Mitau

Latvian: Jelgava

Russian: Елгава (transliterated as Jelgava), Митава (transliterated as Mitau); Polish: Jełgawa

The name Jelgava is thought to be derived from the Livonian word ‘Jelgab’ (= the town). The origin of the German name ‘Mitau’ is unclear; it may be derived from the Middle Low German word ‘mitowe’ (= in the middle of the floodplain).

Mitau is situated at 56° 8' north latitude and 23° 7' east longitude, 41 km south-west of Riga/Rīga.

Mitau lies between the rivers Aa (Lielupe) and Drixe (Driksa).

Mitau is situated inZemgale, one of Latvia’s five regions, in the south-west of the country.

Mitau is one of Latvia’s nine republican cities and the centre of the district of the same name.

Duke Gotthard Kettler granted the first coat of arms to his residence in 1576. The elk, as the heraldic animal, has been incorporated into the current coat of arms, which depicts an elk’s head (symbolising Semigallia) on a crimson background, with a shield bearing the national coat of arms of Latvia in front of it.

The earliest evidence of settlement dates back to the 10th century. In sources dating from between 1263 and 1266 (the Livonian Rhyming Chronicle, the Chronicle of Hermann von Wartberge), the town is first mentioned in connection with the construction of a castle by the Master of the Livonian Order (Crusader), Konrad von Mandern, as Mitau or Mitow/Mitaw/Mytowe. For the following 300 years, Mitau was the seat of the Order’s commander and thus the political and administrative centre of the Order. The first settlement by craftsmen and traders took place at the end of the 14th century.

Following the collapse of the Teutonic Order’s state and with the foundation of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia in 1562, Mitau developed into the capital and ducal residence under the first Duke, Gotthard Kettler (reigned 1561–1587). In 1573, Mitau was granted town privileges. In 1596, the duchy was divided amongst Gotthard Kettler’s sons, and Mitau, together with Semigallia, fell to Duke Friedrich (reigned 1587–1642). Following his death, Jakob Kettler (reigned 1642–1681) became Duke of the reunited duchy. His mercantilist economic policy led to a brief economic upswing in the town. Colonies were established in Gambia and Tobago. In the second half of the 17th century, an economic decline set in, which was compounded by periods of alternating occupation: during the Great Northern War, Mitau was occupied by Swedish forces in 1701 and by Russian troops four years later. When the occupying forces withdrew in 1706, the castle and the town were largely destroyed. In the 18th century, persistent and intense tensions between the nobility and the ducal court led to power struggles, the causes of which lay in the territorial and political influence exerted by the Russian government. During the reign of Duke Ernst Johann Biron’s son Peter (1769–1795), a civic union demanded political participation in the provincial assemblies led by the Courland nobility (1790), and in 1793, millers’ apprentices asserted their rights against the Duke during the so-called Millers’ Uprising. Both endeavours were unsuccessful; the Millers’ Uprising was brutally suppressed. In 1795, Peter abdicated and the now-dissolved Duchy of Courland was annexed by the Russian Empire. The ducal residence became the seat of the Russian General Government of Courland, and the town was renamed ‘Mitava’ (Russian: Μитава). From 1798 to 1801, and again from 1804 to 1807, the French King Louis XVIII, who was living in exile, took up residence in Mitau. Following a brief occupation by the French troops of Napoleon I in 1812, the town was recaptured by Russian forces later that same year.

During the First World War, German troops marched into Mitau, and the town became the seat of the German military administration in Courland (July/August 1915 to January 1919). In December 1918, in response to the advancing Bolsheviks, the company under Wolfert von Rahden was formed as part of the nascent Landeswehr. At the same time, the Latvian Social Democratic Party was preparing for the occupation by establishing a council regime. The arrival of the Red Army was accompanied by house searches, arrests, deportations and the murders of leading German figures from the church, politics and business. After a brief period of Russian occupation, Mitau became the administrative centre of Semigallia within the independent Republic of Latvia. In 1924, Mitau’s German minority formed the Mitau Voters’ Association. This was followed by the formation of voters’ associations in various other towns. The centre-right party was dissolved in 1934 following the dissolution of the Saeima under Kārlis Ulmanis.

