The Baltics – Day 2: Tartu

It is a strange time to be in the Baltics, as the normality of everyday life belies the concerning headlines in international relations. Just yesterday, for example, I read that Russia has been stirring up trouble at the border with Estonia by removing demarcation buoys from the Narva River. What complicates matters even further is that due to the USSR’s Russification policies, about a fifth of Estonia’s current population is ethnically Russian. This makes it difficult to gauge how much of the Russian I hear around here is being spoken by Russian emigres, refugees from Eastern Ukraine, or locals.

I woke up a little earlier this morning to catch the eight o’clock bus from Tallinn to Tartu. During the two-and-a-half-hour ride, I decided to read a little about the city’s history. Tartu is the intellectual capital of Estonia, being home to the country’s oldest university (founded in 1632). While the area has been inhabited by Finno-Ugric people since time immemorial, the first recorded settlement was built there by Yaroslav I the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev, after winning a battle against the local inhabitants. Since then, the city passed through many hands, including those of Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, Germany, Nazi Germany, and the USSR.

Tartu was the epicentre of Estonian nationalism in the nineteenth century, when Tartu hosted Estonia’s first song festival and established Vanemuine, the country’s first Estonian-language theatre. Singing, I learned, forms a big part of Estonian culture. It is said there are records of 133,000 Estonian folk songs, which amounts to roughly one song for every eight living Estonians. Singing also typified Estonia’s struggle for independence form the USSR in the late 1980s. On multiple occasions, crowds would sing patriotic songs as a form of protest, sometimes even turning cultural gatherings into demonstrations. For this reason, the Baltic States’ independence movement is often dubbed the Singing Revolution.

I arrived in the city at around half past ten and proceeded immediately to Vanemuine Theatre. Walking past a street with lovely historic houses, I then climbed up to Tartu Old Observatory. The building was the first measurement point of the Struve Geodetic Arc, which sought to establish the shape of the earth by triangulating survey points from Northern Norway all the way to the Black Sea. The director of the observatory and mastermind of this project, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, mostly studied astronomy, becoming the first person to measure the earth’s distance to a star other than the sun.

Since the observatory is closed on the weekends, I continued to the Ruins of Tartu Cathedral. Founded in the thirteenth century on the site of an erewhile pagan settlement, the cathedral was damaged during the Reformation and fell into disrepair. I found a cute octagonal café in the park by the building, and as I was trying to take its picture, I was set upon by a swarm of giant mosquitos. I managed to kill one, but another was able to get me faster.

After descending from the hill, I found myself in the city again. Weaving through barriers set up for a cycling competition, I made a stop by the neoclassical University of Tartu and the city’s town hall. It was getting increasingly hot as I passed by the orthodox cathedral, so I did not mind dipping into the Church of Saint John. The city struck me as remarkably clean, bicycle friendly, and mostly well renovated, which might bear some relation to its selection as a European City of Culture in 2024 – a fact I only learned about during my bus ride.

With two and a half hours to kill before my bus back to Tallinn, I decided to visit the Estonian National Museum. Walking all the way there would have been a slog, and needing no more persuasion than this, I was pleased to find that I could use my credit card to pay for the ride. I boarded the bus at the same time as several people, among whom were two boys I had noticed at the bus stop with fishing rods in their hands. As they rode along, they chatted to the bus driver and showed him their massive catch in a supermarket plastic bag. I feared the man might tell the boys to leave, but they had clearly judged their audience well.

My visit to the National Museum was both serendipitous and enlightening. It just so happened that the temporary exhibition was dedicated to Central and Eastern European Surrealists, with Czechoslovak artists like Toyen and Jan Zrzavý taking centre stage. Speaking of stages, my visit to the museum also confirmed the Estonians’ love for singing, as a big school performance was being rehearsed in the main hall.

Besides the temporary exhibition, the National Museum features an anthropological exhibition on the Finno-Ugric people and another exhibition on the history of Estonia. The former concentrates on little known minorities and their beliefs, customs, and rituals, paying special attention to pagan elements thereof. I learned that among the Mordvins, for instance, a young man was only considered eligible for marriage when he had mastered the art of beekeeping. The tribe believed that the earth looked like a beehive and that it was ruled over by the beekeeper Nishkepaz, “around whom souls orbit in the form of bees.” “Bees,” the signboard further explained, “were regarded as intermediaries between earth and heaven.”

The exhibition on the history of Estonia features quite a few items from prehistory all the way up to the space age. Perhaps the most historically significant item is Estonia’s original flag, consecrated in 1884 as the Estonian Students’ Society at Tartu University. There are a few interpretations of what the three colours mean, with blue symbolising the sky, the sea, or loyalty, black the country’s soil, suffering, or the traditional jacket of peasants, and white the snow, purity, or the path towards enlightenment.

I returned to Tallinn at five o’clock and spent another hour being a conscientious tourist. Despite a brief spell of rain and the distant rumbling of thunder, the weather was still quite nice, and since good weather never stays, I thought it best to take a look from the city’s most popular vantage points. The weather forecast says it will be cloudy tomorrow, so perhaps these are the best pictures I will take.