Wooden houses and tall trees line the Narva river; fishermen dot a smooth, brown, steady current. Russia’s face to the West, 100 metres away, and it looks like our side of the border. Peaceful, no sign of armed guards, artillery, or barbed wire anywhere. St Petersburg where Tchaikovsky hailed from is not far away, 155km on the E20.
Estonia's border with Russia across the Narva river
We’d had no intention of venturing into Estonia’s far east, let alone peer at a country that today inspires only fear and dread. Cousin Inga proposed the visit of an evening together. She would drive us, bikes attached to the back of her car, and later drop us at a campsite near Rakvere, from where we could pursue our journey north and west, back to Tallinn. Hard to say no, and glad we made the trip.
“More interesting than I would have thought,” my diary says The day is cloudy but not cold, Narva’s Soviet block architecture in better condition than is usually the case. A queue of cars and trucks wait in line to cross a bridge into Russia. Despite a war raging 1000km to the south, the border here remains open in both directions.
I ask Inga about how tough times were during the Soviet era. We had driven earlier through Jõhvi city where she was born and had lived the first 18 years of her life. She then spent three years in Tartu studying nursing, and on graduation found work in central Estonia where she later met Arvet, and where she has lived since.
Inga looks at me seriously, and answers, “I accept what happened.” Time to move on, she says. Is this the Estonian way? Yes, no point dwelling on the past.
So different to a prevailing view of Māori tribal leadership in New Zealand. Then again, Estonia is independent and Māori are not. But how to grant the tribes (iwi) independence when more than 120 iwi each identify as a nation. New Zealand has not solved this problem, to our lasting disadvantage. Our island country populated only since the late 1200s lacks the coherent vision that a living memory of Soviet times provides Estonia.
We visit the museum in Hermann castle, well presented, as museums in this country always are. “Estonians have a strong sense of their history,” I continue writing, “and are determined to ensure that coming generations of Estonians do not forget their history.”
We climb stairs for a vantage point across the river to Russia’s Ivangorod fortress where visitors to it mill on the battlements gazing at Estonia.
Narva was the “pearl of the Baltic” until the Soviets carpet bombed the old town’s stone architecture on 6-7 March 1944, an information panel tells us.
Senseless, I mutter, while Greg observes that all wars are senseless. He is correct, of course, doubly so as I write this post – Israel versus Hamas, and as the war in Ukraine drags on, into a second northern winter.
Even so, the destruction of old Narva does strike me as a tragedy worth mentioning. The old town, the vana linn, was built during Estonia’s “golden age” of Swedish rule, to succumb to fire in 1659. Thenceforth only buildings of stone were permitted in the town centre, and it became a large Baroque precinct, which survived the Great Northern War of 1704 (in which Tsar Peter the Great was victorious), and Estonia’s war of independence in 1918, in which Johannes Napp played a part.
We drink coffee in the castle courtyard watching other visitors walk on stilts, try out wooden swords, and take a lighthearted view of an earlier time. Is Estonia home to this descendant of exiles, I ask myself, as Inga drives us westwards and closer to where the Lehovas once farmed.
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