ESTONIA


mainland Estonians. I get to experience this one afternoon on Abruka, a 3.5-sq-mile island only reachable by speedboat or yacht from Kuressaare harbour. Two thirds of it is designated a nature reserve, home to lynx and eagles, and its population fluctuates between seven people in winter and 50 in summer. One or two of the residents run cafes out of their back doors in summer for visitors who come to cycle the quiet roads or take tours with locals in converted trucks. “I like the nature and the peace and quiet here,” says


my guide Riho Leppik, a towering, ruddy-cheeked man and sixth-generation islander who I find myself drinking espresso and blackcurrant schnapps with in the back garden of one cottage rimmed by sunflowers. The 500-year-old village of Leedri, back on Saaremaa,


is another delightful throwback to simpler days. Its compact structure and dry-stone walls are so unique and well preserved that they’re under national heritage protection. On a walk through its silent streets, I find a restored wooden windmill and houses immaculately painted in cornflower blue and mustard yellow. And I meet one enterprising local woman, Liisi Kuivjogi, who’s built a juniper syrup business with a kitchen and tasting room housed in converted barns. “We use it like maple syrup or honey,” explains Liisi, as


she shovels pancakes onto a plate she’s laid out for me on her tasting room terrace. The syrup is sweet, herbaceous, almost smoky, and the pancakes are still warm, having come straight from her mum’s thatched-roof house across the road. As we eat, a soft breeze brings a hint of wood smoke from her mother’s garden. Everyone around the table chimes in to explain: “It’s Saturday: sauna day!” Just like in Finland and Sweden, saunas have deep


cultural roots in Estonia. With the weekly wash being thought of as a balm for the spirit, they’ve also traditionally been used in rural communities as birthing rooms and places where Estonians come to be healed or to die. Almost every hotel in the islands has its own sauna — some floating on water, some housed in custom-built wooden igloos — but at Pilguse Manor House, where I’m due to spend the night, the speciality is the traditional smoke sauna. It’s a 10-minute drive from Leedri, and I arrive at dusk to find a bare-chested


110 NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL


sauna master with an armful of firewood outside a small wooden house, its one window blackened above the lintel from the daily exhalation of thick smoke. “The smoke sauna is very much a Finnish, Baltic and


Russian thing,” says owner Maria Tamander on a tour of the property. She cuts an incongruous figure in her cream jumpsuit and gold jewellery as we stand at the door to the sauna in a field of grazing horses. “It’s totally multipurpose. In summer, traditionally, it’d be a kitchen — there would be a big stove and you’d hang meat in there and smoke it — and in winter, it’d be where the animals would sleep.” Estonia’s stories are written into the walls at Pilguse


Manor House, an old farm that was converted into a mental institute during the Soviet era and hosted many political dissidents. Before the Soviets, the 220 acres on which the manor stands had been part of a swathe of coastal land belonging to Maria’s family. “My mother escaped from Estonia to Sweden in 1944 with her parents,” she tells me. Though half-Swedish, she now lives here for part of the year, then spends the rest of the time in London with her family, who — like many other Estonians from the western isles — have spent years fighting to regain ownership of their lands. It’s easy to see why they were worth fighting for. The day’s


dying embers cast an ethereal glow on the reed marshes by the sauna house, as barn swallows twirl around the roof of the old dairy farm behind me. Beyond a pathway through the reeds, Maria points in the direction of unseen lakes and a wall of pine forest that leads to a beach on the Baltic Sea. It isn’t until darkness seeps into the fields at around 10pm


that I finally slip into the sauna, feeling its heat like a warm hug in the coolness of the night. Smoke has been absorbed


“JUST LIKE IN FINLAND AND SWEDEN, SAUNAS HAVE DEEP CULTURAL ROOTS IN ESTONIA AND ARE THOUGHT OF AS A BALM FOR THE SPIRIT”


Clockwise from top: The natural dip-pool at Pilguse Manor House; locally grown onions drying outside a barn in the village of Leedri, Saaremaa; Leedri resident Liisi Kuivjogi, pictured right, talking through her extensive range of homemade juniper syrups


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