(To be amended)
By Anneli Reigas
If you happen to be in Tallinn and rest has been seen over and over and you wish to see a different Tallinn, take a tram 1 or 2 to Kopli and drive to place called Kopli liinid, a small village with short streets called "liinid" that means lines in English. It is on the coast of the Baltic Sea sea, max 15 min by tram 1 or 2 ride from Tallinn old town, considered very central Tallinn but is very different of the rest of the town. The houses there were for long time partly in ruins there and it has been not the safest place for foreigners to walk around, specially alone and late. But for me it has been the small land of paradise bordered with the Baltic Sea, and with endless childhood memories that included looking often how Sun fell asleep into sea.
By now, 2020 the venue is safe and a completely new village is under construction there - and it looks really beautiful, like a museum. Namely, after few decades of postponing the reconstruction of the area the new village is built now, and what makes it special is that houses look similar as the ones built over 100 years ago, and even streets are partly built with small stones like they were in old times, but new modern amendments are made.
Our village - poor but very intellectual
When I lived there many of the few hundreds villagers who lived there knew each another, their parents and grandparents had lived there before WWII and the village was in good order, not like at the end of last decade of 1900s and start of new millennium when most of its ex-inhabitants had left. By summer 2019 first new and renovated houses had started to bring life and and long lost order back to our village.
At our house only one person lived there after new millennium arrived - an old lady, Saima Krikk, who for few decades worked as a fashion designer at the Tallinn fashion house Tallinna Moemaja. The fashion magazine Siluett published by them in Estonian and Russian during Soviet era was not famous only in Estonia but known all over Soviet Union. I had to envy Saima for the look at sea that she had from her windows and that I was missing once we moved away in 1979.
We had also an opera singer and few professors living there that time. Tallinn University of Technology has had for long one of their faculties nearby, just a short walking distance or one tram stop from the village, and many children who grow up at that village went to study there after graduating from high school. The spirit at the village felt intellectual and made me to understand already in childhood you do not really need much of those things you buy for money or some fancy title to be a great person.
When Robert Nerman, historian who did a very good job to write and publish books about the history of different Tallinn districts, published a book about Kopli (its the name of bigger area than the small Kopli village nearby sea) that also included many pages about our village, I recognized how other people who had lived at that village have had the very same feelings and memories about our time there.
Growing up there with the Baltic Sea in front of you, and knowing its sea only dividing you from the Finland and Sweden and the rest of the free world it felt like the Soviet empire started behind me and it was our very own corner of the land that belonged fully to us. You could see two Soviet border guards watch-houses there and I saw often late night two border guards making their walk on beach, but there was nothing Soviet at that village - it felt really different.
Anyway, there were rules. Do not go to walk on bay too far in winter when its covered with ice or you might get shot! That rule I knew from the very early years. Sister of the husband of my aunt broke that rule - Vilma was shot to leg by border guards when she was still a child. She told me few years ago nobody ever asked sorry from her or from her mother and after all, she was lucky at least to survive.
We had also some nice not at all Soviet-minded Russian families (and very few not nice) living in that village and some at our house. Some of them had like Estonians lived in that village since pre-WWII time and we had good relations with all good people.
My mucisian father Juhan (1942-1968) and mother Leida who were born few weeks apart in autumn 1942 grew up in the very same village and were friends, sweethearts and classmates since kids there and as soon as they were grown up, got married.
Sea, Grannie and books widening the horizont
I recall my grandmother Elfriede (who had lived at the same village since 1930s with her husband Johan) as my best friend until she left 1979. She was also my very own first history teacher and she also taught me lot of those few things in life that you usually learn - if at all - later in life with years starting to share experiences. She lived close to us at the closest house to sea and I had my own room at her flat that had two windows with one of them so close to sea you could throw a stone from the window into the sea. It has even happened that sometimes during the storm sea waves hit her house, Whenever I went there, she was doing one thing - reading some book - that she always put aside when I had ringed her doorbell and stepped in.
She used to insist me often always to remember I am a Swede, not Estonian but I never really felt it like that. But there was a Swede that had found a place in my heart, like she had found a place in hearts of millions of children around the Baltic Sea and elsewhere and whom I started to adore soon after I learned to read - Astrid Lindgren. I kept reading her books over and over, loving most the story about Melkersson´s family (and their adorable friend Tjorven), Kalle Blomquist and Pipi.
When I called Astrid Lindgren from NK department store in central Stockholm in May 1989, being already 26 then, the very last day of my first visit to Sweden to ask her whether she will be available to give me an interview when I come to Stockholm next time there must have been probably something in my voice that made her to ask me to come to her home right away. Her phone number was not public, but I had got it from the Dagens Nyheter (Swedish daily). I wrote about that warm meeting also at the Dagens Nyheter net site dedicated for her when she passed away and got some really adorable letters from other Lindgren admirers later.
If you listen the few small clips I took from the interview with her to that blog, you will probably recognize what a great respect I felt for her. I was so sad they did not give Astrid Lindgren the Nobel prize in literature that she certainly deserved for being one of the world greatest authors of books for children. It was an extraordinary to meet that woman whom millions have loved but who left me impression as not just a very warm but also a very modest person, a lot like was my grandmother.
Among other things she told me she was blessed to have had two environments to grow up when she was a child - a farm and a nice town very close to that farm. She also said the childhood she had was a lot like she describes in her book Bullerby and that her father loved a lot her mother and told it so every day.
The other author I enjoyed most while teen was Ernest Hemingway, his Farewell to Arms was among my most favorite books.
1979, piece of harmony left behind
Even that probably no other kid at that village had a luxury to grow up with such a grandmother as I did, most of them had a privilege to go to the same school as me and that nowadays is called Tallinn Art High School, that was at the other side of the park from our village.
It was a a unic school that time in all Soviet Union because it was the very first and one of very few also later that got the right to use a special teaching program on arts since first grade to last grade. It made the school also to have some international touch as we had often visitors from West. The man behind the idea and also the Head of the Art Classes for decades at the school was Leo Tõnisson who was like a moving monument-reminder of the-once-upon a time free Estonia at our school. Leo Tõnisson lived in Tallinn until he perished in 2015 (and if you happen to know some Finnish you can find my interviw with him published at the Finnish daily Turun Sanomat at my blog in Finnish.) His father Aleksander Tõnisson was a Mayor of Tallinn when Soviets took Estonia over. And most of all Aleksander Tõnisson was known as a famous Estonian military commander during the Estonian War of Independence 1918-1920.
When I went to Tartu University in 1981 I learned first time with a surprise how some young Estonians also from my generation had grown up to be really Soviet-minded and spoked and acted that way. So it probably has a really great role who are the people who play the greatest role in your life when you just start to discover that world and to figure out for what you have been sent here.
I lived at our small Kopli village since 1963 to 1979 and when we moved to new place to one of those Soviet era built apartment blocks after my mum got a flat there in winter 1979 (we finally had warm running water, central heating and even first bathroom at home) I got a cultural shock - I didnt care about these modern things but felt like I had left Republic of Estonia behind, and had to get settled now in that Soviet environment, partly because I had to leave the village and partly because few weeks before we moved my grandmother Elfriede had also left me and this world.
And I am telling it all only because when you go to that village that looked for few decades a ghetto and has gone into rebirth by now you know that for me it is one of those places that I always feel like sacred when I go there, that I have done at least once in summer during all these years since we left the village in 1979.
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