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Ruth Sowter discovers Estonia and its unique people carved from a turbulent and romantic history, straddling the past and present and leaping into the future.
I had planned my visit to Estonia to fit in with my first trip overseas, nonchalantly slipping it into my itinerary between Sweden and Lithuania, to conceal the huge importance visiting my mother’s homeland had for me. For most of my life I told people my mother was Russian to avoid the difficulty of explaining where Estonia was, why it was part of the Soviet Union and how on earth to say my mother’s name (Tiiu). Stories had trickled down from my grandparents about bits cut out or blacked out of letters from relatives, how many of them had died fighting Russians, how empty the shops were and the people who were bullied by vulgar Ruskie types. Boney M seemed to have it right when they groaned, “Oh those Russians…”
The ferry from Stockholm was massive and could have been anywhere in the world except for the number of blondes aboard, and the announcements being made in Swedish, English and Estonian. We disembarked in a remote-feeling (or perhaps that was just me?) wharf full of men in black leather jackets standing around cabs. Our chosen cab quickly had us at the borders of Tallinn’s old town, with the driver explaining that cars could not enter. Despite getting down to –30 degrees in winter, in October the weather was mildly in the mid 20s. A fresh breeze came off the Baltic sea.
I had read that Tallinn was the ‘new Prague’. The Tallinn I found was a style-conscious city of medieval charm, determined to defy the post-Soviet, or actually any, stereotype. As tourists trampled the globe searching for places un-trampled, Estonia is one place still relatively fresh – a blend of former Soviet edginess and Scandinavian cool, naturally beautiful and intriguingly mysterious.
Tallinn is now famous as a party town. Brits and Europeans flock like Aussies flocking to Bali – chasing cheap beer, anonymous nightlife and locals. Trendy spots abound, but one bar that deserves a special mention is the more off-beat Depeche Mode bar, an underground grotto devoted to the band. Popular with backpackers for years, it feels like an 80s themed party and the spot to meet other people looking for something more than another trendy night spot.
Centuries of occupation by Danes, Swedes, Germans and Russians have galvanised Estonians into fiercely independent, quietly ambitious people, wary of allegiances and highly political, if somewhat hard to read. Fortunately I knew not to take it personally if people didn’t jump down my throat with friendliness the way they sometimes do in Australia. There’s a saying in Finland about two old Estonian friends who haven’t seen each other for ten years bumping into each other in a pub. “How’ve you been?” asks one. “Not bad,” the other replies. They sit and drink in silence for some time. Suddenly the first man exclaims, “Well, did we come here to talk, or to drink…”
The heart of Tallinn is Toompea, a hill where its first fortress was built in 1050. The two churches on Toompea represent both sides of Estonia’s past – a very simple, 12th century cathedral with the stone faces of its saints mostly vandalised, and another more dramatic church, Russian Orthodox with large glistening dome and tacky icons for sale.
The city is one of the best remaining examples of medieval architecture, its cobbled streets and alleyways nestled behind huge grey walls and turrets. Markets are still held in the walls (that’s how big they are), where you can buy incredibly long knitted socks, silver, amber jewellery, boots, carvings from Juniper wood and even white fox fur mittens. At the centre of the town is ‘freedom square’. Loud music, generally American, blasts out of the square’s shops and the exuberance of freedom is palpable.
To say the internet is big in Estonia is an understatement. In a country so practised at secretly pursuing liberty, the internet is the ideal portal to the world. This year the country was the first in the world to conduct its presidential elections using an electronic voting system, and all government legislation can be viewed by the public online.
After three days in the old town I was ready to explore further. Braving a five- or six-lane unmarked intersection to catch a tram, I headed for the outskirts of the city. The small, blue tram ticket cost me about three Aussie cents. Leaving old-town Tallinn, I found a different world of sprawling concrete and older, timber housing. Here was the post-Soviet grimness I had feared.
An old lady sat by the side of the road on an upturned box. Wearing only a cotton dress and headscarf, she was hunched over the wares she was selling: a few bits of old-looking apple and cabbage. It was an image I was to see repeated throughout the Eastern Block. Further out, abandoned houses, rubbish, stray dogs and bored looking youths edgily regarded the passing tram. Rusty flag holsters on the houses were a grim reminder of Soviet occupation. This place was a pin up for anti-communist sentiment, with signs everywhere of desperation, repression and poverty.
The smell of poverty was inescapable and the landscape dotted with another thing I would see all through Eastern Europe – pale, blue kiosks selling cigarettes, chewing gum, sweets, and dozens and dozens of varieties of vodka.
Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, culminating in what is known as the ‘singing revolution’. This began in 1987, with a cycle of demonstrations where people sang national songs and hymns that were banned by Soviet rule. They began broadcasting the songs on TV and the radio, and at its peak 300,000 people participated. In 1991 the Soviets sent tanks to quell the resistance and the Estonians formed a human chain around the TV and radio stations. At the same time, parliament passed legislation proclaiming the restoration of independence. Estonia had its revolution without any bloodshed, a fact of which they are justifiably proud.
