Estonia's problem from a defensive point of view is that it is basically flat. Great for cycling but not for repelling invaders, and there were many over the centuries. In 1208 German-speaking Crusaders seized the hilltop fortress of Otepää in southern Estonia from the local tribespeople. The Sword Brothers and military orders like it converted heathens to Christianity under Papal mandate, by force, carving out their own territory in the process, a mission shared with Danish invaders in the north, see Britannica. These latter-day Vikings wrested control of a hilltop in 1219 from Estonian defenders, known to them as the Lindanise, which the Sicilian Arab map maker al-Idrisi had noted down in 1154 as Reval, and much later became known as Tallinn, from taani linnus, Danish fortress.
And so began the end of self-rule in a part of the world Iron Age Estonians had called their own for uncounted ages. At that time these kinsfolk of Finns, the Sami in Lappland and other Uralic cultures called themselves rahvas, the people. Already farmers, Estonians disappeared from view to become peasants and serfs under Baltic German overlords while the tides of war and regime change wore ceaselessly back and forth over the centuries.
“It takes survival skills to last on such a tiny piece of land,” an animated short film tells visitors to a museum in Tallinn’s old town. The narrator is the spirit of Estonia, depicted as an old greybeard in a pea jacket, his body ending not in legs but a reptilian tail.
At dinner with friends in Tallinn we asked about Estonians’ survival skills. They had to have been considerable to avoid being wiped out entirely.
In 1346 the Danes tired of controlling their northern strip and sold it to the Teutonic Order who then ruled the remainder of Estonian territory and northern Latvia. In the mid-1500s Russia under Ivan the Terrible emerged the winner of a drawn-out conflict, the Livonian War. Poland-Lithuania later had their time in Estonia, as did Sweden until 1721 when Tsarist Russia again took over, this time until 1918. Under all of these regime changes, Estonians suffered. During the Livonian War alone the population fell from around 300,000 to half that figure.
A further source of wonder to us was how the Baltic German aristocracy survived all this conflict. Our hosts said in answer a high level of education and political skills fitted the landed gentry for governing and administration, regardless of who ultimately ruled. The Baltic Germans were needed, so they stayed, as lords of the manor or mõis. Most of these former estates and buildings lie in ruins, dotted through Estonia’s countryside, while some have been restored, and are open to visitors.
Sagadi manor, close to Lahemaa National Park
The Estonians did not mix with their overlords, nor did this minor nobility mix with their lowly servants, Tiiu Kull explains. In this setting, the Estonians clung onto their language, traditions and culture, uninterrupted, through more than 700 years of continuous occupation or colonisation by others. It’s an unexpected debt to Baltic German culture, and Estonians seem to recognise it.
Our grandma Erika Napp née Lehova attended a German-speaking high school in northern Estonia around the early 1920s, a legacy of an earlier time. Fluent in Russian and German, besides Estonian, Erika worked for the railways during the Nazi occupation of 1941-44, and that’s another story.
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