Encounters

We’re very familiar with our current everyday lives. But what was life like decades, centuries or even millennia ago? Encounters is an exhibition that brings you face to face with many people who have lived in Estonia, their everyday activities, joys and feelings.

Journeys in Time

Journeys in Time takes museum visitors on a trip through Estonian history. The exhibition can be toured in either direction: starting from the present and delving deeper into the past, or from the Stone Age toward modern times.
The Journeys in Time are divided into seven sections: The Time of Freedom, Life Behind the Iron Curtain, Modern Times, The Era of Books, The Arrival of Christianity, The Metal Ages and The Stone Age. These are not strictly defined by historical events. However, each period is characterised by the relevant cultural phenomena. Each era had its own rules, standards and beliefs. These were defined by the political, economic and societal conditions, relationships with rules and neighbours and level of technology. Regardless of the rules and ideas of the era, people always faced choices. Invariably, the decisions would change the future: which customs and traditions to preserve, what to develop, what to change.

The Time of Freedoms

Independence was restored in August 1991. Already in the first week, 28 countries recognised Estonian independence. Estonia was free again, but the newly restored country lacked its own currency, military, border guard, diplomatic missions, and railway. Reforms were quickly made, aiming to transform Estonia into a European country once more. Life changed beyond recognition: the development of information technology, new goods, new topics in the media and open borders. The country finally settled into its regained free existence in the 2000s. We now know that freedom can be realised in many ways. The era has brought new opportunities, but also new restrictions and risks. After all, freedom is also a responsibility.

Life Behind the Iron Curtain
World War II and the Soviet occupation that followed meant half a century of life in a closed society under the watchful eye of the state. However, the period of Soviet rule was not all that uniform in its characteristics. The Stalinist reign of terror after the war was something very different from the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ era or the stagnant Brezhnev period.

The Soviet Union was nominally a people’s state. Private property was abolished and companies were nationalised, people in the countryside were forced to join collective farms and the market economy was replaced by a central command economy controlled from Moscow. Workers’ collectives filled people’s leisure time: they organised trips to the theatre and cinema, held summer picnics and sports tournaments.

As a Soviet republic, Estonia was cut off from the Western world. Military bases and coastal exclusion zones put some land off limits to ordinary people. However, the Iron Curtain was never airtight. People gradually restored some ties to friends and relatives living in the West. Ideas and pop culture flowed across the borders. Estonia became a special, more liberal part of the Soviet Union – the Soviet Wxxest or Sovetski Zapad.

Modern Times
Early 19th century Estonia was a class-based society divided into groups such as clergy, nobility, townspeople and peasants. Each class had its own rights and responsibilities. Peasants, who made up 90% of the population, were serfs – the property of the manor lord, not much different from land and buildings.
Slowly a new worldview started competing with the old order, which had existed for centuries: the concept of all men being equal developed, along with the idea that they were entitled to pursue their own choices in life.

Little by little, laws changed: peasants were emancipated and gained the right to choose where to live, followed by the right to own land and participate in local government. National independence ideologies prevailed and Estonians’ own multilayered society emerged alongside Russian and German-speaking societies. Women gained the right to enter university at the start of the 20th century and universal suffrage was established. Class was formally abolished entirely in the independent Republic of Estonia.

Cities and industry entered a period of dynamic growth and the standard of living rose. More and more people received regular wages. Money and the capitalistic view of profitable production became the economic underpinning of the new society.

The Era of Books
After the printing press was invented in the 15th century, information and the written word spread across Europe like wildfire. The first printed book reached Estonia in 1470 or earlier. Half a century later, Estonian-language books were being printed. The Lutheran faith, which took root here in the 16th century, was instrumental in spreading the faith in written form. The Estonian readership – initially small but fast-growing – gained knowledge of distant lands and peoples, current events and much else. At the same time, the world learned of Estonians, their lifestyles and culture.

Apart from the great shift in media, this was a period that, for Estonia and the world, was also characterised by many calamities, including wars, epidemics and famine. From 1558 to 1710, Estonia was passed back and forth between several Baltic Sea states – Denmark, Sweden, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia. The change in rulers led to a number of changes in society and the economy: the first mills and plants were established and extensive state-held tracts of land emerged. But the period of flowering for Estonian towns was now in the past, and a number of smaller towns passed into the hands of large landowners.

The Arrival of Christianity

By the beginning of the second millennium AD, Christianity had spread to areas neighbouring Estonia. Initially the indigenous inhabitants learned of the new religion from both east and west, as confirmed by loan words that entered the language around this time. In the 13th century, parts of what is now Estonia began to be claimed by Catholic Europe in the course of crusades and conquests. Estonians, and the events in the country, now made it into the historical annals.