In 1939, following Adolf Hitler’s call for resettlement, the majority of the German population left Latvia. During the Second World War, Mitau was initially occupied by Soviet troops (June 1940 to June 1941), then by German troops. In the summer of 1941, a large proportion of the Jewish population was murdered. In June 1944, the town was burnt to the ground. Its reconstruction began in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Following Latvia’ssecond declaration of independence in 1990–91, Mitau gained in importance, largely due to the establishment of the Latvian University of Agriculture and its role as the centre of the Semigallia administrative district.

In 1795, Mitau had a population of 9,948, of whom 51.5 per cent (5,120) were Germans, 35.6 per cent (3,546) were Latvians (including Poles and Lithuanians), 10.4 per cent (1,039) were Jews and 2.4 per cent (243) were Russians. A census carried out in 1797 revealed that nobles and scholars were represented in roughly equal numbers (300 and 309 people respectively) and that the majority of merchants (675 Germans compared with 82 Russians) and craftsmen (1,668 Germans compared with 175 Latvians) had registered as Germans.^[1]

By 1863/64, the population had risen to 22,901. Mitau was thus the second-largest town in the Latvian-speaking part of the Baltic Provinces. By 1897, the number of inhabitants had risen to 35,131: The largest ethnic group was the Latvians, accounting for 45.7 per cent (16,053), followed by 20.2 per cent (7,079) Germans, 16.6 per cent (5,829) Jews and 12.2 per cent (4,235) Russians.

The population fell to 11,000 as a result of the First World War. It was not until 1935 that the population began to rise again, reaching 34,099. Following the sharp decline in population resulting from the Holocaust and the Second World War, the figure rose to 36,300 in 1959 and to 45,300 five years later.

The current population stands at 64,279: 55 per cent Latvians, 29 per cent Russians, 6 per cent Belarusians, 3 per cent Ukrainians, 2 per cent Poles and 2 per cent Lithuanians (as at December 2010).

Owing to its location between Prussia and Lithuania on the one hand, and Riga and St Petersburg on the other, Mitau was the central market and trading centre of Courland, frequented by merchants and the nobility. In the 1830s, Mitau was linked to the surrounding region via the road from Riga to Šiauliai. In 1868, the Mitau–Riga railway line was opened, followed in 1873 by a connection to Mežeikiai. It was particularly thanks to the link with Riga that the German and Jewish merchant classes of Mitau were able to prosper. In 1896, the Christian (i.e. German, Russian and Latvian, but not Jewish) merchants formed an association. In the 1860s, shortly before the abolition of compulsory guild membership, a third of the town’s population (excluding the military) were engaged in craft trades.^[2]

The legal recognition of Jews in Courland in 1799 and Duke Peter Biron’s policy of tolerance, which had been in place since 1763, led to an increase in the Jewish population in Mitau, greater community activity and a more developed organisational structure. With the appointment of a ‘Jewish missionary’ in 1866 (from 1871: Pastor Rudolf Hermann Gurland, 1831–1905), Mitau became the centre of the ‘Jewish Mission’ run by the Protestant Synod of all three Baltic provinces.^[3] The policy of expulsion targeting Jews in Courland brought an end to community life during the First World War.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Mitau’s Baroque townscape was transformed by the emergence of Neoclassical buildings. With the demolition of the fortifications in 1816 and through official regulations, efforts were made to standardise the townscape. Timber construction continued to dominate, particularly in private dwellings. Alongside ornate timber carpentry, Mitau was characterised by the frequent use of half-timbered construction, a style adopted from the German states. Alongside the buildings of the German bourgeoisie stood the secular structures of the late Baroque and Classical periods, erected by the Duke and the (German) nobility. Otto Dietze (1832–1890) from Chemnitz was appointed as the town’s first architect in 1863.

