Toby Screech is a professional linguist who lives in Amsterdam and Liverpool.
Guest author Toby Screech travels to the heartland of the Livonian minority in Latvia to visit the their annual cultural festival. Not as grand as the main Latvian event in Riga, it is an altogether more intimate affair. And it reveals that the Livonian identity today is hardly more than the ephemeral memory of a once mighty realm.
Guest author Toby Screech was in Riga in Latvia last summer and chanced upon a remarkable cultural event. In the Baltic region, song and dance festivals are an important medium for asserting national identity. Toby reports for hidden europe on the Latvian Festival of Song and Dance.