News archive

On September 6th, Latvian Member of Parliament Veiko Spolitis presented a lecture titled “Russian war in Ukraine, the Baltic States in transformative Northern Europe & European Union”. Veiko Spolitis visited Canada as a guest of the Muskoka Forest University.

An art exhibit titled “Konrad Mägi. Unseen Paintings” could be viewed at the Mikkeli museum in Tallinn throughout August and September. The exhibition introduced artworks that the public had never seen from almost all of the artist’s creative periods, allowing for a further understanding of Mägi’s legacy. The pieces came from Estonian and Swedish private collections as well as from VEMU/Estonian Museum Canada. In addition, the album “Konrad Mägi” detailing the artist’s life and all of his surviving works was launched alongside the exhibition’s opening.

The National Library of Lithuania has added new documents to the collection of documents on the activities of cultural attachés of diplomatic missions of the Republic of Lithuania. The last collection of documents came from Tomas Ivanauskas, who served as Cultural Attaché to China and South Korea from 2019 to 2021. The archive handed over is exceptionally rich in published documents, illustrating the intensity of publishing work.

On 18 October 2022, the National Archives opened its full-text search platform based on a software program called Transkribus.

On October 19, Vytautas Gedgaudas‘s book, Pirmyn arba mirk (Forward, or Die), was presented at the National Library of Lithuania.

For the first time, the life and work of the theatre director, laureate of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts and dissident Jonas Jurašas were presented in such detail at the exhibition organised by the National Library of Lithuania. The exhibition “Jonas Jurašas. The Price of Being” presented over fifty Jurašas’s plays staged during the Soviet era in Lithuania and Russia, on the stages of the Western world (USA, Canada, Germany, Belgium and Japan), and in Lithuania after the restoration of independence revealing the personality of the creator and the importance of his works.

The autumn edition of the Baltic Heritage Network quarterly newsletter is now available. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, various forms of media have broadcast the events in Ukraine as well as the quality and state of life of Ukrainian refugees in Estonia. However, a lesser degree of focus has been put on how the war has affected Estonians and what role Estonians have played overall in the war. Another question that needs to be posed is how this war has affected diaspora Estonians and their respective communities. There’s no doubt that the war in Ukraine has revived personal and familial memories for many Estonians from the era of the Second World War, the fears related to it, and the trauma of leaving their homeland. With the upcoming collection campaign titled “Stories of War” from the Association of Estonian Life Stories and the Estonian Cultural History Archives (Estonian Literary Museum), we wish to collect stories related to the Ukrainian war from individuals belonging to various generations. VEMU/Estonian Museum Canada in Toronto is a partner for the collection campaign. When documenting your story, the following questions can be considered: What do you remember from the beginning of the war? How did the knowledge of the outbreak of the war affect your everyday life? Do you discuss the war in your family? If so, what themes related to the war have come up as conversation topics? Have you or a family member had personal connections to the war in Ukraine? If so, then what have these connections/experiences been? Have you come into contact with Ukrainian refugees? If so, how? What emotions have the war in Ukraine brought forth in you? Have they changed over the course of the war? Does the war currently affect your everyday life? If so, how? Stories can be written in both Estonian and English. Please send your story to one of the following email addresses: elulood@kirmus.ee or piret.noorhani@vemu.ca Deadline: December 31, 2023.

After the pandemic-induced hiatus, the Baltic Heritage Network international diaspora researchers’ seminar was again held. This time the get-together took place on September 22nd, 2022, in Riga at the premises of the library of Latvian University. There were five presentations, each dealing with a Baltic history or culture segment.

