We visited the Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils — here's what we found

An improbable museum in an improbable city

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Daugavpils in 1903. The city was then called Dvinsk, a multi-ethnic Tsarist garrison town with a substantial Jewish community. Rothko’s family emigrated to the United States when he was ten. He went on to become one of the defining figures of Abstract Expressionism, his large-scale colour field paintings now worth tens of millions of dollars at auction. He never returned to Latvia.

The Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils is, in this context, an unlikely institution: a serious contemporary art museum named after the city’s most famous son, housed inside the 19th-century Daugavpils Fortress complex, in a city 220km from Riga that most international visitors never reach. We made the trip in March 2025. Here is what we found.

Getting to Daugavpils from Riga

Daugavpils is Latvia’s second city, but it is firmly in the category of places that requires commitment to visit. There are two main options:

By train (Pasažieru Vilciens): The direct train from Riga to Daugavpils takes approximately 2.5-3 hours and costs around €12-15 one way. The service runs several times a day. This is the more atmospheric option — you pass through flat Latvian countryside that transitions into the Latgale lake district, which has a different quality of light and landscape than the Riga region.

By bus: Faster services (some run direct in under 3 hours) connect the two cities, with fares around €8-15. The bus station in Daugavpils is reasonably central.

By car: About 2.5 hours on the A6 highway. If you’re combining Daugavpils with a broader Latvian road trip, driving makes more sense.

We took the morning train and arrived in time for lunch, which we had at a simple café near the station. Daugavpils has a substantial Russian-speaking population and the city feels more Eastern in character than Riga — Cyrillic signs appear alongside Latvian, the architecture trends Soviet-era rather than Art Nouveau, and the pace is considerably slower.

The Daugavpils Fortress

The Rothko Center is located within the Daugavpils Fortress (Daugavpils Cietoksnis), a massive 19th-century military fortification built under Tsar Alexander I. The fortress is enormous — it covers 127 hectares and is one of the largest intact Napoleonic-era fortresses in Europe — and most of it is still being gradually restored and repurposed.

The fortress complex is itself worth exploring independent of the museum. The scale is hard to comprehend: enormous earthworks, brick warehouses, barracks, and defensive walls covering ground that a full morning barely exhausts. The audio tour of Daugavpils Fortress provides context for the military history of the site, which spans Napoleonic, Tsarist, World War One, and Soviet periods.

Walking through the fortress grounds in March, in grey Baltic light, with most of the restoration still incomplete and the brick slowly reappearing from centuries of whitewash, felt genuinely atmospheric — not polished-heritage-site atmospheric, but actually slightly eerie in the best way.

The Rothko Center itself

The museum is housed in Arsenal building Number 5 of the fortress, a well-restored brick structure that provides good gallery space. The permanent collection includes eight original Rothko works — none of his most famous large-scale pieces, which stay at the major American and European collections, but enough to understand the arc of his career. There are also works by his family and contemporaries, and a substantial gallery of contemporary Latvian and international art in rotating exhibitions.

The eight Rothko originals are the centrepiece. In person, particularly the works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, they do what Rothko’s painting is supposed to do: the fields of colour vibrate slightly at their edges, and if you stand at the recommended distance (further than you’d normally stand from a painting), something shifts in your perception of them. They’re smaller than the famous Seagram Murals or the Houston Chapel paintings, but the effect is present.

What struck us was the quality of the presentation. The Rothko Center is not a budget regional museum making do with what it has. The curation is thoughtful, the lighting is properly calibrated, and the interpretive texts are available in several languages including English. For a museum in a city of 80,000 people, it punches significantly above its weight.

Is the trip worth it from Riga?

This depends on what you’re after. As a pure art pilgrimage — seeing original Rothkos in the city where he was born — yes, without question. The combination of the paintings and the biographical context makes for an experience that’s different in quality from seeing his work in New York or London.

