One woman selling radishes thought it was funny that we wanted to take pictures of the market. We bought some of her radishes and ate them as a snack. Mark is not normally a fan of radishes, but we get these little ugly dry radishes at home. These were big, crispy, and juicy, with just a touch of sharpness. He says he will miss the terrific produce when we go back home. We have better apples and oranges than eastern Europe has, but most of their fruits and vegetables are fresher and taste better than ours.
Our next site of interest was Toomemagi Park. In the park is a statue to the first Estonian to attend the university. He is shown with a walking stick since he walked more than 155 miles from Riga to Tartu to attend classes here.
There is a mound of sacred stones in the park. Bridegrooms are expected to carry their new brides to the top. This is also a place where people would like offerings to pagan gods on full-moon Thursday nights. (Evelyn asks, 'Why Thursday? But even more, where did they get the concept of Thursday? I thought the seven-day week--a necessary prerequisite to Thursday--was Jewish in origin and spread by the Jews and later the Christians.') One guide book says that students ceremonially burn their notebooks here the Thursday night before exams. Another book says it's the Thursday *after* their exams. Since photocopy machines are relatively new, we suspect the second book is more accurate.
Nearby are the ruins of what once was the largest cathedral in the Baltics. Now it is just ten buttresses flying without a cathedral to hold up.
As Mark describes the next stop, 'Thus far Tartu had seemed prosaic for most of what we had seen. The next site did not seem like it would be a whole lot better, but it really was the wackiest thing we've seen in the Baltics. When you go in, they have you put on shoe covers. I am not sure they had a lot more to protect than a lot of other museums we had been in, but it was a nicely maintained building. It is the University Museum. Early on they say the university's unique function was to serve as a 'mediator between Russian science and international science.' From this we learn that there are two different sciences: 'Russian' and 'international,' and that they are going to be in conflict sufficiently that they need someone to mediate disputes. We are met on a battlefield of that conflict.'
'I think that in the West we had always heard that Russian science was a bit weird. We'd heard of mental hospitals that were really political prisons because being politically discontented was treated as a mental aberration instead of a capitulation to the obvious. Among the things you see in the Tartu University Museum are weird machines that look like something out of DR. X. There is a four-foot-high electronic whatsis that does something electric to the air in a room for the sake of 'prophylaxis.' There are big electronic machines looking like 19th Century polygraphs that are for 'psychological experimentation.' There is a section that looks like a science lab from a good Frankenstein movie. On the floor is a battery of six huge Leyden jars (used as electric capacitors), each about two feet in diameter and two feet high.'
Mark continues, 'You really want to get the creeps? Look in the medical section. There is a case of tools for bone operations in weird shapes, and the pieces look as if they were made in the last century. The instruments for eye operations, also in a carrying case, look almost as old and are things that come to needle points or razor edges. Next you see what looks like a huge syringe. The main body of galvanized steel--like a bucket--is about a foot long and four inches in diameter. It is labeled as an 'enemator.' Then there was a large device for inhalation medication that came to a mask.'
'There were cases displaying the august textbooks used. There was a short colorful booklet, apparently a comic book, showing on the cover how atoms formed into crystals. We translated the title from the Russian: 'We Learn Chemistry.' It looked like something we'd read in third grade. There were large panels to pull out and read about the accomplishments at Tartu U. One had two columns of about twenty city names each. Between the two columns was the name Tartu and lines going to each of the forty cities. These were technical contacts. 'We talk to people in forty different international cities about science,' they were saying. In science this is hardly an impressive accomplishment. I probably have contacts in more international cities just to discuss films. A map on the wall shows places world-wide where they have placed science graduates. They have a blow-up of the United States which often has cities in the wrong place. Amherst, Massachusetts, is shown as being in the southeast part of the state. Again, such placements are not so impressive in science.'
'Other accomplishments are written on the walls. One claims that the synthetic India rubber was invented here. Impressive if true, but I will be surprised if it turns out that synthetic rubber really was invented here. Other accomplishments seem more esoteric: the discovery of fossil ice in Alaska, for example. What the heck is 'fossil' ice. You generally apply that word to living things. Do they just mean old ice? Surely the Arctic is full of it.'
'From the school of theology they say they have graduated Protestant ministers trained in rooting out Catholic and pagan influences.'
'Their library has pictures of graduates and faculty, dueling suits, and other artifacts, including a beer stein made from a human skull. You definitely get the feeling you are in eastern Europe,' Mark concludes
Evelyn would like to add a few comments: 'The goal of this museum seemed to prove that the world's great discoveries and researches happened at Tartu, and that it was *the* center of learning. I need to look up Johann Heinrich Madler, an astronomer from Tartu who supposedly set off some furor in the scientific world with a new theory, and also Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, just to see if they're as famous or important as the displays would lead one to believe.' (Struve is in fact well-known, though his time in Tartu is not noted in the article Evelyn found. Madler was not listed in the encyclopedia we checked.)
