St. Saviour's church, Riga

About

St. Saviour's Church (Latvian: Anglikāņu Sv. Pestītāja baznīca) is a congregation of the Church of England in Riga, Latvia.

Its parish church is located at Anglikāņu iela 2. This is to the north of the old town centre (Vecrīga), close to Riga Castle and the banks of the Daugava River. The neo-Gothic church was designed by Johann Felsko.

The foundation stone was laid in 1857 and the church was consecrated on 26 July 1859 by Bishop Walter Trower. In 1897 Heaton von Sturmer left the wilds of Lincolnshire to be British Chaplain at Riga. His wife having died, he remarried in St Petersburg in 1899 to a Miss Matilda Owers – a ‘Scottish girl’ born in Stockholm, who had been adopted at the age of eight by a Russian princess.

When the Great War broke out, he dropped the ‘von’ from his name but stayed in Riga until December 1918 – when in the face of Russian Communist invasion, he left Latvia in a British warship. Church use was halted during the Soviet occupation, and in 1973 it became the home of the Riga Polytechnic Institute student club. After Latvia regained its independence in 1991, an English-speaking congregation was again formed under the guidance of Lutheran Pastor Arden Haug.

In 1995...