Three Cheers for Jāņi: Latvia’s Summer Solstice Festival

The air is fresh and cool in Riga, Latvia, where we’ve joined friends for a few days of sightseeing, learning about history, exploring and absorbing local culture and having culinary adventures.

We’re here during the summer solstice, and in the evenings, we sit with the windows open, enjoying the nautical twilight and telling stories, as folks have done for centuries.

This time is special for The Grill-Meister and me not just because we are blessed to be spending it with close friends who bring purpose and meaning to our lives, but also because it is our anniversary. On June 21, the actual summer solstice, we celebrated our 18th anniversary.

Each year, the solstice reminds us of our vows, and we rejoice.

Back to today. Because Riga is so far north, true darkness barely arrives in midsummer. The long evening light lingers past bedtime, sliding from sunset into civil twilight and then nautical twilight, that magical blue-gray glow that makes midnight feel enchanted. This graph illustrates just how much sunlight we’re enjoying here this week. The crosshatch is the date of this post.

Let’s just call it Max Daylight. Check out these pics that bring it home.

Latvia’s beloved midsummer festival is Jāņi, celebrated on the night of June 23/24, with June 23 and 24 observed as national holidays. Rooted in ancient nature-based traditions, it honors light, fertility, abundance, and the power of the sun. People sing, dance, wear flower and oak-leaf wreaths, gather around bonfires, and stay awake to greet the sunrise.

Midsummer songs are sung and cultural rituals are observed, and the festivals across the country blend pagan ceremonies, folk music, and rural customs. Despite decades of occupation and oppression that only ended in 1991, Latvia is a thriving, vibrant place, and never more exemplary of its culture than during the midsummer festival. Find out more here: Summer Solstice Celebrations.

We visited the KGB Museum today, which brought some important history that resulted from twisted and wicked ideology into sharp focus. During Latvia’s occupation years, first Soviet occupation from 1940–1941, Nazi occupation from 1941–1944/45, and renewed Soviet occupation from 1944/45–1991, expressions of Latvian national culture such as this joyous holiday were reshaped, suppressed and hidden.

No longer.

Freedom abounds.

People rejoice in this holiday. Truth-telling has brought shadows into the light.

It may seem trivial to lament that certain holidays couldn’t be celebrated during the long dark night of Soviet occupation, especially when compared against the backdrop of incarceration, intimidation and murder of innocent Latvians, but the suppression of culture and its expression is a different kind of murder. I have so much respect for Latvians now as I move about this amazing city with the fresh realization that this country has only been free for 35 years.

And so, at midsummer during the June 23 & 24 national holidays, the people rejoice and dance, enjoying the solstice and all that it means: sunlight, abundance, fertility, blending with nature and the blessings that abound in the natural world. Here is my haiku to honor it:

solstice light reflects
harmony, stories and truth
sun-dance abundance

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This haibun, which is haiku with introductory content, was written in response to a prompt from the dVerse Poets Pub, Haibun Monday, First Solstice. The prompt, focused on the solstice, was:
Today, let’s honor this seasonal sensation! Write a haibun that alludes to this first Solstice of 2026! New to haibun? The form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated.

You can find the other submissions here.

Rejoice in the solstice, the truth-telling and the light, my friends.

©️ 2026, Glover Gardens