The population of Estonian received an influx, mainly from German-controlled areas and Scandinavia, who soon formed a local elite. The power of the new rulers became consolidated in stone citadels built throughout the land. New settlements – cities – arose in strategic trading areas. Churches and chapels were built all over Estonia. Latin was the language of worship services in churches and cloisters, but the most important prayers were translated into Estonian early on. Indeed, communication between the newcomers and the local peasantry was conducted in Estonian.

The Metal Ages
The Bronze and Iron Age in Estonia are considered to be a time period of 3,000 years from the 19th century BC to the start of the 13th century AD. During this time, the country changed completely – the old-growth forests became a cultural fabric dotted by farms, fields, cleared areas and grasslands. People learned to alloy bronze and smelt iron. All across the country, citadels were built, turning into centres of power, trade and craft. The proceeds of taxes, trade and pillaging brought a local class of leader, a military elite, to the fore. At the dawn of the Metal Ages, the Estonian chiefs and elders were quite closely connected with bronze working and international bronze trade, and finally with export of iron and furs. The lives of ordinary people revolved around arable farming and animal husbandry, which shaped their particular faith based on seasonal cycles and a fertility cult. Food became more nourishing and the diet more varied.

The Stone Age
In no other age has humankind depended so greatly on nature as during the Stone Age. Nature provided for all needs: food, water, clothing, shelter. The oldest villages were established on riverbanks and lakeshores. This meant access to pure water sources, food and transport routes. The people would fish and trap beaver on the rivers and lakes, while moose were hunted where they gathered to drink. Only toward the end of the Stone Age did agriculture and livestock – goats, sheep, cattle and pigs – begin to develop alongside fishing, hunting and gathering.

On the basis of the beliefs of the northern peoples, it can be conjectured that rivers were viewed as a symbolic axis of the world, connecting the world of people, gods and spirits with the land of the dead. It is perhaps because of this that river mouths were favoured as burial sites, as places where it was believed these worlds met.

The People and the State

The People and the State looks at Estonia’s political development, at how the national borders changed and at the entrances and exits of foreign rulers and the complicated path to national independence.

At the end of the 19th century, modern-day civil society began to emerge out of the social classes of the past. An Estonian body politic developed alongside the German- and Russian-speaking upper class. In 1918, during a time of war and revolution, the independent Estonian state was forged by this same community, which by this time already had its own well-defined social relations and institutions.

There are few peoples in the world who still have the first ever version of their flag. In the case of Estonia, the flag, based on an idea from Estonian university students, has been carefully safeguarded for generations, even during occupation. The flag was hidden for years so that it could be brought out once again at the right moment. After the historical flag was retrieved from its hiding place in 1991, the flag’s originators, the Estonian Students’ Society, entrusted it to the care of the Estonian National Museum.

Where did the Estonian border run? How did the people finally achieve political power? How does the state recognise its citizens? What is the story behind the colours of the national flag? What does the blue, black and white combination mean to people in Estonia?

Cities Within a City

Cities are for people. Estonia’s largest city is today home to 459,000 people, with over 83,000 people aged 19 and under. The younger population spend a large part of the day out in the public space, experiencing, using and changing the urban space.
Cities Within a City focuses on children and young adults who navigate both the local physical space and worldwide digital space. We will look at notions of urban space and the city through the eyes of children and young people. What do they notice in the urban environment, where do they go and what do they do? How do they see the public space as an environment for living, what do they make of the streets and buildings? In preparing the exhibition, the curators studied the city with children and young adults.

My Own Abode

A home is a place where personal and public worlds intertwine. Ideally, a home is a private place where you can be yourself and do your own things – be ’master of your own domain’. Yet time and again, society intrudes with its ideas and norms.
The living room is usually the home’s calling card, as it were, the part seen by the outside world. The bedroom is more private and intimate, the setting for many key moments and relationships. The bed is associated with birth and death, love and sickness, both solitude and hospitality. Indeed, the word ’ase’ in Estonian can signify a bed or a home. Gaining a berth or home, or being deprived of one, can signal dramatic turns in a person’s life.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

Living seems so ordinary because so many elements recur. It is human to rejoice, to mourn, to love and to regret, no matter the time or place. At the same time, everything is unique. Bring in both dimensions – time and place – and each life is so different.
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives talks about the unexeptional and exceptional qualities of life in the 1940–1980 period. The main characters of the exhibition are people who were born in Estonia, who lived here, moved away or were forcibly removed, and the people who have come here and stayed. Their lives and stories are a window we look through into a time when the world was gripped by the great post-World War II standoff, the Cold War. We get an idea of how people lived their lives and experienced the great historical events between the covers of schoolbooks.