This museum, by the way, was 11 EEK for two people and one photography permit.
After that we were ready for lunch--sort of. We had lunch at Gildi Trahter, a restaurant recommended in the 'Lonely Planet.' They had a very nice mushroom soup with sour cream and hard-boiled egg slices. Mark recognized the name of the soup from the previous restaurant. We ordered sort of at random from a menu in Estonian and Mark ended up with pork filled with ham and cheese. It was tasty but gristly in some places. It also had a lot of fat, considered a virtue in the Baltics, where 'heart-smart' dishes have not taken a firm hold. He had a glass of pineapple juice before the meal and a Coca-Cola with the meal. Both tasted dilute. This meal came to 90 EEK, about half what the Eeslitall would cost.
Although before the Holocaust there were only about 5000 Jews in Estonia, Tartu has three Jewish cemeteries. We went to the one closest to the center of town, and assume the other two are similar.
The cemeteries were listed in 'Tallinn This Week,' by the way, not in the 'Lonely Planet' guide, and the description was somewhat terse. It was a puzzle finding the entrance. To enter it, use the entrance to the Russian orthodox cemetery at Roosi 44 and enter the Jewish cemetery through a gate at the end of the wall to your right as you enter. You can also enter the Russian Orthodox cemetery from the cross-street and walk around the Jewish cemetery to the gate. If the gate is locked, there were a couple of gaps in the fence around the cemetery.
The cemetery clearly was not being maintained and showed wear. Also, in several places there were very clear signs of vandalism. The Russian stones had places for pictures, but none were left. They all had been either pried off or smashed. Some of the stones had toppled of their own accord or had been toppled. Of the 5000 Jews in Estonia at the time of the Holocaust; 250 or so survived. Tartu does apparently still have some Jews, but it is just a tiny community and anything they do to fix up the cemetery will only get undone. Reading the names in Yiddish and Russian, there were some familiar Jewish names, but none that sounded like people we knew. We spent nearly an hour just reading tombstones, doing some minor straightening and photographing. Most of the stones we photographed we also put small stones on out of respect.
Evelyn writes, 'Walking around the cemetery, it occurred to me that while when other people come to eastern Europe looking for relatives they check phone books and ask in old neighborhoods, Jews look in cemeteries. And finding relatives there is a good thing--it means they were buried in a proper grave, either because they died before the Holocaust or because they somehow survived it. There were a couple of hundred graves up to 1935, then only three more (1947 and 1964, husband and wife, and 1987). The cemetery itself is in a sad state of disrepair, partially from neglect, partially from vandalism, although it seems to have been that way for many years (based on how the moss has overgrown the fallen and broken parts). We saw only one name we recognized as possibly a relative of a friend.'
Heading back to the train station, we stopped at a bookstore. We bought for an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan a copy of a book whose title turned out to be arzan's Adventures in Tallinn(Tarzani Seiklused Tallinnas. It claimed to have been co-authored by Burroughs and Toomas Raudam, but we suspect that Burroughs had very little input. Still, for 2 EEK (about US$0.15), it's an interesting souvenir.
The trip back was longer than we'd expected. After waiting about forty-five minutes in the train station, the train left about 18:37 and did not get in until 22:10. This was partly because we sat on sidings two or three times while trains going the other way used the main track. It was also partly because this was the 'potato chip' train. the 'bullet' train is so named because it is supposed to remind one of the speed of a bullet shot from a gun. Well, this was closer to the speed of a potato chip flung by hand. It's 190 kilometers from Tartu to Tallinn and it took three and a half hours--work it out. Of course, this is still considerably faster than Indian trains.
It was about a twenty-minute walk back to the hotel. Even at 22:30 it was only twilight.
On television there was a program about a Canadian writer who seemed to write some interesting fiction. Mark decided he'd like to look him up. However, he did not get his name. He knows only that he wrote a novel called NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE which is a sort of retelling of the story of Noah. The excerpts Mark heard of his fiction were really quite good. (He is Timothy Findley.)
Mark writes, somewhat dejectedly, 'Thing told me its batteries were low so I replaced them, only to find out that the backup battery I had just bought from Radio Shack was apparently dead. I lost everything in Thing but the software it came with. I'd backed up everything all my software three days before the trip, so I will not lose much except the special features I created this trip. I lost some notes on things to do when I get home. I have to recreate any of the programs I want to use on the trip. I am a little sorry to have to take the time. I don't begrudge the effort of recreating the program, only the time. The programming is really fun. It is a lot like building something with an Erector set except that you use mathematical concepts and logic. And when you are all done you have a useful tool.'
Mark says probably will have to voltmeter-check the batteries he gets from Radio Shack in the future. (But it turns out that the problem is not the battery, but the connection--it's just not getting power from the backup battery even when it is good. Evelyn's theory is that the Riga power lines fried it. |
