Qualla: Daugavpils Fortress

Daugavpils Fortress: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edgars Košovojs, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tsar Alexander I signed the construction order in 1810, and even then everyone knew Napoleon was coming. The fortress at Daugavpils - then called Dinaburg, the Russian outpost of a former Polish-Livonian frontier - was meant to anchor the western approaches to St. Petersburg against the French army that would invade two years later. Ten thousand workers labored in two shifts. The fortress was still half-built in 1812 when 24,000 French troops attacked it. Three thousand three hundred Russian defenders, manning two hundred cannons, held them off long enough to matter. Construction continued, sporadically, for another 66 years. By the time it was finally complete in 1878, the kind of warfare it was built for had largely ceased to exist.

Read more: Daugavpils Fortress on Qualla

Image: Edgars Košovojs | CC BY-SA 4.0

Daugavpils Fortress: The Last Intact Star Fort

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ainars brūvelis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Daugavpils Fortress is the only early 19th-century military fortification of its kind preserved in Northern Europe without significant later alterations. The classic star-fort geometry - angular bastions projecting from a central enceinte, designed to provide overlapping fields o...

Read more: Daugavpils Fortress on Qualla

Image: ainars brūvelis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Daugavpils Fortress: Stalag 340

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artyom Makhlin, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the fortress sheltered Russian royalty, it sheltered the Latvian army during the brief interwar republic from 1920 to 1940. Then came the Soviet occupation, and then the German invasion of June 1941. The Wehrmacht converted the fortress into Stalag 340, a prisoner-of-war ca...

Read more: Daugavpils Fortress on Qualla

Image: Artyom Makhlin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Daugavpils Fortress: The Rothko Connection

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ivo Kruusamägi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Markus Rotkovich was born in Dvinsk - the Russian Imperial name for Daugavpils - on September 25, 1903. His family lived in a Jewish quarter near the fortress. They emigrated to Portland, Oregon, in 1913, escaping the antisemitism that would shortly afterward escalate into pogrom...

Read more: Daugavpils Fortress on Qualla

Image: Ivo Kruusamägi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Daugavpils Fortress: A Fortress Becoming a Town

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlexandraMt, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the fortress functions as something between a military monument and a still-inhabited neighborhood. Many of the historic buildings have been restored - the Engineering Arsenal, the Pump House, the Nicholas Gate, the Officer's House, the Gunpowder Warehouse - and the courtya...

Read more: Daugavpils Fortress on Qualla

Image: AlexandraMt | CC BY-SA 4.0