The sea people

Our family and the sea are closely bound together. By ship is how our grandmother and father arrived in the distant islands the Estonians call New Sealand. Our grandfather had an ice yacht. A grainy photo shows him racing on the Baltic ice, skating swiftly on ice runners.

An ice yacht, very similar to one our grandfather had

As kids, dad taught us to sail, although my talent is limited; Greg is the one with a yacht, and the best I can do is work as crew. At least, I can claim immunity to seasickness.

For nature philosopher Valdur Mikita, the Estonians are divided between the more Finno-Ugric speakers of southern dialects who revere the myth-laden forests and boglands, and the mererahvas or sea people who are culturally more Germanic. The north was where the Danes had a beach-head in the 1200s to the mid-1300s, and to the west, the Swedes at times had the islands and an outpost at Nuckö or Nuck Island, known as in Estonian as Noarootsi.

This northwestern part of the Estonian mainland is a landscape of white sands strewn with glacial erratic boulders fringing a grey sea, coastal pine forests carpeted in heath plants and berries, and pretty farmsteads in a Swedish style of steep-roofed red buildings with white window frames.

Fish such as sea-caught flounder and perch are highly prized. Otherwise, there is little to distinguish the sea people from the forest dwellers, other than lighthouses in the north, and a richer vein of folklore in the south. The sauna is common throughout the country, as are log-built cabins, boating or skiing as occasion allows, foraging for berries and mushrooms when in season, and slices of rye bread to round out every meal.

Our father’s name of Bernhard Napp is as Germanic or Scandinavian as it gets. On visiting bilingual Helsinki, a sign pointed to nappitalo in Finnish, or knapphuset in Swedish. This means literally “button house” – a haberdashery, basically - in Estonian, napimaja.

Is it possible that the Napp family name is of Swedish origin? An earlier blogpost speculated the name Napp was bestowed on a peasant farmer by a German overlord, in tune with Tsarist reforms of the early 1800s setting peasants free, and bringing in surnames.

In line with this theory, the mõisasaks or German baron spotted our ancestor, and called him Knapp, which in German means “in short supply”, “meagre or scarce”, or “a narrow escape”. A joke or an insult, or implausible?

On the family tree, we can go back as far as our great-grandfather Anton Napp. We do not know Anton’s father’s name, and that man’s grandfather would have been among peasants who were freed. But no record exists in Otepää, where the records held by the Orthodox church are good records.

Possibly, this branch of the Napp family moved to Otepää from somewhere else. There would have been Swedes all over the place. After all, Sweden ruled Estonian territory and further afield during a “Golden Age” that ran from the late 1500s to 1721, on Sweden losing a bitter war to Russia’s Peter the Great. When the freeing of peasants happened in Estonia during the early 1800s, Noarootsi clung on as a feudal outpost, Swedes controlled by a Swedish aristocracy. This was a period of mobility, a time when one Napp and his family might have headed into a relatively freer non-Swedish Estonia.

Ultimately, who knows. And if there is an affinity to Estonia’s northwestern coast, there can be no surprise. But no one in our family has mastered the one-time vital skill of making buttons.