The windmills of Angla

Standing in a field on the island of Saaremaa are five wooden windmills. They make a striking arrangement when viewed from an angle. “Charge up those camera batteries,” the Lonely Planet guide says. “This is the site of the largest and most photogenic group of windmills on the islands.”

By the early 1500s there were nine standing on this slight rise in the land; today the area is an open-air museum dedicated to the Mediaeval art and science of grinding harvested rye and barley into flour. Four post-mills date from the 19^th Century, and a Dutch-style one was built in 1927.

We visit Angla on our bikes, troop in and out of the wooden structures and gaze in wonder at cogs and wheels, spindles, pegs and posts, all made of wood. A friend takes his interest in windmills further, arranging one near Otepää to be moved to his house in Estonia’s northwest, piece by piece, to then restore the tuulik to its original function.  

In earlier times bread was the staple food above all others. Carefully kept, sacks of flour would last the long winters until snow and slush eventually melted, the land turned green once more, and spring crops ripened. This imperative stays with Estonians today in the phrase, jätka leiba, “may your bread last”, said at the beginning of a meal.

Millstones are a further source of wonder, huge wheels of granite with a hole in the centre like a giant doughnut, placed horizontally one on top of the other. The top one spins around with the force of the wind against the mill’s wooden lattice sails, while the other stays motionless, and the distance between the two stones is carefully managed to produce a high-quality, fine-grained flour.

The industry as it stood is explained in Liza Picard’s 2017 book, Chaucer’s People. One of the characters Geoffrey Chaucer describes in The Canterbury Tales (1387 – 1400) is the miller, who had to have extreme strength to move mill wheels, and for the older post or trestle-mills, to turn the mill on a central vertical pivot for maximum exposure to the wind.

When the mill was operating after crops had been harvested and threshed, it was a busy time for the miller who, as the case all over Europe, was paid in kind. The lord of the manor took his cut, and after the farmer had paid off the Church, there was a lot less grain for winter storage.

That said, peasantry and serfdom were the normal state of most Estonian families, extending into the early 1800s and beyond, a state of enforced poverty, which took a long time to amend. Soviet collective farming could hardly improve over the Tsarist era. It’s fair to say modern times in Estonia only began on the restoration of independence in 1991. Which is extraordinary.

But there is a clear benefit to this slow, strong wind of change. Still commonplace throughout rural Estonia and in towns are gardens, greenhouses and orchards, busily tended during the summer, attended by bottling and pickling produce, to be stored and enjoyed during the winter.

The windmills at Angla and dotted around the countryside symbolise an Estonia that has not forgotten its roots, that connects people to the land in which they live.