The garden that took thirteen years

On Monday evening, at 20A Priedaines Street in Zolitūde, a western suburb of Riga, people who had been waiting since 2013 walked into a garden. Latvian public broadcaster LSM called it an unusually bright late afternoon. The Maxima supermarket that used to occupy this ground collapsed on the evening of 21 November 2013. Fifty-four people died, among them three rescuers. Dozens more were injured. It remains the worst loss of life in Latvia since the country regained independence.

Viktorija Ulanova’s mother, Nataļja Igumnova, was in the store. “We searched for her for a long time. On the third day, we went to the registration centre, and that was the end of it,” she told LSM. Her children have never seen their grandmother. Her sister’s children have not either. “I believe that today is yet another day of mourning. But at least we now have a dignified place where we can remember our loved ones who have passed away. And for the survivors, too, this place will be somewhere they can stand, somewhere they can be silent and perhaps find peace.”

The garden is called Atceres dārzs, the Remembrance Garden. It covers 0.8 hectares. The city of Riga paid close to two million euros for it. Landscape architects at ALPS won the competition in 2022, working with design studio H2E and the philosopher Igors Gubenko, and with the families’ association Zolitūde 21.11. In the Latvian brief the place is “dedicated to people, not the tragedy.”

In the middle, on what the designers named Togetherness Square, sit 54 spheres of polished stainless steel, different sizes, set down without a grid. Each one stands for a person. The metal is a mirror. You do not look at a face from 2013. You look at whoever is standing there now, and a strip of sky.

Further in is the Hill of Silence, with a round pool at the top. H2E quotes the poet Rainis: diamonds and pearls falling across a field. The spheres are meant to be dew. A linear park runs along the edge, so the quiet has a way of becoming an ordinary street again.

Rolands Lejiņš drove the first ambulance. The call, he said, was for an explosion. On the way it felt like a film set, “a completely different dimension.” Sarmīte Leitāne, who still leads the Imanta ambulance support centre, said the feelings arrived later: “It was only a couple of days later that we truly realised what had happened here.” General Mārtiņš Baltmanis, head of the fire and rescue service, spoke for the three colleagues who died, and for those who were injured and never went back on duty.

The court case is still going. Only the building’s structural engineer, Ivars Sergets, has so far been found guilty. A garden does not settle that.

This month, in another part of Europe, the Czech defence ministry has begun fixing QR plaques to war graves, starting at Olšany Cemetery in Prague, so a phone can open the Central Register of War Graves and a name on a stone can become a record. That is a public history project, and a useful one. The Riga spheres do a quieter job. There is nothing to scan. The memorial shows the living to themselves.

Families who use Echoleft can keep a memorial private, which means a story is not automatically a public one. A civic garden is the other job: it has to be walkable by anyone who still lives on the street. The people who come to Priedaines Street this autumn will be standing in a neighbourhood that had to live with a hole in it.