Tromping around with my ignorance and my camera

I haven’t been sure how to blog about our trip to Estonia. I just wrote an email to a friend and asked: Have you ever visited somewhere that seemed really complicated and you feel a bit like 'who am I to be tromping around here with my ignorance and my camera?’

I was not expecting to face this question in Tallinn. I was expecting old things, pretty things, good views from church towers and impractical paving. All of which we found in abundance. Don’t get me wrong, the old city is beautiful and remarkably preserved, with fantastic places to eat and is definitely worth a visit, but it didn’t take long to feel pressed in by the waves of tourists, the spruikers at every turn, the souvenirs in every size, colour and material.

So we fled the crowds a couple of times to venture into Kalamaja, which I’d read has pretty wooden houses and good cafes.

It also has Russian markets with amazing old cameras, vintage homewares, musical instruments, busts of Lenin, busts of Stalin, t-shirts with Putin’s huge face on them, Soviet and Nazi military uniforms, gas masks and jewellery of the Third Reich. I got so confused. I’m impressed and I’m revolted and I’m revolted at myself for being impressed. If we’re celebrating Putin in one stall, are we celebrating Soviet occupation in the next? Who’s buying Nazi jewellery? What does it mean? Where has it come from and how have these stall holders come by it?

Compared to living in Australia, where our very blemished, very diverse and (often times) very geographically dislocated histories seem vague and distant and all too easy to overlook, there is a deafening roar of history in Tallinn, from the ancient to the recent and I became aware, very quickly of my ignorance.

What I knew about Estonia before our arrival I’d learned from a snippet of Michael Palin’s travel show Pole to Pole, and from Sofi Oksanen’s fiction-based-on-historical-events Purge (which I highly recommend you read, it is so well written). Basically, that after centuries of varying rule, Estonia struggled in recent history through Soviet occupation, then German occupation, then Soviet occupation, until finally coming out from under the thumb of occupation in 1991. So we took ourselves off to the Museum of Occupations to learn more. We watched the first 5 minutes of a series of 20 minute videos, saw artefacts written in German and Russian behind glass, read about lots of dates and political back-and-forths, and caught some glimpses into the unpleasantness (to put it lightly) that occurred under previous occupations.

Outside the walls of the old city, we stumbled over former Soviet occupation everywhere. We heard Russian spoken as much, if not more, than Estonian, found Russian written into the cement that hardened prior to independence, saw images of Putin worn proudly on the front of t-shirts of people walking in the sunshine, and found many inexplicable and crumbling structures and buildings.

We spent more than an hour curiously wandering back and forth over one: a gigantic Soviet-era building, marked on the map as a concert hall, with the appearance of some Mayan temple. It is decorated by graffiti, and carpeted by broken bottles, birds’ nests, hardy mosses and adventurous saplings. Once we managed to descend its Escher-like stairs to the ground level, we found car bodies covered in a thick layer of dust. We had finally come to decide that it was an abandoned monstrosity, when we stumbled across a hidden entrance, and an open door to what, apparently, are a bunch of offices with graffiti-clad windows.

Then there was the prison. Perhaps a good preface to the most … staggering … part of our visit in Tallinn is from a sign I read in the Museum of Occupations which said something along the lines of: our history - whether it contains joy or mourning, shame or honour - should be remembered. The decaying Patarei Vangla (Patarei Prison) is open to the public for self-guided tours at only 3 euro per person. And so we, along with other tourists wielding phone cameras, took photo after photo of the cells, and the prison beds, and the halls, and the kitchens, and the guard rooms, and the yards, and the rusted barbed wire, and also the hanging room, indicated by a hand-written sign in a pretty font, duct-taped to the entrance hall.

I couldn’t find much information about this prison, just a Wikipedia page poorly translated from Estonian. It tells me very little but that the prison ceased operations somewhere around 2002. The prison’s website notes that it 'constitutes a monument for victims of communism and Nazism and a powerful symbol of resistance of the martyrs of the Republic of Estonia’.

I would have liked some more information to try to make some meaning of this place. And I would have liked to show more respect than to take a bunch of photos and blog about it. I just hope that perhaps it’s enough to have new questions and a new care for the history and people of a little country where power and injustice has been cruelly wielded and where the sun still shines on crumbling monuments, pretty wooden houses, good cafes, a complicated past and an optimistic future.