Riga, a city revelling in its culture — theguardian.com

In central Riga, people are laying flowers beneath the Freedom Monument. It's a green statue of a woman holding three gold stars on top of a 42-metre stone pillar at the end of a broad, busy street. One woman explains to me that it's the 65th anniversary of the day in 1949 when 42,000 Latvians were deported to Siberia by the Soviet government. She still remembers hiding underground and finding the neighbours' house empty the next day. "Only the dog was left," she says.

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