Thought For The Day No. 42 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

'That old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind'.

Martin Luther-King

Travel Clichés

Some time ago I went on a writing course with a noted travel writer, who provided us with, amongst other things, a list of no-no clichés (see previous posts too)...

...so here are some of the most cringeworthy that you mind find in trave 'literature' - some of it might not even be directly taken from the canon of the Lonely Planet, Rough, and In Your Pocket guides and similar, but not much..

'snow-capped mountains'
'Majestic mountains'
'Lunar landscape'
'Narrow/winding cobbled streets'
'Perched on the hill/nestling in the valley'
'Like opening an oven door'
'Best kept secret'
'A land of contrasts'
'Where east meets west'
'The Athens of the North/Venice of the South'
'The real Borneo/Acapulco/Ulam Bator'
'In a time warp'
'Washed down with a glass of the local wine'

'Those wearisome adjectives of magnitude - big, great, vast, huge, tremendous, enormous, gigantic - which are nothing but emotive noises inviting the readers to do all the work. They are the plague of most travel books...'

...so there you go, I know some of our three  readers are budding travel writers and so hopefully this will have been 'food for thought' to coin another one..

New Flight Links To Tallinn

You will soon be able to get to (or escape from) Tallinn easier than ever; Ryanair are at long last hooking themselves up to the land of Kalev and, since the country is so small anyway, there is none of the usual landing at a disused world war one aerodrome a five hour journey away from the billed destination. They hope to shift 300,000 passengers per year through Tallinn airport, which will amount to a huge proportion of total throughput (for example in 2009, post downturn, a little over 1.3 million people, or rather 1.3 million passengers - some of whom could presumably be the same person travelling multiple times - went through Tallinn, curiously approximately the population of the whole country).

Thanks to the blue- and yellow-winged harp, Tallinn is going to be linked to Dublin, 'London' (acutally 'Luton aaiiirrrpawwt'), Dusseldorf, Edinburgh, Milan, Stockholm and Oslo, if any of those places grab you. Services start on 14th December (Dublin) though you're too late to have grabbed any special offers celebrating the event.

As if that were not enough, Sleazyjet are also upping their connections here, flying three times a week to and  from the laughably-named John Lennon airport in Liverpool, to join the existing Stansted service.

So now there's no excuse for the olds to not come and visit me...oh hang on, they're already coming next month...

With thanks to George Francis for drawing our attention to the news, via the Tallinn Property facebook page.

Remembering George Dawes

...he's not dead, was just reminiscing about shooting stars, here, and here.

Thought For The Day No. 41 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

Robert Heinlein

Can You Be Pro-Business And Still Be 'Alright'? - Seth's Blog

It's official - it's ok to be pro-business and yet not a heartless, polluting, labour-exploiting, cigar-chooing, call-girl patronizing shit, at least nowadays.

Check out this excellent post by my big brother Seth Godin. You see, paradigms have changed. Whilst minimum wages, environmental laws and the like USED to be something of a hindrance to business (when businesses were largely factory-based) this is no longer the case. This is because business needs people, first and foremost, and more to the point healthy, cooperative people, not downtrodden drones.

So unless you're in Russia or something, you can sleep easy whilst you vote for a business-friendly party (like IRL, in Estonia, for example) - they're not the enemy any more and you have an excuse to do the decent thing and chuck the Pete Seeger records at last!

History Of Estonia 101: Part Seven

Continuing from the last post...'

Of Palaces and Emancipation


So, from 1721 for sure, Estonia was a part of Peter the Great's Russian Empire, and continued to be so long after Peter. It was during this time that the Kadriorg Palace was built outside (then) Tallinn; named after his wife, Catherine I, it was not quite on the same scale as St Petersburg but employed an architect, Zemtsov, who'd been involved in the construction of the new city on the Neva. After Peter died in 1725 his wife showed little interest in visiting her summer home (which was still unfinished) and the palace we have today in fact dates from about a hundred years later, when Tsar Nicholas I ordered a drastic renovation in 1827. The palace gives its name to the surrounding district today.

Though the good old Swedish times were definitely over, many aspects of life continued as they had been. The two Duchies (Estonia and Livonia) enjoyed a relatively high degree of autonomy, in the same way that the Duchy of Finland to the North (a Russian acquisition after the Napoleonic wars) also did. A relatively progressive part of the empire, a trend that was to continue in the twentieth century, Estonia saw the abolition of serfdom in 1819, far earlier than in Russia proper, enabling the former peasants to own their own land or move to Tallinn or the other cities.

Nevertheless it was not all rosy. A disastrous series of crop failures in the early 1840s saw famine and epidemic (curiously almost concurrent with the Irish potato famine). Russian rule also brought a new religious denomination, Orthodoxy. There had long been orthodox people of Russian descent living in Estonia, most notably old believers descended from refugees who had refused to accept the reforms of Patriarch Nikon in 1666-1667. Now native Estonians could convert to Orthodoxy following the establishment of a bishopric at Riga. In a manner which only really resonates if you know anything of the Estonian character, mass conversions started in part due to the fact that the Orthodox church taxes were lower than the Lutheran ones, and upon the (no doubt intentionally spread) rumours that converts would be rewarded lands in return. Many disappointed peasants re-converted to Lutheranism when it became clear that this benefit was not to materialize! In this respect it could be argued that there was more freedom in Estonia at the time than there was in Sweden, surprisingly enough, where it was illegal for a citizen to convert to any denomination other than the state Lutheran church until 1860.

