On 31 October 1835, at Strutele Manor, Krišjānis Barons was born into the family of the estate foreman Juris Barons and Eņģele Brikšķe. Later he would be called the Father of the Dainas, but the beginning was thoroughly rural – a child of a Courland manor who grew into a Young Latvian thinker, publicist, and the great organizer of Latvian folksongs. His Cabinet of Folksongs, made in Moscow in 1880 from his own design, holds 268,815 small song slips – a people’s memory arranged in drawers.

Barons’ work with folksongs turned an oral tradition into an organized archive of national culture. The Cabinet of Folksongs later became one of the most visible symbols of Latvian spiritual culture and was inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2001.