On Tuesday, the 22nd of September in the year 1925, Andrejs Blezurs arrived at the Riga docks, having just completed yet another sailing job. Most likely this job had taken Andrejs to port cities in Belgium, France, Denmark and maybe other places as well. It may have been weeks since he had been back home in Riga and he was ready to kick back and relax on his first evening back on land.
The old streets surrounding the famous Daugavmala Markets just along the river, were well-known for their seedy, raucous pubs and restaurants, frequented by sailors, dock workers and a ‘motley audience of merchants’. Sailors like Andrejs would stop in to one of these establishments, their pockets full of the cash they were just given upon completion of a job, and blow some of that cash on a hot and hearty meal and plenty of booze. Needless to say, things often got out of hand! That evening, Andrejs went to the sailor’s pub ‘Anchor’ (‘Jakors’ in Latvian).
The Jakors “Anchor” Sailors Pub
The Jakors was known as a cheap and cozy place to eat, drink and be merry. It was located at 3 Svērtuves Street, at the corner of Ķemerejas Street; there were entrances off both streets. They served simple hot food, good beer and vodka and even had live music on the 2nd floor. I found a great article by someone who had spent time there observing the vibe of the place. Here is how he described it:
“Most of the people sitting at the tables were workers – eating, drinking and talking. Those who had just come in spoke more quietly, but those who were [already drunk] – louder. We were especially interested in the types. And there was no shortage of them here…We ordered roast beef and “Ulmanīte”. They brought unusually large portions, and the vodka was as soft as ice. The drops just ran down the bottle. It was a great drink.
Suddenly we saw that at one table there was an exchange of words between the guests, which could not be settled otherwise than by force. They gathered like angry roosters, pecked at each other and began to test their strength. I think that others were getting restless, but no one interfered in their quarrel. When things began to get more heated and we thought that a real fight would be possible, a waitress came up to one of them, grabbed him by the collar from behind and, without blinking an eye, pushed him to the door, where she gave him a good kick with her foot and threw him out. Thus, peace returned to the room and everyone still felt comfortable.” – “Vecās Rīgas vēderā”, 2001.08.30 Literatūra un Māksla Latvijā.
I looked up the Jakors pub in Periodika and found many stories of crazy things happening there over the years. In 1931, two men tried to break into the place but were caught in the act. The owner, Aleksandr Molochaevs, was fined in 1931 for the ‘unclean’ condition of his establishment. There were many fights and drug or alcohol related offences too.
One article from 1929 related a court case where a man was approached by two young women who he invited to sit with him. They ate from the buffet and then left. When he went to pay his bill, he was charged for the women’s food too. He was angry and refused to pay. The manager then proceeded to rough him up a bit and the customer pressed charges against the pub. The case went to court with witnesses and everything. The manager, in his own defence, urged the judge not to believe anything the plaintiff said saying, “Your Honor—that man gets into a scandal in every single tavern, don’t believe him.”
Another interesting case involving this notorious pub comes from January, 1929:
“A prison guard leads a young, elegant lady into the courtroom: 24-year-old Vera Asberg, who arrived from Estonia and committed several crimes in Riga. On December 29th of last year, she was arrested in the “Jakor” (Anchor) restaurant, where she had robbed a patron.
The judge says: “You have educated, respectable parents, and you yourself are a young, intelligent woman—why did you do this? What do you have to say in your final statement?”
“Please do not punish me, for I have been punished enough by losing my parents and my homeland,” the accused Asberg says.
The judge of the 12th district sentenced Asberg to 1 month in prison.”
The Mugging of Andrejs Blezurs
As his evening wore on at the Jakors, Andrejs started drinking with a man named Eduards Matīss, a shipyard worker. The Jakors closed at 10 pm. Matīss asked Andrejs if he wanted to keep the party going by inviting him and others to his apartment in the Moscow suburb just southeast of the Old City. Andrejs agreed and a small group of drunken sailors headed off. They spent some more time partying and drinking and eventually Andrejs decided to walk home.
It must have been obvious that Andrejs had an awful lot of cash on him. I don’t for a second believe that Andrejs was naive. I think he was a jolly and overly trusting man who made a bad decision on this night.
Walking alone, he passed under the Gogol Street viaduct (today the viaduct on Emīlijas Benjamiņas iela). Two men came up from behind. One of them grabbed Andrejs’s arms and the other held him by the throat. They stole all of Andrejs’s money as well as his documents and threw him down on the road, running off into the night. They took Andrejs’s Riga ID document, his military ID and other documents. Andrejs had on him 1,740 Belgian francs, 450 French francs, 800 Lats, and 500 Danish kroner. That was a very large amount of money at the time and they took it all.
The next day, Andrejs reported the theft at the 6th police precinct and told the authorities that he suspected 41-year-old Eduards Matīss. A manhunt was immediately begun but he could not be found. Sometime later they tracked him to the apartment of a Paulīne Štāle, who lived at 8a Baltāsmuižas Street, Apt. 9. She didn’t know where he was but it seems she did admit to being guilty of being involved in Andrejs’s robbery. (An interesting coincidence is that this address is right next door to the building where the murderer of Blezurs’s cousin, Andrejs Zekants, lived at 6 Baltāsmuižas.)
At the end of 1926, the search for Eduards Matīss finally ended. He was found living on a farm in Līvāni, using Andrejs’s identity! He had removed Andrejs’s photos from the documents and inserted his own face. Matīss denied any violent act that night and claimed that he merely robbed Andrejs. It even sounded like he was defending his actions because Andrejs had been ‘completely drunk’. Matīss had already spent a few years in a correctional facility on other charges and on the 25th of January 1927, he was sentenced to 4 years hard labour for the attack on Andrejs over a year before.
Eduards Matīss
Eduards Matīss was born in 1888 and I found his occupation listed as ‘barman’ or ‘tipster’ but in the articles about the mugging he was described as a dock worker. He may have been sent to prison in 1922 in Cēsis or Madonas. There are many notices in newspapers over the years stating that the police are looking for him. He was also a WWI veteran, a former soldier of something called the ‘2nd Separate Squadron’ in the Northern Latvian Partisan Regiment. His father was some kind of factory director which is interesting to note. Why did a factory director’s son turn to a life of crime? Did his war experience colour the rest of his life? I guess we will never know.
After serving his sentence of forced labour, he was at it again in 1932:
“During the night of April 11, in Bauska at 33 Sudmalu Street [known as Rīgas Street today], someone picked the lock of Wulffson’s meat workshop and stole 25 kg of salted meat and sausages. Eduards Matīss, who had already been sentenced by a military court to forced labour for robbery, was detained with the entire “cargo.” Taking advantage of the darkness, Matīss bolted and vanished. A few days later, supervisor Zariņš arrested him. On October 25, the Jelgava District Court sentenced…Matīss to 1 year and 6 months in a house of correction.” After this the trail runs cold. Maybe Matīss never got out of his life of crime. Or maybe he did and that is why I can’t find anything more about him!
The End of an Era
By the late 1930s the vibrant, seedy pubs and restaurants near the Daugavmala Markets were closed to make way for a new city council office building. Then during WWII much of what was left was completely destroyed. Svērtuves Street doesn’t even exist as a street anymore.
Andrejs would have had a very sore ego I imagine after losing so much money in such a preventable way. Although he married Olga Rozenvalds in 1927 and entered the life of a ‘family man’, he remained a sailor until his untimely death in 1929, with no more mentions in the newspaper! This whole event, learned exclusively through old newspaper articles on Periodika, has been a interesting exploration of the dirty and seedy underbelly of Riga’s working-class in the first decades of the 20th century.