Sunday, September 22nd

Cesis is a very interesting town - Looking prosperous for over 8 centuries

Multitude of architectural styles - Buildings with great stories & secrets

Started at the 18C manor house, which has a museum

Medieval castle on the same grounds

(12C castle built by Livonian Knights of the Sword)

Inside, a "Lantern Girl." eager to converse in English

Climbed the spiral staircase, lantern in hand

Reached a darkened stone-faced rotunda room with illuminations on the wall

White lines growing in number as a digital clock clicked downward

Sat and waited - Others joined

What transpired was an illuminated 270-degree light show of the castle's history against the contours of the stone walls and ceiling

Starting with the castle's construction

 (see below - year 1213 ) 

Moving on to 1577, came the sight and sound of catapulted balls of fire hitting the stone walls and 300 defenders blowing themselves up before Russia's Ivan the Terrible ransacked the castle

By this time the young children in the audience were crying and wailing in fear

Impressive use of technology to portray history

After lunch, set off for the village of Skalupes, 30 minutes away through rolling countryside

With a reservation to tour an underground Soviet bunker from the Cold War

 Instead of a 1 hour tour - Ours lasted 2 hours 

The facility decoyed as a rehabilitation hospital, and still is today

Front desk receptionist assisting tourists, and patients, in the order received

Regina, our tour guide, enjoyed our interest 

Ended up shutting off the lights

Last people to leave

The bunker is 30 feet underground 

15 feet of which is concrete mixed with iron 

There are places where we couldn't take pictures,
Many rooms had manuals and logs laying about

Regina remembers the chart below about gas masks from elementary school and was timed in taking apart and re-assembling a Kalashnikov

We were taught to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear disaster

Once again, anyone enjoying1960-80ish instrumentation would have gone bonkers here

Telephone equipment (below) connected to the outside world

Underground cables running 25 kms in each direction (Sigulda and Cesis) to signal towers there

This bunker wasn't detected by the USA until 2003

Built in 1968, completed in 1982, for 250 Communist elite 

(Men only - no families)

We spanned 800 years of history today - Mostly about war and destruction

But Lantern Girl and Regina saved the day - Sharing their lives with strangers

It's time to find another sacred oak