A government statement in 2004 quipped that Estonia sang its way out of the Soviet Union in 1991, and then into the European Union in 2004 when Estonia came to the world’s attention by winning Eurovision. Since then, it has exploded with life with an economic boom and a taste for European sophistication, creating a strange contrast against the old Estonia.
Many of the Russians in Estonia still refuse to speak Estonian to this day, but having been born in Estonia, they refuse to return to Russia. In a weird twist, a significant number have become like gypsies – not eligible for citizenship or passports from any country, they stay around like ghosts, waiting for a return to Russian Imperialism that may not even recognise them anymore.
Four days is enough to take in the old town and outskirts, so on Day Five I took the train to Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city. Here was a different Estonia. The countryside, if not spectacular, was gently beautiful, all autumnal golden grasslands and dark fir tree woods.
People seemed to relax as we moved away from Tallinn; passengers chatted to each other and to the driver. There were no tourists, but there might have been more had they known how cheap the train was, less than one dollar Aussie.
Its hard to talk about former Soviet-occupied countries without it turning into a rant about Russian imperialism. One method the Russians used to keep people under control was by letting the infrastructure run down, leading to demoralisation. This was evident in the Estonian trains. Although clean, the huge steel car doors didn’t shut properly – instead, they spent the whole trip swinging back and forward, smashing with a tremendous clang whenever we rounded a corner. The train seemed to pull up anywhere, once or twice in the woods with not even a platform. The passenger would leapg a few feet down into the grass with a wave to the driver.
Tartu is Tallinn’s smaller, friendlier, if less sexy, sister. Home to Estonia’s oldest university, it is very much a cosy student town. A running joke in the town is immortalised in a statue of one of Estonia’s most famous poets, Wilde (pronounced Vil-de). He lived about the same time as Oscar Wilde, and the similarity was evidently amusing enough for the Estonians to have a themed Irish pub named after the two men, with an accompanying bookshop. This was one of the best pubs I visited, pumping with students, good food, more cheap beer and lovely wooden interior.
Traditional Estonian food is all about black bread, sauerkraut (pickled cabbage), fish and potato. Being a vegetarian, I had to put up with family jokes for years about how a good Estonian blood sausage would sort me out (that is, it would exorcise silly vegetarian notions), so I was nervous about local food. How wrong I was! Anyone who likes garlic would love the Estonian black bread served at Wilde – toasted, buttered and rubbed with garlic. Also, Estonian ice cream is like no other – it is all real cream and fresh local fruit.
After independence, we asked my grandfather if he would consider going back. He shook his head. “Too cold.” Estonia, like my grandfather, is looking forward – focused on a future that sees the country becoming ever stronger and more secure in Europe. If you want to see any remains of the old Estonia, you had better move fast. After waiting decades for freedom and self-definition, this country ain’t waiting around for no-one.
When directing the Cultural Festival for the 2007 Commonwealth Games, Marcus traveled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, mining underground art scenes around the world. On this journey he discovered Glasgow, which he revisits in his new television series Not Quite Art.
Marcus Westbury is interested in the unique possibilities of any given place. He’s not particularly interested in conventional tourist destinations and even describes himself as a bad tourist. “I’m not a museum guy,” he says. “I don’t want to look at objects.”
This could potentially be a problematic statement coming from an art expert, but as Marcus explained to the ABC, when he was asked to create a new art show, his art expertise covers what might be called Not Quite Art. The turn of phrase caught the commissioning editor’s ear and became the name of the television show in which Marcus explores the art world outside of galleries.
To the founder of Australia’s biggest media festival, This Is Not Art (TINA), the title was somewhat comical. Having done This Is Not Art and then doing Not Quite Art he opened himself up to a barrage of questions about when he was going do Art.
It seems that art, like beauty, depends on the eye of the beholder. In Not Quite Art, Marcus shares a glimpse of the art world through his eyes, having devoted much of his life to the art that inspires him. During the episodes of Not Quite Art the audience is led into a world featuring abandoned warehouses used as art galleries, a shop turned gallery and skateboarding venue, a bohemian theatre in an old bowling club, lanes filled with graffiti, a hiphop collective and socio-politically focused computer games such as Escape From Woomera, giant paper cabbages, sticker art, stencils, video art, rear-projection urinals, magazines posing as advertising posters, exploding garden gnomes, ringtone symphonies, empty shows, uncollectable art and an iconic opera house bearing the words ‘No War’ in red tile paint.
Originally the series was to be set only in Australia. “The budget for the show was not really enough to go anywhere. It’s not meant to be an international show,” says Marcus. Something, however, was missing in the first episode, which focused on Australian arts funding. It posed the question, “Why does Australian society spend far more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones?”
The episode was meant to focus on Marcus’ hometown, Newcastle, a city struggling to shake off its industrial heritage and form a cultural district with what Marcus calls a “cultural vision… much like a real estate development”. The episode focuses on artists in Newcastle struggling keep grassroots studio and gallery spaces alive, critiquing government funding bodies who view culture as something that must be imported from elsewhere.
