IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

WELCOME TO ESTONIA
Epp Annus, 2012 IAPL Host Coordinator
Dear guests, welcome to Estonia, a country gathering in
itself ten thousand years of weighty history, ever unfolding in
relation to its dreams of the future. Here, the imaginary and
technical landscapes of the present include gene-technologies
and cyberdefence, bound together with medieval architecture,
traumatic personal memories of World War II and its aftermath,
and the painful excitement of renewed statehood in the more
recent past.
Estonia, like many other places, is a place of hidden things. Here the unknown of the
earth has long been granted official recognition. One of the first things I “studied”
at the university, as a literature major, was how to clean ancient bone and ceramic
fragments with a toothbrush (no toothpaste!). This was in lieu of the harvest labour,
required of first year university students, on a Soviet kolkhoz. From the present
perspective, another curiosum of another history.
As I was brushing dust from the ancient bones in Tartu, one could see out the front
window the Autumn 1987 everydayness of Tartu University in the dying days of the late
Soviet era; to the rear, however, was the hole itself, the Werneri auk, as it was called,
surrendering cryptic traces of a past. On one side, students and professors could be
seen rushing by, absorbed in their everyday activities and concerns in the cityscape of
nineteenth-century classical architecture; on the other side, bygone eras were being
excavated in a grid of ancient woodwork and abandoned stairwells. The modern Sovietera
houses surrounding the site, having lost their exterior walls, were now exposed
to offer images of disrupted homely still-lives: a bath in the bathroom, the pipes, the
shower. The layers of time, ordinarily merged together, were now painfully opened for
the investigating eye.
I think there are no visible signs remaining today of the Werner hole in Tartu. But
the main square in Tallinn, the “Vabaduse” square celebrating national independence,
provides its own windows into the past. Here, you can walk over glass-covered openings
that let you gaze not into the quiet darkness of the earth, but into the medieval ruins
of the city wall, now ornamenting a twenty-first century underground parking lot! In
Tallinn, a parking lot with medieval city walls is not motivated by a playful gesture
of a postmodern juxtaposition. Rather, it is the curious necessity of coping with the
unexpected emergence of the past. In the medieval centre of Tallinn (and in other old
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