In 1660, Michael Karnall founded the first court printing house in Mitau, where mainly small-format books were printed. Examples of well-known publishing houses and printed works from Mitau include the publishing house of Johann Friedrich Hartknoch (1740–1789), which published the first works by Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, and the newspaper *Mitauische Nachrichten von Staats-, gelehrten und einheimischen Sachen*, which was published from 1766 under the editorship of Christian Liedtke (1733–1766). The establishment of the Academia Petrina in the 18th century was followed by the opening of a bookshop and a printing works (the Steffenhagen Printing Works), as well as the founding of a public library.

The brothers Johann and Tobias Heintz (1590–1617) became renowned for their carpentry and woodcarving, which can be seen in Riga Cathedral and the New Castle in Riga; further examples of their woodwork can be found in Mitau, in the Church of the Holy Trinity (pulpit and altar).

The first significant court painter was the Coburg-born portrait painter Friedrich Hartmann Barisien (1724–1769), who produced numerous portraits of Mitau residents. Artists known beyond Mitau included, amongst others, the Dresden-born and trained painter, restorer and cultural historian Julius Döring (1818–1898), the landscape painters Julius Woldemar Fedders (1838–1909) and Johann Walter (1869–), as well as the city architect Oskar Alexander Johann Baar (1848–1914), the miniaturist Anna Louise von Berner (1795–1868) and the draughtsman Wilhelm Siegfried Stavenhagen (1814–1881). In the 20th century, the painters Karlis Baltgailis (1893–1979) and Jānis Plase (1892–1923), both founding members of the (Riga) artists’ association Zaļā vārna (The Green Crow), gained international renown.

The appointment in 1765 of Franz Adam Veichtner (1741–1822), a composer and violinist from Regensburg, as the ducal concertmaster and kapellmeister marked a revival in Mitau’s musical life. Following the dissolution of the court orchestra, musical societies run by Germans emerged in the first half of the 19th century, including the Mitau Liedertafel.

• Institute of Art History, Latvian Academy of Art (ed.): Senā Jelgava [Old Mitau], compiled by Elita Grosmane. Riga 2010.
• Institute of Art History, Latvian Academy of Art (ed.): Jelgava: Virtual Reconstruction of Architecture and Art [Mitau: Virtual Reconstruction of Architecture and Art]. CD-ROM, 2nd expanded edition. Riga 2008.
• Erwin Oberländer, Volker Keller (eds.): Courland. From the Polish-Lithuanian Feudal Duchy to a Russian Province. Documents on Constitutional History 1561–1795. Paderborn et al. 2008.
• Karl-Otto Schlau: On the Founding and Constitutional History of the City of Mitau (Jelgava) in Courland (1265–1795). In: Journal of East Central European Research 42 (1993), pp. 507–547.
• Karl-Otto Schlau: Mitau in the 19th Century. Wedemark-Elze 1995.
• E. Schmidt: Mitau and its Surroundings, Including the Ducal Palaces of Courland, in Words and Pictures. Riga 1913.

• www.jelgava.lv (City website)
• www.jvmm.lv (Jelgava Museum of History and Art / Ģ. Eliasa Jelgavas Vēstures un mākslas muzejs)
• www.pilis.lv (Jelgava Palace)
• www.herder-institut.de/bildkatalog/wikidata/Q179830 (Images relating to Mitau/Jelgava in the image archive of the Herder Institute, Marburg)

[1] In addition, there were people from other professions or social classes. See Schlau: Mitau in the 19th Century, p. 385a.

[2] Schlau: Mitau in the 19th Century, p. 208.

[3] On the Jewish population, see Svetlana Bogojavlenska: The Jewish Community in Courland and Riga 1795–1915. Paderborn et al. 2012, here p. 53.

Anja Wilhelmi: Mitau/Jelgava. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2014. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32478 (as at 21 December 2021).