Sacred places

Ahto Kaasik has helped put more than 2,500 sacred places on an interactive Estonian map, a massive undertaking that is unique in the world. And yet he is barely known within his own country for a task started when he was 18 years old, at times working closely with the Hiite Maja Sihtasutus (a foundation) and other institutions. I meet Ahto with friends to help translate our conversation, and before long we are chatting enthusiastically about his life and work.

In ancient times Estonians had sacred stones and geographical features, landscapes, trees, lakes, rivers, bogs and springs. Later conquerors and crusading missionaries tried to destroy or cover up Estonia’s ancient history and heritage, both physically and by converting Estonians to Christianity.

This was not easy to do, even though churches were built on top of sacred sites, both to draw a congregation, and to extinguish folk memory. Estonians continued practising traditional rites and rituals in secret for hundreds of years after the Danes, Germans and Swedes occupied Estonian territory. As far as the “people of the land” or maarahvas were concerned, the new god was simply another, and quite welcome to join Taara, Peko, Uku (both the sky father and earth mother), and others whose presence was, and is felt everywhere in Estonia.

Pühajärv, the sacred lake where Ahto and Liisa do not swim out of respect

As for lakes and hilltops, these are impossible to remove from the landscape and have remained sacred places to this day, with or without buildings placed on top of them. A notable example is the hilltop Kuremäe convent near the northern town of Jõhvi.

Ahto tells me the word jumal or deity is at least 4,000 years old in Estonian tradition. For ancient Estonians, everything in nature shares the same life force – humans, other animals, plants, the rocks and the water, the air and the sky. Sacred places mark a connection between nature and the people who live within this world.

The sacred places or pühapaigad on the map are present everywhere in Estonia, and if there is a higher concentration in southeast Estonia, there can be no surprise. Here is where Ahto lives with his wife Liisa and family, at a farmstead or talu they have restored, and amid forests and fields, apple trees and vegetable gardens, and a pond full of fish. Valdur Mikita had spoken to me earlier of soul landscapes and, surely, this is one.

Among specific interests to Ahto are “slide stones” or liukivid, large glacial erratic boulders on which women used to slide down from the top to ensure fertility. We watch a stone sliding re-enactment in a forest on Youtube, and Liisa tells me of taking a group of film makers to one of these sites. An Estonian woman who had been told by her doctor she could not have children tried it out for herself. Some months later she wrote to Liisa to say she was pregnant. Ahto says liukivid have been found all over the world, and he asks me to find out if there is such a tradition among Māori in New Zealand.

Still today some Estonians practise ancient rites and rituals as part of a nature religion or living culture. Bound together with this are magic words and spells – Ahto says there are thousands of such words in the Estonian language, and this again reminds me of Valdur who is writing on the subject.

Spells are cast typically in relation to herbal medicine, and my relative Meelis Ilves joins the conversation with tere hommikust, or good morning, which for him carries power. This is treating other people with respect, and giving to them good wishes. Another everyday example is when clinking glasses with terviseks, “to health”, once more, a tradition found everywhere in Europe.

In a traditional view, magic has to do with being open to the forces of the universe, in the pursuit of daily life. Liisa tells me her family were due to move out of their apartment in Tartu by a certain date, and extensive searches for somewhere else to live had turned up nothing until just before they had to pack up and leave. Then the place where they are now came up for sale, and within a day or two the sale-purchase was complete.

We walk around the property after a delicious dill-flavoured lunch, picking wild strawberries, red dots in the greenery, a perfect dessert, and thinking on synchronicity. In Estonia, the conscious and subconscious flow together in a landscape and way of life that is as much a part of the soul – holding an open mind - as the soul is of sacred landscapes and way of life.