Unfortunately for Estonia's occupying powers, however, in a pattern which was to be repeated later on in Estonia (and in many places around the world) granting greater freedoms, far from placating demands for freedom, often has the reverse effect, and leads to more and more demands...

Kadriorg Palace in winter, believe it or not.

History of Estonia 101: Part Six

Since the PMC has been going for some 60 years here in Estonia, during which time we've seen such comings and goings as the regaining of independence, the imminent introduction of the Euro, and the Beatles concerts at the Lauluväljak, we feel fully qualified to present this, a multi part set of posts on the history of Estonia which will appear, now and again as we're given time.
There's unlikely to be anything new for Estonians, who therefore don't need to read on unless they want to check we're not peddling complete mistruths. The sources are likely to be the usual internet sites such as wikipedia and any links that arise therefrom, but this should save the reader some time in finding all this stuff themselves, the one or two books we have on the subject, and maybe the occasional word of mouth stuff.
You might also want to check out our posts about a year ago now, on the Estonian language.
At the very least we hope to dispel any misconceptions of Estonia being a slavic speaking country, being located in the Balkans or being a place with a lot of stones (although this last is in fact true)...


Part Six: End of Swedish Rule, Beginning of Russian

As seen in the previous post, Estonia came under the aegis of the Swedish empire, starting in the sixteenth century and being consolidated through the seventeenth at the high water mark of Swedish power. This was later to be viewed as something of a golden age and so was not set to last forever, as golden ages generally don't.

By 1700 some of the other European powers had had enough of this and an alliance of Russia, Denmark and Saxony attacked. The war went well for Sweden to begin with. The Danes were soon dissuaded from being a part of the squabble by their co-nordic enemies, who, together with the Dutch and British navies (the British later switched sides in this war, something to bear in mind when English people point the finger at Italy for doing the same in WW2) landed to the North of Copenhagen in August. The Danes were to reenter the war later on however. In November a Russian force besieged Narva, a town which has had far more than its fair share of destruction down the years, and this was defeated by a Swedish force somewhat smaller than it.  Incidentally Swedish hegemony extended to the east of Estonia itself, to include Ingria, a region surrounding present-day St Petersburg (which was about to be founded) where a language related to Estonian was spoken.

Charles XII, the Swedish King, turned his attention to his enemies to the south, notably Augustus the Strong who ruled over a vast territory incorporating Saxony and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, defeating him  twice, most decisvely at Fraustadt in 1706, but in so doing he left the back door open for Peter the Great (for it is he) of Russia to re-take parts of Ingria and found his eponymous polis. This was too much for Charles XII who, in a move that was eerily echoed in later invasions of Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led and ill-fated invasion of Russia via the Ukraine, with Moscow as his ulitmate aim. A series of setbacks culminating in the famous Battle of Poltava saw the end of his ambitions in that respect, though not the end of Swedish rule just yet.

Back to Estonia, Charles XII continued to maintain a navy in the Baltic and so remained a thorn in Peter's side, leading to the latter's eventual capture of Tallinn (and Riga) in 1710. Thus for the first time in its history, Tallinn came under Russian rule and an unhappy precedent was set. The Swedes took a long time to accept their loss of Tallinn and Estonia in general, continuing to launch harrassing raids on the country, and the Russian occupation did not become a de jure matter until the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. Finland remained a Swedish possession for much, much longer, happily for them.

The first century of Russian rule did not see a radical change in the Estonian way of life, however, with the Lutheran church remaining predominant and the ruling classes remaining largely German speaking. Modern day Estonia was split, as it had been for many centuries, between the Governate (Guberniya) of Estonia and the Governate of Livonia. The latter was centred around Riga, and incorporated much of South Estonia including Tartu. The Governate of Estonia enjoyed a very illustrious roster of governors down the years, including Price Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov (1711-1719, a personal friend of Peter, also Duke of Ingria and even de facto ruler of Russia for two years during the reign of Catherine I),  Gustav Otto Douglas (1738-1740, actually a Swedish turncoat who had been captured by the Russians and was now in their service) and Peter August Friedrich von Holstein-Beck (1743-1753, two beer brands in the one name). Estonia was no doubt a prestigious acquisition for the Russians, as indeed it has been for all of its occupiers.

This rather garish map depicts Russian gains (the dark green hatching) at Sweden's expense (yellow) following the 1721 Treaty of Nystad. Interestingly enough the Russians took the north shore of lake Ladoga from Finland, as they were to do once again in WW2. The territory gained includes all of modern day Estonia, the northern part of Latvia (which together with south Estonia made up the Livonian lands) and Ingria, the region to the East of the Narva River, and bits of Karelia.