Not the romance of castle ruins, but very practical statecraft: on 26 June 1923, State President Jānis Čakste promulgated Latvia’s first law on the protection of monuments. It protected movable and immovable objects of archaeological, ethnological, historical, or artistic value when their preservation was in the interests of the Latvian state and people. The protected category also included archives, historical documents, battlefields, and burial sites – not only stone and masonry, but memory itself.

The young Republic of Latvia had to recover its cultural heritage from the confusion of war, evacuations, and changing ownership. The law gave a legal framework to the Board of Monuments and allowed the state to protect antiquities, buildings, and historic sites in the public interest.