans were involved in, including the Russian Revolution of 1905 in Latvia, World War I, and World War II. In addition, there are locations marked with individual unpleasant experiences, survived by various narrators, their family members, or more distant acquaintances like “an old woman”, “one maid”, “some merchant”, etc.