Rural Life and Rural Beauty

Estonians are constantly preparing for winter. That saying describes the basic nature of Estonian farm life, which is based on the ability to remain alive in the northern climate. The rhythm of farm work stemmed from the two halves of the year, winter and summer. Farm work and building up a store of winter fodder for the herd lasted from spring to late autumn. The winter, when the sun rose above the horizon for only a few hours, was a time for felling timber, doing indoor work and human interaction. How much time and toil did farm work require? How was material gathered for preparing these things? What sorts of tools were used in villages a hundred and more years ago?
The core of the Estonian National Museum collections comes from Estonian rural culture. Many artists among the antique and artefact collectors had a special affinity for the handicraft of rural people, also known as folk art. However, documenting everyday life was also an important goal. The well-endowed collections allow us to represent the facts of daily life and beauty on many farms from the 18th century to the early 20th century.

Runo Song

Runo song is a form of oral folk culture in which words, melody and performance tradition all have equal importance. It developed over the millennia in the Baltic Finnic linguistic space, uniting the peoples through a poetic vision of the world.
Runo song is flexible: it can express faith-based ideas, the work of women and the political facets of the traditional men’s world. In runo songs, girls revel in their beauty and youth and orphans mourn their parents. The runo song form is used to tell tales and sing incantations to a hard-working life. As runo songs have complicated texts, the melodies are kept relatively simple. They do not have an overly wide range and are reminiscent of the rise and fall of speech. The performance style and context are important.
400 runo songs can be heard in this exhibition.

People and the Environment

Estonia’s natural environment became the place we know it as today as a result of centuries of human influence. Nature offered ways to survive, delights for the senses, but also drought, famine and disease. People depend so much on what nature has endowed, but they have also refashioned it and left their mark.
Some of the big environmental processes start from specific places and phenomena, partly from the choices people make. Here, too, in the Estonian National Museum, every person in attendance is but a tiny part of the fabric shaped by give and take between humankind and the environment. By selecting stories from this local environment – Raadi and Tartu – we also relate the global processes in the history of the environment.

The Language Brew

At The Language Brew, you can listen to and read Estonian. What makes the Estonian language special? What are the phonemes in this Finno-Ugric language and how do the vocal cords shape Estonian vowels? Estonia has historically been a linguistic patchwork quilt with over 100 dialects. How do they sound? Like all languages, Estonian can be subdivided into several sub-languages. Among them are oral and Internet variants. How are they different from the written language? What is Estonian sign language and is it, too, a subset of Estonian? All languages are in constant flux. How did Estonian become what it is now?

Food We Cook

It’s hard to miss the fact that Estonian culinary culture is very seasonal and tied to important dates in the family, folk and liturgical calendars: in spring, fresh Baltic herring appears on tables, black pudding appears on shelves around Christmas, and rosolje, a creamy diced beetroot and potato salad, is a fixture at grandmother’s birthday dinner. It’s harder to notice how chefs shape our culinary heritage. Food is like the voice of cooks that carries their convictions and worldview and interacts with the family and the community.
How does our culinary culture reinvent and perpetuate itself? Are the changes technological or is it more the ideas and food preferences that become transformed? What do professional chefs value and why and how do they add value to it?

The Imprint of Time on Estonian Blankets and Rugs

For contemporary people, a rug is usually a floor covering, and less frequently, a decorative wall tapestry or Gobelin. But Estonian museum collections also contain a large number of blankets used for travel or as bedding, old-fashioned shawls that were worn as part of folk costume, and rugs created by textile artists.
The Estonian National Museum’s collections today contain over 3,000 rugs, blankets and shawls. The oldest were woven in the 18th century, but most are from the 19th and 20th centuries. There are also rugs made by textile artists in more recent times.
The Imprint of Time on Estonian Rugs and Blankets presents both ancient Estonian shawls and rugs and blankets for special purposes, fashioned by old folk art masters and professional textile artists.

Design Your Own Exhibition

Are you passionate about something? Do you want to showcase your ideas and interests to more people? Want to put heads together with others in your field? Have you ever thought of producing your own exhibition?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll be excited to know that the Estonian National Museum offers a space to do just that.
Once a year, we hold an exhibition concept competition meant for individuals, NGOs or other organisations that aren’t engaged in museum activities or exhibition curation on a daily basis. The winners get to turn their idea into reality.

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