At the Karītes farm in Braslava Parish, on 13 September 1894 according to the new style, Ernests Blanks was born – the future journalist, historian, and stubborn formulator of the idea of an independent Latvia. The National Encyclopedia describes him as the first person who, in 1917 within the borders of the former Russian Empire, publicly demanded a fully independent Latvian state; his compact sentence was: “Where Latvia begins, Russia ends.” The biography began in a tenant farmer’s family of seven children, not in a political salon.

During the First World War and the revolutions of 1917, Latvian political circles were still weighing autonomy against full independence. Blanks worked in the press, where a political phrase could become a programme, and later wrote on the Young Latvians and the Latvian national awakening.