Fed up with the fickle English weather, I decided I wanted beauty and beer so booked a last-minute weekend trip to Tallinn. In addition to the sunshine, it also meant that I could visit a friend who is presently an officer serving with the NATO taskforce in Estonia. The British Army demurely calls Operation Cabrit its “Forward Land Forces” in the Baltic States.
More straightforwardly, His Majesty’s Armed Forces are there to deter anyone else from being there instead.
It doesn’t take long to work out who might have Tallinn in their sights. The smart hotel where I stayed was once the Soviet naval headquarters: marble floors, crisp linen and smoked fish for breakfast, but with an anchor and red star in the pediment. On the other side of the Old Town a plaque identifies the former KGB headquarters: “Here began the road to suffering for thousands of Estonians.” The cells where prisoners were tortured are now a sobering exhibition space.
To my shame, I was blithe to any of this until about halfway through my visit. After a very jolly reunion on the previous evening – drinks, then dinner, then drinks again – on Sunday morning I made my way blearily down <em>Vene tänav</em> to the sound of the bells of the Cathedral of Ss Peter & Paul. Set back from the road behind a gate, it was the picture of prettiness in the morning sun. I stopped to take a photograph; then, suddenly, an explosion of noise to my left startled me so much that I jumped.
A hundred yards away, the Orthodox Church of St Nicholas, which functions under the auspices of the Moscow Patriarchate, had begun to summon its own people to worship. Up in one of its open-arched Classical towers a bearded man wearing ear defenders was pushing an enormous bell back and forth until its huge clapper made contact with the mouth. It took four or five hefty shoves to produce the effect, but, when it did, it was deafening. It effortlessly drowned out the gentler tones of its Catholic neighbour.
Even then, it didn’t really register – and in any case the next hour was taken up with wrestling with Mass in Polish. The weekly English-language Mass is on Saturday evening, which I missed, and the other options were Estonian or Russian later in the day. In the end I gave up and just let it wash over me, and revisited my long-held thought that every cathedral, wherever it is, should have at least one Sunday Mass in Latin for the sake of any overseas visitors who might be in town.
It was only when we reconvened afterwards, and I had been marched up Tallinn’s tallest tower (which belongs to the Lutherans) that it all fell into place. The skyline is dominated by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, high up on Toompea Hill and right next to the Estonian parliament building. It makes little sense architecturally in what is basically a medieval city, and sticks out like a sore thumb. I have since discovered that plenty of Estonians would be glad to see it go.
As in all liminal places, the religious history of Estonia is considerably convoluted and complicated. It was Catholic until the middle of the 16th century, when Reformation influence from the south and Swedish rule from the west turned it Lutheran. After the Romanovs took control the Swedish ban on Catholicism was lifted, but Orthodoxy also grew as ethnic Russians migrated into their new territories from the east. The independent Estonia that emerged in 1920 was secular, but religiously diverse.
All that changed when the Soviets arrived in 1940, banning all forms of religion and ushering in a new age of martyrs. Among them was Eduard Profittlich, the Apostolic Administrator of Estonia, who chose to stay at his post despite the danger. “My life – and, if necessary, my death,” he wrote, “is life and death for Christ.” Inevitably he was soon convicted of trumped-up charges of espionage and sentenced to death, but he died of exposure in the Gulag before he could be executed.
Profittlich’s memorial in the cathedral reads simply “Episcopus Martyr”, and his cause for beatification has been opened in Rome. Outside, high up on the west front, large letters proclaim “<em>Hic Vere Est Domus Dei Et Porta Cœli</em>.” It’s a bold claim for a small community hemmed in on one side by the Lutherans and on the other by the Russian Orthodox, but after Mass the courtyard was full of people cheerfully greeting one another, with a smattering of Dominicans and Missionaries of Charity to boot.
The last Russian troops left in 1994; independent once more, Estonia joined the European Union a decade later. But long shades linger, and I learned far more than I was bargaining for in a very short space of time. I doubt many weekenders in Tallinn think much of it – and certainly not the noisy stag party who passed us in the main square in matching T-shirts and carrying a blow-up doll. Much easier, if not necessarily safer, to focus on the beauty and the beer instead.
<strong><strong>This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
