Vidzeme farmstead and white highways

Vidzeme

Listen to the landscape

In Vidzeme, rural landscapes are strikingly picturesque with birch copses and white, crushed-dolomite highways that wind through the hills and valleys, also meandering past Braki, home of playwright Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Meņģeli, home of musicians and composers the Jurjāns brothers, and Kalna Kaibēni, the brothers Kaudzīši museum. Nowadays, such picturesque farmsteads are often transformed into public spaces – guest houses, artists’ studios and museums. In earlier times, Vidzeme farmsteads comprised several small buildings – the family home, a byre, a stable and cart shed, the namiņš or summer kitchen, a flour-mill and one, or sometimes even three or four small barns.

Buildings were constructed of local materials – conifer logs and boulders. If there was a clay deposit suitable for brickmaking, the family home was made of reddish-brown bricks.
Straw or reed thatch were the preferred roof covering, also wood shingles.
For horses to trot faster in the shade or find the roadway in snowy winters, peasant farmers copied the landed gentry and planted avenues of trees along their farmstead roads.