A place to stand

In New Zealand, all who identify as Māori and have a tribal connection know their ancestral mountain, river, and lake / sea. In introducing oneself at a tribal meeting house, Māori recite their ancestral connection to their natural environment, cementing their status as people of the land, or tangata whenua, a distinction not available to other New Zealanders.

Later arrivals must resort to explaining themselves differently. Nevertheless, in the old country, there is a chance of rescuing an ancestral connection with nature, where until the later 19th century Estonians called themselves maarahvas, or people of the land.

When in Otepää – the bear’s head - I spend an afternoon tracing the same landmarks, mägi, jõgi and järv, in and around the town our grandfather came from, and where a family of Napp descendants still live today, and where I am staying as I write.

A circumnavigation of the Pühajärv – the holy lake - starts the pilgrimage. This 3.8km-long, forest-fringed and reed-lined lake is among Estonia’s most sacred sites. It was here students from Tartu dipped the new flag of the Estonian nation in 1884, to consecrate it before placing the tricolour into hiding at St Mary’s Lutheran church, where there is a monument to the event. A nice start on a lakeside path, white swans milling about in shining water, and then a slog alongside motorways, the lake peeping occasionally over fields in gently rolling terrain and stands of trees from a distance.

Wondering what to do about finding a suitable river, a country road takes me right past the lake outlet, a smoothly flowing current hemmed in on both sides by trees, rushes, and herb and berry fields. This is the Väike Emajõgi, or the little mother river, which bends into a huge tear-drop of a lake, the source of an iconic river in Estonian lore – the Emajõgi - that passes through the university town of Tartu, and then out to the Peipsijärv, the 5th largest lake in Europe, and marking an eastern border with Russia.

Feeling more worthwhile about this travel episode, the roads swing northwards back towards the starting point, passing renovated homesteads, and then rejoining a grassy and sandy lakeside to find the monument to the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism visited the holy lake a couple of months after Estonia’s re-independence in 1991; a wooden post with a metal wheel on top pays understated homage to the blessing of the waters.

Bordering the township is the Linnamägi or fortress hill, the site of an ancient Estonian stronghold until the Livonian Order – German-speaking crusaders - took the area for their own in 1208 after a bitter struggle. Sixteen years later a bishop’s castle was completed on this flat-topped site, hence the name, to be destroyed in battle in 1396 against the Bishop of Tartu. Few ruins remain, and without written help it would be impossible to tell what they represent.

The rain starts intermittently and a wind springs up as I make my way on a grassy path up to the top of the bear’s head. From the top, I can see the baroque spire of St Mary’s, the ski jump attached to the Tehvandi sports complex – Otepää is known as Estonia’s winter capital – some forests and fields, and not much else. This is a rare case of seeing more from the ground up, than the other way around. Forked lightning tears the sky into top and bottom halves, and a few seconds later, a gentle rumbling, as the sky darkens. Time to go, as the rain lashes down, and the temperature falls.