How Estonia grows
Photographer, traveller, travel guide, guide and founder of the tourism brand Tallinn InSight Kristjan-Jaak Tammsaar writes how he has discovered the story of Estonia for himself and others piece by piece.
In retrospect, of course, it’s embarrassing to admit that in the mid-2000s, in my early 20s, I didn’t know how to appreciate my country or its story. I just wanted to go ‘far away’, somewhere that seemed exotic and exciting. However, feeling embarrassed about one’s past values should not really be a shameful thing, but a welcome sign of intellectual maturity.
It’s easy to take any environment for granted if it’s the only one that you have known so far. The opportunity to leave Estonia and fulfil yourself elsewhere is also a privilege, which opened up to us thanks to our accession to the European Union and the Schengen area, but which could easily be taken for granted in the boldness of youth.
As fate would have it, I ended up working as a guide in Estonia for the summer ten years ago, but I could not yet foresee that this seemingly nice and active role would be accompanied by two more significant and long-term aspects. Firstly, while staying in my home country, it allowed me to meet people from different countries and backgrounds, discuss politics, religion and life in a way that would be possible in a small number of professions. Thus, I continued to travel while actually remaining stationary – through other people’s eyes, thoughts and stories.
Secondly, it meant that as an adult I had to familiarise myself with Estonian history and cultural history again. In school, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have a particularly inspiring history teacher, so I actually had to start from scratch, mainly by trying to grasp the big picture, link facts and tell stories. No one comes to Estonia dreaming of trotting after a tour guide who monotonously recites a memorised text and fires off unrelated names and dates for a couple of hours. It is also a fundamentally different experience to learn and perform something in a sterile classroom. But now it was my job to use only empathy and words to recreate events, buildings and historical strata in places where they may not have actually existed for centuries or even millennia.
As adults, with inner motivation, learning unleashes a snowball effect – every piece of new knowledge reveals a next promising window leading to more new and exciting layers. This was amplified by the visitors’ own unexpected narratives and questions, which we often dare to allow ourselves only when we are far from home. Then we notice everything with fresh and curious ‘child’s eyes’ and therefore do not feel false shame about looking naive and asking about seemingly self-evident things.
In the evenings after the tours, I often found myself diving into some exciting ‘rabbit hole’, reading and exploring something that could have been triggered by only a superficial question or a random keyword. And so Estonia itself, with its stories, grew immeasurably bigger in my head than it had ever been with its seemingly small 45,000 square kilometres and flat mountain-free profile.
Did you know, for example, that just a half-hour drive from the centre of Tallinn, there was a pre-Christian stronghold, which, according to the findings and knowledge accumulated only in recent decades, has turned out to be the largest known stronghold of its time in Northern Europe, north of German territories? It also seems equally crazy today to imagine that at the end of the 16th century, one of the tallest buildings in the world at that time was located right here in the cosy and tiny old town above our heads in the shape of St. Olaf’s Church. Which in turn speaks and allows me to speak about the wealth and importance of Tallinn as a key port city in the era of the Hanseatic League.
Sometimes I ask my guests to imagine Tallinn as a late medieval Dubai, where St. Olaf’s Church took the throne as the Burj Khalifa of its time. Obviously and deliberately, this is an absurd comparison, but mnemonic techniques show that it is the absurd images that we remembered the best. Equally, such a comparison recreates in our mind’s eye the beliefs and values of an era in which the highest buildings on the planet were still religious buildings, not financial centres. How telling is even such a fleeting awareness of a distant period of history – the key is finding a way to understand something else, perhaps completely incomprehensible, through parallels with the points of reference we know.
Through these unexpected and peculiar pieces of jigsaw puzzles, I have assembled Estonia, our stories and our big picture for myself year after year. And, what’s great about it is the fact that it’s a puzzle that has no edges and can only grow, and each additional piece enriches and sharpens the colours and contours of an already existing image. In parallel with the puzzle, my own hunger to offer more personal stories and curated experiences to my guests as a guide grew. This culminated in the establishment of Tallinn InSight, which offers newly personalised private tours.
It is a special pleasure to (re)introduce Estonia to people who have been here 20 or 30 years ago and through them, experience the progress that we have achieved with only a generation. Recently, I introduced Tallinn to an Englishwoman who had visited Estonia shortly after the end of the occupation period, and from an abandoned Soviet army base, she had pinched three uniform buttons bearing a star as a souvenir. I thanked her for her small but symbolic and significant contribution to the liberation of Estonia from the propaganda symbols of the totalitarian empire – obviously an oversized bronze Lenin would have exceeded her baggage limit.
Particularly emotional, however, are the days when my tours are attended by people whose ancestors or other close relatives are from Estonia and they have come to discover their roots for the first time or are accompanying their family. Again, it is a bit embarrassing (i.e., good and right) to admit that it was only a year or two ago when I actually realized how large the Estonian diaspora is – that thanks to Estonian communities from Canada to Australia, as much as 15-20% of us, Estonians, live outside Estonia. That’s an enormous amount.
We’re like beach sand scattered around the world by winds and sea waves. Many had to leave against their will and instead of being spurred on by their dreams, they were dispersed by the merciless storms of history. But it was thanks to them – thanks to you – that Estonia’s story persisted and was kept aglow far away from its home shore, when the country itself had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for half a century.
Thanks to my profession, I immediately remember stories like that of Ernst Jaakson, who represented Estonia’s interests as a state official in New York when we were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and the puppet government here condemned Estonian civil servants who did not wish to return to their own funeral to being shot in absentia.
Jaakson stayed. And for half a century, he alone represented Estonia’s interests and legal continuity in the diplomatic corridors of the USA, and in 1991, he continued his work as the first ambassador of the re-independent Estonia. For decades, therefore, the longest-serving diplomat in the US and, according to diplomatic protocol, also honoured for the length of his service, had a flag and a state, but he temporarily lacked a homeland to which they belonged.
It’s both an incredibly powerful story, as well as a symbol and a reminder of the role and weight that a single person, a single piece of puzzle, can have. We may be scattered around the world, but we all represent Estonia, whether officially or not. I’m sure we’ve all been often told by someone, ‘You are the first Estonian I have ever met.’ And so, for many people, each of us will be the first face and voice of Estonia they have met, and thus perhaps the only one that will remind them of Estonia.
It is both a beautiful opportunity and a responsibility for all of us to share our story in a dignified and memorable way. Our existence is not self-evident – instead, it is the culmination of centuries of global political development, as a result of which a good and hard-working small country can hold its head up high among great powers and consistently surpass the expectations it has set itself – punch above its weight. And every day, therefore, offers yet another opportunity for all of us to enrich someone’s worldview with a new and exciting piece of puzzle about Estonia that colourfully and engagingly conveys and perpetuates our story.
Kristjan-Jaak Tammsaar
Fotograaf, rändur, reisijuht, giid ja turismibrändi Tallinn InSight asutaja