In the late summer of 1944, tens of thousands of Baltic people were compelled to flee their homelands. They fled in desperation with the intensifying war front in the Baltic lands and in fear of the pending terror of a Soviet reoccupation of their nations. Some fled via limited land routes, and several thousand crammed onto the last departing freighter ships. In Estonia, over 30,000 Estonians fled to the Baltic sea coast seeking passage to Sweden on boats large and small. Those fortunate to find space on boats would embark on a perilous journey – across the Baltic sea. Many boats capsized in the stormy seas; the invaders’ gunboats ruthlessly sank some boats. Several thousand perished at sea. Yet over 27,000, crammed on their small boats for two or more days and nights, survived the journey and landed on Swedish shores. They disembarked into an uncertain future but felt heaven-blessed for their deliverance. The escapees hoped that the war would soon come to an end and envisaged a return to their homeland and to their loved ones left behind. But this was not to be. The lives of those escapees were irreversibly diverted, and a return to the homeland would not be possible for decades. Nevertheless, the drama of their Great Escape would be indelibly remembered by the escapees as a life-altering event. The Great Baltic Escape (or as it is referred to in Estonian, “Suurpõgenemine”) was commemorated this past September in several countries. An all-day “Suurpõgenemine 1944 ja meie” conference was held on September 19 in Tallinn at the parliament convention centre. A summary of that conference’s presentations and forums was presented in Eesti Elu’s September 23 edition. This past July, the BaltHerNet (Baltic Heritage Network) summer school in Hiiumaa featured several presentations on the archival research and exhibitions of the Great Escape. One of the presentations was by Dr Mirja Arnshav, a Research Coordinator at the National (Swedish) Maritime Museum. Dr Arnshav’s interest in the Great Escape and her ongoing research is fascinating and noteworthy. Dr Arnshav’s personal connection to the Great Escape can be traced back several years to a serendipitous encounter that she had with what turned out to be the wreckage of a small escapee boat. Over the years, Arnshav spent her summer holidays on the Swedish island of Gotland, and during those sojourns, she realised an interest in history, the sea and boats. Old boats are seemingly everywhere on the shores of Gotland, as there is a tradition of leaving boats to disintegrate by the sea after reaching the end of their service. However, while strolling along the shores during one of her visits to Gotland she noticed a boat, unlike the other abandoned boats due to its construction. Based on her growing maritime knowledge, she suspected the boat was built in eastern Europe. Subsequently, an elderly local confirmed that the boat had been beached and abandoned by Estonian escapees in 1944. Arnshav’s curiosity about the boat revealed that the maritime heritage agencies did not list such refugee boats. Although Arnshav does not have family roots in Baltic escapees, she felt that the legacy and stories represented by such escapee boat wrecks were important and worthy of research and documentation. Arnshav’s formal research into refugee boats began with her PhD thesis at Stockholm University in 2017. Her extensive study of the refugee boats for her 2020 dissertation has been documented in a book entitled “De Sma batarna och den stora flykten” (The small boats and the Great Escape). The scope of Arnshav’s research work was to seek and identify as many Baltic escapee boats as possible that still remain on Sweden’s shores and to document their condition. This research is not only an archaeology of the escape and its aftermath based on these escapee boats. The forsaken boats also quietly evoke stories, images and memories of those escapees who stepped out of those boats in 1944 onto Swedish shores. Arnshav’s research examined 34 boats confirmed as Baltic escapee boats. They are located on several shores, on Swedish islands and the mainland and are ageing in varying degrees of degradation. In her role as Research Coordinator at the National Maritime Museum, Arnshav commenced a second and broader research project on “The Materiality of the Great Escape”. The three-year project investigated, documented and archived hundreds of essential and cherished items brought along by the escapees on their boats. In addition to the collection of items, interviews were held with several of the 1944 escapees or their descendants – all of which were compiled into a compendium for the museum. A book on this research, “Foremal pa flykt” ((Personal) Objects of the Escape), has also been published. Exhibitions, public lectures and school education programs have been organised to share the research results and the stories of the escapees. This past June, many Estonian diasporas in Sweden were in attendance at the Maritime Museum forum, where Arnshav’s book was presented along with various panel discussions. Dr Arnshav’s research work and the two books were originally written in Swedish. There is interest in having the works translated into English and Estonian. A recent Estonian TV news clip of Dr Arnshav and her research can be viewed in clip number 2: “Mis on teisel pool vet”. This research work and interest in the Great Escape is timely, recognising that the 80th anniversary of the 1994 Escape will be commemorated in 2024. Steps are being taken to formally acknowledge September 19 as the Day of Remembrance of the Great (Baltic) Escape. In leading up to the 80th anniversary, there may be interest in preserving at least a couple of the escapee boats on the Swedish shores and to erect suitable plaques at those sites, inscribed with the historical context and a recounting of the Great Escape. Such memorial sites on Swedish shores might be a fitting complement to the Puise, Estonia statue “Minna et taha, kuid jääda et saa” which commemorates the Great Escape departure from the shores of Estonia. Toomas Eichenbaum First published in Eesti Elu/Estonian Life