St John's stone

It is 7 July, St John’s Day or Jaanipäev in the Eastern Orthodox calendar. Around 100 of the Seto community mill around, setting up tables by carefully tended graves of their forebears, and preparing lunch as we arrive at an improvised car park of mown grass.

The weather is fine, and it is warm when the sun shines. In this peaceful setting in a stand of birch, linden, pine, spruce, oak and aspen. it is hard to believe we are only 4 kilometres away from the border with Russia.

We walk down to a spring-fed stream, now dry, and see a large rock in several pieces, in the stream bed and embedded in a bank. This is the jaanikivi or St John’s stone, sacred in ancient Estonian tradition, and attributed with healing powers. I see straightaway it is a glacial erratic granite boulder, common in the north of Estonia, and much less so in the south.

Miiske kirik, Setomaa

I hunch down beside one of the pieces, drop several coins as an offering, and place my left hand on the rock. It feels cool on my palm; I close my eyes and strive to feel the healing presence, and, who knows, the feldspar, quartz, hornblende, mica and iron oxide crystals within combine to answer my silent plea to repair torn tendons from an old construction injury.   

It is also my saint’s day, John being my first name, and named after my grandfather Johannes Napp who was baptised in the Orthodox church. I decide to celebrate it as a special day, my mind open to what chances in life fall my way.

Up a grassy slope from the stone is a recently restored, and beautiful, wooden Orthodox church. Master builders and craftspeople had dismantled the Miiske kirik and rebuilt it. The community would have contributed to the project, and it would also have received county funding. The cupolas are of gleaming copper; large icons and stained-glass windows adorn pale walls of vertical cladding; plank edges tooled in small nicks add an accent.

The site is an example of where foreign rulers and the church sought to extinguish local traditions, or superimpose the Christian faith on pagan beliefs. At Miiske, the old traditions remain, and a legend concerning the stone has become intermingled between the two sets of faiths, and Seto practice of synchretic religion is still so today.  

While visiting the region, John the Gospel writer sat on the stone to rest his travel-weary feet, and blessed it, whereupon people started to visit the stone thereafter. In popular belief, placing an injured or sick part of the body against the stone will heal the affliction.

In later times a local Baltic-German lord of the manor took the stone and broke into pieces for use in building a barn. When the animals in the barn began to die, the mõisasaks became fearful, and rushed to put the jaanikivi fragments back into place.

Liisa Kaasik who drove me to this event tells me she heard the old people relaying these stories to their grandchildren, and so the legends of the stone continue as a living tradition among the Setos.

As to the clergy, a procession erupts from inside the church shortly after midday, speeds downslope to the stone and surrounding offerings for a blessing, and the ceremony is over in moments. As the congregation marches back up the hill, I sense this is something the priest and his entourage feel they have to do, rather than want to do. A man says that when he was a kid he used to wait until everyone had left and then took all the money.

We follow and take a last stroll around the church and the adjoining cemetery, and return to our vehicles to find out what the rest of the day brings. A visit to a ruined castle built by mediaeval German crusaders in the early 1300s, then to a wooden viewing tower, a chanterelle-gathering expedition (at a secret location), followed by a pilgrimage to Estonia’s biggest and oldest oak tree Lauri Tamm, end with a return to Otepää to cook the mushrooms in white wine and cream, and to spend several hours in and out of the sauna.