With two special events, Riga Airport celebrates the summer solstice this week and opens the air gate to the Nationwide Latvian Song and Dance Festival which has been recognized as a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Marking ten days until the Nationwide Latvian Song and Dance Festival, which will take place from 30 June to 9 July, this week a unique live broadcast took place from the Riga Airport. Employees of Riga Airport and amateur art groups of Mārupe municipality – more than 100 participants in total – danced and sang one of the most popular pieces of the Song festival, "Manai dzimtenei" (“To my homeland”), on the aircraft stand and at the passenger traps.
Riga Airport is the air gate of Latvia – it will be the first to welcome festival participants and guests from all over the world to Latvia. Also, among the 1400 employees of the Airport itself, there are many participants of the Song and Dance Festival, whom we symbolically accompanied to the festival with this live broadcast, wishing sonorous voices and smooth dance steps.
Besides, in the Airport terminal a special exhibition of Latvian national costumes belonging to employees of the Riga Airport “Floor-length skirt, full of colours” has been set up and will be open to passengers until July 10. The exhibition also includes a unique collection of dolls dressed in ethnographically accurately imitated Latvian national costumes. The traveling doll exhibition has so far visited more than 35 places, including Tallinn, Stockholm and Brussels, but this summer it will also travel to the Latvian centers of the USA and Canada. The authors of the exhibition are the society "Latgale Ethnographic Embassy". The exhibition is complemented by an interactive game with folk costume profiles and Latvian folk costume collection tasks.