“The theme for that episode was the idea of where culture comes from, the idea that culture is something that you grow. It’s not something that you build or that you import,” explains Marcus. The director, Brendan Fletcher, felt that looking at what wasn’t working in Newcastle was not enough. Brendan’s advice was to “find a counterpoint of where it works well.” Marcus knew just the place.
In 2006 Marcus travelled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, scourging the underground art scenes in all the countries in the British Commonwealth, in search of talent for the arts festival component of the Commonwealth Games. “The Next Wave Festival got the job of co-ordinating the program,” epxlains Marcus, “and as the director of Next Wave, that meant I was directing it.”
“I went from Australia to New Zealand to Canada to Belize to the UK to South Africa to Kenya to Singapore, back to India to Malaysia, back to Singapore, then home. In six weeks I worked out that I spent more than six days of those six weeks actually in the air, without my feet actually touching the ground.”
It was during this mission that Marcus discovered Glasgow. Its industrial landscape pockmarked with abandoned warehouses and derelict buildings had something very exciting hidden under the corrugated iron and dark red bricks. Renegade artists. In Glasgow, artists have moved into the derelict sawmills, Chandleries (large ship warehouses), empty fish markets, abandoned shops and many other spaces.
“What I loved about Glasgow,” explains Marcus, “is that there is a whole bunch of people there that are part of the Glasgow scene and Glasgow culture that’s grown out of Glasgow, and Glasgow’s proud of it. I know it sounds almost stupidly obvious, but it’s actually really rare. It’s really difficult.”
Artist collectives around the city avoid rotten patches in floors, deal with water ruined paintings that have been hung on leaky walls, occasionally turn up mummified cats buried under sagging walls and turn them into exhibition icons, build pizza ovens out the back with their seventy-six year old grandfathers for a pizza party gallery opening… and produce some amazing art.
“There’s a cultural energy… an ethos in Glasgow that I think is embraced by people who are just making the culture that they believe in happen, because there’s no-one there to tell them that they can’t. There’s no-one standing around saying, you know ‘we’re the gatekeepers and you have to do this and you have to do that.’ There’s just a lot of DIY stuff going on. To me, that’s the kind of culture that I find interesting.”
Glasgow particularly touched Marcus because it is so physically similar to Newcastle. He regrets not having shot the Glasgow part of the show before the Newcastle part, to match up the almost identical landmarks “for those really nice transitions.” The post-industrial poverty of the towns also led to similar cultural and artistic expressions. As Clare Simpson, a Glasgow council member says in the series, “There’s a lot of poverty in Glasgow. With that comes inventiveness.” What makes Glasgow such a fertile area for artists and what makes it such a good counterpoint for Newcastle is that the local government, the landlords and even the police support the underground art scene. When Marcus tours the ex-fish market (now a sculpture gallery) with Simpson she explains that the council understands that “for the arts in Glasgow to thrive, there needs to be an infrastructure for production as well as presentation.”
Although he doesn’t revisit them for his series, other highlights from his Commonwealth Games tour were Montreal and Nairobi where he discovered similar DIY culture.
“Montreal is quite a different city. There’s quite a different layer going on there for lots of historical reasons to do with French Canada and Quebec,” he explains, “but Montreal had been through a similar process where it was bankrupt in the 70’s and the whole city fell apart and then became a very interesting, vibrant place. It unleashed certain possibilities.”
As for Nairobi, Marcus had “read in the guidebook before I went that Nairobi’s the most dangerous CBD in all of Africa, which makes it the most dangerous CBD in the world, but I actually found Nairobi an incredibly welcoming warming kind of place. I found the most amazing people there doing amazing things. I found a good entry point. I’m sure I could’ve gone there five hundred times and never found the stuff that I found there or even the pathways into being embraced by them, but I really loved it.”
With so little time, travelling to so many countries, it seems remarkable that Marcus got so quickly to the hidden artistic underbelly of each place as can be witnessed in his televised sojourn in Glasgow. He puts it down to thorough planning, the internet, hunches, chance and an unconventional way of doing things.
“Traditionally, I think when you do an international program you’re meant to do it the other way round where you go from the top down,” he says. “We probably could’ve got a lot more money and more resources if we’d gone to the British consulate and said, ‘Who are the best young artists in Britain? Can you please bring them out to Australia?’ When you do something like that, that’s how you’re expected to do it. But we did it from the other way round. Basically we just set out feelers across the networks that we knew and said, ‘Does anyone know anyone that’s doing anything interesting in these places?’ I found out little bits and pieces … I went to Kenya on the basis of one article I read in a newspaper about Kenyan hiphop musicians.”
But although he loves Glasgow, digs Nairobi, finds Montreal interesting, lives in Melbourne and works in Sydney, he says that there’s no place like home. “My favourite place to go to is Newcastle because it’s home,” he says. “It’s the place I get most excited about when I get off the plane.”
