Chillin by the river called Daugava.
Riga, Latvia
VANŠU BRIDGE!
The Vanšu Bridge (Latvian: Vanšu tilts) in Riga is a cable-stayed bridge that crosses the Daugava river in Riga, the capital of Latvia. Its name literally means Cable-stayed bridge and is also translated as Shroud Bridge. 595 meters in length, it is one of five bridges crossing the Daugava in Riga and passes over Ķīpsala island. It was built during the Soviet period and opened to public use on 21 July 1981 as the Gorky Bridge (Latvian: Gorkija tilts) after Maxim Gorky street, today renamed Krišjānis Valdemārs street, which it extends across the river.
On the left-side of the bridge lays our National Library.
The first discussions about the need for a new National Library had already started in 1928, and the significance of the project of this century was further confirmed by the high-level international recognition. In 1999 almost all 170 UNESCO member states during its General Conference adopted a resolution, calling the member states and the international community to ensure all possible support for the implementation of the NLL project. The continuous growth of the Library had made it necessary to transfer parts of the stocks into other buidlings. Thus, in 2013, NLL was distributed between five locations in Riga. Furthermore, some stocks were being stored since 1998 in a depot in Silakrogs outside the capital.
These inconveniences finally convinced the Parliament to approve a new building on the left bank of the Daugava. On 15 May 2008, after discussions lasting for many years, the state agency Three New Brothers and the Union of National Construction Companies signed the contract on the construction of the new National Library of Latvia. On 18 May 2014, the main facility of the Library at Krišjāņa Barona iela was closed for the move. In 2008, construction started according to the design of the Latvian-American architect Gunnar Birkerts who has been tasked with the project already in 1989. The new building has 13 floors and is 68 m high. Construction costs were given as 193 million euros. 480 people work there. As part of Riga's programme for its title as European Capital of Culture, selected holdings were symbolically carried from the old to the new building by a human chain on 18 January 2014. The new building was finally opened on 29 August that year, the Library's 95th anniversary.
Today the NLL building is a dominant landmark on the Riga cityscape. It is used for a variety of purposes, regularly used for conferences and conventions. Among others, it hosted the 4th summit of the EU's Eastern Partnership programme in May 2015, and a debate chaired by the BBC's Jonathan Dimbleby on 14 March 2016.
HISTORY
Interwar period
The National Library was founded on 29 August 1919, one year after independence, as the Valsts Bibliotēka (State Library). Its first chief librarian and bibliographer was Jānis Misiņš (1862-1944) who made his immense private collection the basis of the new library. Within a year, until 1920, the stocks had grown to 250,000 volumes. Starting in the same year, all publishers were obliged to hand in a deposit copy of their works. Since 1927, the Library has published the National Bibliography of Latvia.
There were significant additions in 1939 and 1940, when the State Library took over many of the libraries and collections of the Baltic Germans, most of whom resettled to the Reich. Among these was a large part of the collection of the Society for History and Archaeology of Russia's Baltic Provinces, est. 1834, the primary historical society of the Baltic Germans. In 1940, holdings encompassed 1.7 million volumes, so that they had to be stored in two different locations in the Old Town (Jēkaba iela 6/8 and Anglikāņu iela 5).