As a general day trip from Riga, the answer is more conditional. Daugavpils is not a conventional tourist city. There is no Old Town in the Riga or Cēsis sense, the sightseeing infrastructure is limited, and you need to be comfortable with a destination that rewards those who approach it with curiosity rather than a checklist.

We spent about five hours in the fortress complex (museum plus walking the grounds), ate lunch and an early dinner in the city, and caught the evening train back to Riga. The whole day felt like a genuine journey rather than a tourist excursion, which we consider a recommendation.

The Latgale region guide covers the broader area if you’re considering combining Daugavpils with the lake district, which is extraordinary in summer.

The city of Daugavpils itself

Daugavpils is a city that rewards curiosity. It doesn’t have a conventional tourist offering — there’s no Old Town in the sense that Riga or Cēsis have Old Towns — but it has a distinctive character that comes from its geography, its multi-ethnic history, and its current moment.

The city sits at the junction of major railway routes, which explains its historical significance as an industrial and military centre. Today it has a population that’s approximately 45% Latvian, 30% Russian, and 25% other minorities (Polish, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Jewish historically), making it one of the most multi-ethnic cities in Latvia. This is visible in the street signs (Latvian primary, Russian also common), the religious architecture (Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran churches within blocks of each other), and the general atmosphere of a city that hasn’t been smoothed into a single cultural identity.

For a visitor with a few hours beyond the Rothko Center and the fortress, the area around Vienības iela (the main commercial street) and the several religious buildings near the centre give a sense of this texture. The Great Synagogue Memorial near the fortress marks the site of the city’s historic Jewish community, which was one of the largest in Latvia before the Holocaust.

Combining Daugavpils with the Latgale lake district

The Latgale region — Latvia’s easternmost area — is known for its network of lakes, its distinctive folk culture (more Catholic than the Lutheran rest of Latvia, with strong Polish and Belarusian influences), and a landscape that’s softer and more forested than the Riga region.

If you’re making the journey to Daugavpils, consider spending two nights and using the city as a base for exploring the nearby lakes (Rāznas and Drīdzis are the largest and most scenically impressive). This turns a demanding day trip into a more relaxed cultural and nature itinerary. The Latgale region guide covers the wider area.

Practical information

Opening hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10:00-18:00. Closed Mondays. Entry fee: Adults €7. Students and seniors €4. Children under 7 free. Language: Good English signage throughout. Café: The museum café is decent. More options in the city centre, 15-20 minutes on foot. Distance from train station: The fortress is about 2km from the main station. A taxi or Bolt is easier than walking, particularly in winter. Photography: Permitted without flash inside the galleries. The Rothko works can be photographed for personal use.

The Rothko connection

For those interested in the broader context: Rothko’s relationship with his Daugavpils birth is complicated. He left at age 10 and rarely spoke of Latvia in his adult life. The 1913 emigration came during a period of Tsarist-era anti-Semitic violence, and Rothko’s father — a pharmacist — made the difficult decision to send his children to the United States before bringing the rest of the family. Marcus Rothkowitz arrived in Portland, Oregon, as Marcus Rothkowitz. He later anglicised his name to Mark Rothko.

The museum, established with the cooperation of the Rothko family and the Latvian government, received its first original Rothko works in 2010. The collection has grown gradually since then. There is no direct record of Rothko expressing a desire to be memorialised in Daugavpils — the museum is an act of civic reclamation by a city claiming its most famous son — but the works themselves, the colour-field paintings with their contemplative quality, seem entirely appropriate in the quiet fortress setting.

Where this leaves us in 2026

Updated May 2026 — the Rothko Center continues to be one of the most undervisited cultural institutions in the Baltics. The fortress restoration is ongoing and more areas have opened since our 2025 visit. Train connections have slightly improved with additional daily services. If anything, the case for making this trip is stronger now: Daugavpils remains genuinely off the tourist circuit, and the combination of the Rothko originals, the fortress scale, and the very different character of Latgale from western Latvia makes for a day that feels like real travel rather than tourism.