Is it a good idea to splash money on European cities of culture?

As you enter the old KGB building, at the end of Freedom Street, the first thing that hits you is the cold. Outside it’s below freezing. Inside it’s even colder. The cells are in the basement, down a dank and narrow corridor. Upstairs are the offices where the KGB filed away the details of the men and women they kept below. In the foyer, where people used to come in to enquire about their next of kin (who might be dead or in Siberia or in a cell downstairs for all they knew), there’s a letterbox where visitors could leave incriminating memos about their neighbours. ‘During the Soviet occupation the State Security Agency imprisoned, tortured, killed and morally humiliated its victims in this building,’ reads a plaque outside. Since Latvia won its independence this art-nouveau apartment block has been empty. This year it will reopen, as part of Riga’s year as European Capital of Culture. ‘The House on the Corner’ (as Latvians still call it, euphemistically) will become a museum.

Invaded by the USSR and then the Nazis and then the USSR again, Latvia has been a nation for fewer than 100 years yet it spent more than half of the last century under occupation. No country deserves a party more, but returning to Riga late last year the timing felt all wrong. Latvia was about to swap its lats for euros, forsaking the currency that symbolised its hard-won independence. The supermarket collapse that killed 54 people had prompted the resignation of the prime minister. Latvia has the biggest growth in the EU (over 4 per cent) but in the economic crisis it lost 18 per cent of GDP, more than any other EU country. Can this little nation really afford a year-long artistic jamboree?

Conceived in 1985 by Melina Mercouri, the Greek minister of culture, the idea of Cultural Capitals was an EU plan to ‘foster a feeling of European citizenship’ (whatever that means) and ‘encourage a sense of belonging to the same European family, by making us aware of our common European roots and our shared ambitions for the future’ (hardly a mission statement designed to please British Eurosceptics).