Latvia carries one of the oldest continuously preserved Indigenous cultural lineages in Europe. For thousands of years, Latvian life was rooted in an animist worldview where nature, spirit, land, ancestors, and everyday life were inseparable. Due to Christianization arriving later than in other areas of Europe, it never fully replaced ancient practices. These older nature-based traditions survived inside daily life - woven into songs, rituals, seasonal celebrations, plant medicine, and family healing.

A wooden mail sorter with multiple small compartments, some open with mail inside, enclosed in a glass case.

Dainas

Hundreds of thousands of folk songs were passed orally for millennia, encoded with ecological knowledge, spiritual teachings, agricultural wisdom, emotional guidance, and sacred metaphor. This oral library is considered one of the largest collections of ancient poetry in the world, and it preserved philosophy when written language and sovereignty were restricted.

Interior of a rustic wooden cabin with a small window, a wooden table, a bench, and a bed with a blanket, all made of dark wood.

Pirts (sauna ritual)

Pirts is an ancient healing system combining heat therapy, cold immersion, plant medicine, singing, breathwork, prayer, and sensory awareness. Unlike spa saunas, pirts is a guided ceremony led by a trained healer/shaman (pirts meistars) who uses steam, touch, aromatic herbs, and water to cleanse, regulate the nervous system, and restore emotional and physical balance. This practice survived because it was hidden “in plain sight” as part of everyday rural life.

Looking up at a large tree with textured bark and green leaves, sunlight filtering through.

Relationship with land and ancestors

Latvian cosmology understands nature as alive, intelligent, and relational: Mother Saule brings warmth and renewal; Māra, the Earth Mother, governs bodies, birth, and the material world; Pērkons protects the land and restores balance; Laima weaves fate and blessing; and Dievs watches over the order of the world, offering guidance, harmony, and moral grounding. Ancestors are not distant - they remain present and participatory, living in the land, water, stones, and forests. In this worldview, humans are in relationship with the more-than-human world, and well-being arises through reciprocity, gratitude, protection, and belonging.

A large crowd of people gathered outdoors at night for a celebration or event, with many wearing traditional clothing. The scene features an impressive modern architectural structure with a curved, lattice-like roof and bright lighting, spanning the background, and a group of performers or officials in the foreground.

Photo: Patriks Pauls Briķis/DELFI

A History of Survival

For centuries, Latvia endured occupation - German, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Soviet - becoming a free and sovereign nation for the first time in 1918. Despite repeated attempts to erase culture, language, and identity, Latvians used song, ritual, and folklore as a hidden form of resistance. During Soviet occupation from 1941, singing ancestral songs became an act of political defiance and spiritual survival. In 1991, Latvia regained independence, and today the Song and Dance Festival is a UNESCO-recognized cultural treasure, with a chorus and attendance of tens of thousands.

Because so much knowledge survived through oral tradition, Latvia, as well as its Baltic neighbors, is now one of the few places in Europe where intact pre-Christian, nature-based spiritual and healing systems are still practiced.

Why pirts and related healing traditions are unique

They

  • induce trance states by integrating heat + cold therapy + herbs + chanting + somatics

  • are rooted in animist and ecological intelligence

  • survived through non-written, embodied lineage

  • focus on relational healing (self, others, land, spirit)

  • are whole-person practices (physical, emotional, spiritual)

  • remain community-based

  • unlike many European Indigenous traditions that were erased or Christianized beyond recognition, Latvian practices endured because everyday people carried them forward quietly inside families, farms, and rituals.

Baltic Healing Documentary

When filmmaker Andrea Lötscher learned that women in Latvia had quietly preserved traditional European healing knowledge into the present day, she envisioned what would become the documentary Baltic Healing. In the summer of 2023, Andrea traveled through Latvia to meet four women healing practitioners working with pirts, the traditional Latvian sauna. The resulting documentary feature, Baltic Healing, premiered in the spring of 2024 and, in its first year, was screened more than a dozen times in cinemas and outdoor venues.

The film is directed, filmed and edited by Andrea Lötscher. Baiba Balka was the production coordinator and translator.

Watch Baltic Healing on Vimeo