Saaremaa
Though Saaremaa island is not directly connected with any one of my works – or precisely because of this – this island has exerted the strongest influence on me.
Saaremaa was the first place where I was without any obligation and without parents, and on since then all Baltic Sea islands awaken a feeling of intoxicating freedom in me. Some time later I once met a double bassist, who had been – also when he was in school – in Florida, and during all of his free time he sat at the Mediterranean and drank cocktails at the stern of the boat.
Saaremaa is a place where my wanderings past the forests started, for the first time really got into the depth of nature. The names of Estonian plants, very fantasy-abundant: as far as the eye could see. I have climbed with my neck in a crick in the run-down manor house, and read old Baltic German newspapers, which were once glued under the old wallpaper; looked for the old cemetaries of barons – driving my car almost to pieces since the roads didn’t take you there – and skulls grinned under opened gravestones.
Saaremaa is an island which has different faces depending on the time of year and period of life: the more beautiful it is, the more difficult period of time is at hand. The more secretive it is, the clearer things in life become. In early spring the forest dryly turns yellow, and a mezereon blooms there like a mystical creature from a totally different world.
The month of June, the night: a damp scent of a jasmin tree, the shadows of birds against the light, and the cautious voice of the nightingale, which turns more and more piercing the deeper into the night it goes. An housewife keeps busy in the kitchen, the fire crackles, and the old radio crackles as well, some kind of cackling in Hungarian – because it is the only radio station which comes through in this transparent night.
At the southern tip of Saaremaa island is the Sõrve lighthouse, which blinks at the Livonian coast. When you really try, from the tip of you can see the pale blinking-back of the Mikeltornis lighthouse from the tip of Sõrve. Exactly 150 kilometers to the west from Sõrve is the coast of Fårö. Sõrve is a place where at the place of former villages there are only pointless signs showing when you leave and when you come – during the war this empty cape was smashed which was connected to its strategic location in the Gulf of Riga and all inhabitants were taken away. The interior part of Sõrve is empty, full of symmetrical drains and fully urinated-on shafts of rocket bases.
Western Saaremaa is a low, rocky plateau, on which the Baltic Sea wind blows without any obstacles and blows the flight of numerous insects, which change into polyphonic layers against the setting sun. Western Saaremaa is the richest in terms of its secret places, which one must simply know: the run-down, overgrown cemetaries of swooping leprosy epidemics, the Baltic Sea pumping air into the pine forest bordering it, where owls hoot, without people or their voices bothering them.
Saaremaa island is famous for the meteor that fell there in ancient times and its craters, which is referred to in the Edda folk tales from Norse mythology and the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The second special characteristic of Saaremaa are its old pudgy churches from the Roman period: on the ceiling incomprehensible symbols, a smell of mould and square heads of a Gotland master bent over on the outer walls.
For some time a sparsely populated Swedish-speaking settlement was located here, though the Swedes disappeared from these coasts a long, long time ago, and although held by one ruler and passed to another, Saaremaa still stayed an island for Estonians. It became poorer as time went – and later was troubled from all sorts of religious crazes.
During my first contacts with this island, the Russian army still ran around here: thick dust rose from their trucks and on the ferry to the mainland there was a strict pass control. Now the Russian army as well as the untouched coasts have disappeared, and replaced by numerous Finnish tourists, who sit in the main square of Kuressaare and redden theirselves at the hands of the sun.
Photo courtesies by Vitali Beljajev ©