Latvia has one of the most extreme relationships with seasonal daylight in the European Union. Riga, the capital, sits at 56.9 degrees North latitude, close to the same latitude as Moscow and further north than most of Canada’s major cities.
In December, Riga gets about 6 hours and 40 minutes of daylight. In June, it gets nearly 17 and a half hours. The gap between the shortest and longest day exceeds 10 hours, more than double what you’d experience in, say, Portugal or Greece.
This dramatic variation is precisely why the daylight saving time debate matters so much here, and why Latvia has been one of the most vocal supporters of ending the twice-yearly clock change in the EU.
The timezone history
Latvia uses Europe/Riga, which follows Eastern European Time (EET, UTC+2) in winter and Eastern European Summer Time (EEST, UTC+3) in summer. Latvia shares this pattern with Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.
This wasn’t always the case. During the Soviet era, Latvia was kept on Moscow Time (UTC+3 standard, with Soviet summer time making it UTC+4). After independence in 1991, Latvia briefly experimented with what timezone best fit its geography and economy. Moving to Eastern European Time meant aligning with Helsinki and Tallinn while placing the country one hour behind Moscow. That felt right for a nation asserting its Western European identity.
The Singing Revolution and timekeeping sovereignty
The Baltic states achieved independence from the Soviet Union through what became known as the Singing Revolution, a period (roughly 1987-1991) in which mass peaceful protest, centered on song festivals and human chains, asserted national identity against Soviet authority.
The Baltic Way on August 23, 1989 saw an estimated 2 million people form a human chain stretching 675 kilometers across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, linking Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius. It happened on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the secret agreement that assigned the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere of influence.
When Latvian independence was restored in August 1991, the right to set their own clocks was part of what that meant. The Soviet calendar had told Latvia when to sleep and wake. The independent calendar was Latvia’s own.
The EU DST abolition debate
In 2018, the European Commission conducted a consultation on daylight saving time. Over 4.6 million Europeans responded, with a majority favoring abolition of the clock change. EU member states were asked to choose permanent standard time or permanent summer time.
Latvia was among the most enthusiastic advocates for change. The country’s health authorities published research showing that the twice-yearly clock transition correlates with increased road accidents, cardiovascular events, and disrupted sleep patterns in the days following the change. The extreme seasonality makes the biannual disruption feel particularly arbitrary.
The EU Parliament voted in 2019 to abolish DST starting in 2021. But the measure stalled in the Council, with member states unable to agree on whether to keep permanent standard time or permanent summer time. As of 2026, EU countries including Latvia still change clocks twice a year, watching the legislative process that would end this continue to move slowly.
Riga at the extremes
In midsummer, Riga experiences near-white nights: the sun dips below the horizon but it never gets fully dark. The sky holds a blue-gray twilight through the night hours. By late June, it’s possible to read outside at 11pm without artificial light.
In midwinter, the sun rises at 9am and sets before 3:30pm. Latvians spend the majority of their waking hours in darkness for months. The Latvian festival of Midsummer (Jāņi, June 23-24) is one of the country’s most celebrated holidays, a pagan-rooted celebration of the longest light that has survived centuries of Christian overlay. People gather in the countryside, light bonfires, sing traditional dainas (folk songs), and stay awake through the not-quite-dark night.
UTC+3 in summer, UTC+2 in winter. For a country at this latitude, even an extra hour of manipulated daylight means something real.
