As summer fades in northern Europe and the booze cruises from Finland die down, Estonia prepares for the invasion of winter and let’s face it, Estonia has had its fair share of invasions since 1204: Danes Swedes, Germans, Russians, they have all had a go. Incredibly, they only shook off the last lot (the Russkies of course) less than 20 years ago.
Now, it is just cruise ships of Americans and Finns, the latter, as is well known, for cheap(er) booze, though there is also an overnight so-called love boat. I have not discovered how that works, but you get the idea.
Tallinn, the country’s capital, still maintains more than a kilometre of fine city walls and its UNESCO World Heritage Site title, though it might be threatened by recent high-rise buildings very close to the old town. You know it is old because the place is full of pretty girls (and boys) in medieval costumes, out promoting their cellar restaurants, including the aptly named Garlic Restaurant, which apparently includes the said item in all their dishes, so the tiramisu is not recommended.
But inevitably, it’s back to bodily functions (it is becoming a regular feature in these blogs) and the most incredible loo that I have had the good fortune to frequent, because it is built into a chimney. Although it is not open to the elements, it is disconcerting to look heavenwards up a sooty smoke-stack twenty feet up while, as it were, looking down.
However, this is, to my knowledge, the first time I have mentioned public executioners. This was an occupation even more looked down on than estate agents in times gone by, so the poor incumbent in Tallinn found it difficult to make friends, never mind find a wife. However, the latter problem was usually solved by offering a (pretty-ish) female criminal the alternative of marriage instead of jail, which seemed to fix the problem. I imagine a divorce would latterly be out of the question. In the German city of Lubeck, another Hanseatic town, the executioner operated a kind of bonus scheme whereby if he executed 100 customers, he was entitled to call himself a d
Doctor of Medicine. I wonder what I would get for visiting 100 countries.
The chairman of the city council is a Mr Toomas, which is fitting as there is one of those little trains that chugs around the city starting outside the city hall. The train is blue and called Toomas and bears a striking resemblance to another well-known tank engine.
Finally, a word about the role of women in Estonia. It seems they have had a poor deal in the past in what must have been a patriarchal society, but the trusty feminists of today are getting their own back, castigating the male at every opportunity, doubly so if he is Russian and/or communist; they’re not held in high regard in these parts. These amazons are making full use of their recently granted right to free speech, so watch out for these arch feminists, you guys.
Moving south out of Estonia is to leave that Scandinavian feel for a distinctly more Russian atmosphere, especially in Latvia, where almost half the population is Russian, forcibly repatriated by Stalin to dilute the ethnic Latvians and Lithuanians earlier in the last century, rather like the mass immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet and Xinjiang province in western China.
It is truly amazing that the ethnic Balts have continued to hope that every new invader would improve on the last lot, from the Danes, the crusading Teutonic knights, the near-neighbour Swedes, the even nearer Russians (first wave in the seventeenth century), French under Napoleon, the Russians (again), the Germans (again) and the Russians yet again in 1945.
You can see why the present twenty years of self-government is so sweet, but the hate expressed universally for the Russians becomes understandable when you hear how they behaved. For a deeply religious people, the Lithuanians had to suffer seeing their churches turned into tractor repair shops or food distribution centres as a none too subtle way of expressing the Russian disregard for religion of any sort. This is without mentioning the redeployment of huge numbers of Balts to Siberia to work and starve in appalling conditions, while the country’s industry and agriculture was exploited for the invaders’ benefit.
Symbols of religious faith are everywhere, no more so than at a remote site called the Hill (more a mound) of Crosses. A single cross was set up here to commemorate the death of a child in the 1830s, and more were added in such large numbers that the Russians felt it necessary to destroy them, even covering them in sewage. Inevitably the locals replaced them, each time destroyed again by the Russians. Today the hill is absolutely covered with thousands and thousands of crosses of all shapes and sizes, including two from the present and previous pope, all clustered in great heaps, some with bells gently tinkling in the wind. It must be a bit eerie at night.
The arrival of the Nazis in 1941, of course, did not improve the lot of the locals, as many were shipped off for forced labour or worse. More than ninety percent of the Jewish populations of all three countries was exterminated after centuries of peaceful coexistence in these states.
It is no wonder that so many of the museums are devoted to their sad history: the Holocaust museum, the state Jewish museum, Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, Museum of the Barricades; in fact, the Museum of the Blackheads in Riga Latvia (built in 1334 and taken over by the Blackhead guild of unmarried foreign merchants led by a Moor, all known for riotous parties, a bit like the Bullingdon club in Oxford) comes as a bit of light relief.
About ten miles outside the city is a small shrine to identify where the Jews were quietly rounded up for transport to the camps. Apparently, the Nazis were not keen to highlight their task by carrying it out in the city itself. Very thoughtful.
The countryside, especially in Estonia and Latvia, seems to be very lightly populated, except for a few grand estates built in previous centuries by German settlers. One of the largest and grandest, Rundale Palace in Latvia built in the early eighteenth-century aimed to rival Versailles in its ambition and style, much frequented by Catherine, Empress of Russia. It is truly amazing to think that at one time Lithuania was a country larger than France, incorporating parts of what are today Poland and Belarus before it was broken up by the Russians in the mid seventeenth century, then by the Prussians and the Austrians before being reduced to a Tsarist puppet state of about four million people.
And did you know Pope John Paul’s mother was Lithuanian? The Poles keep quiet about that.