A Viking cemetery in Estonia

Nikolai Roerich: Guests from overseas, 1901 (Tretyakov Gallery).

“The midnight visitors are floating. The shelving shore of the Gulf of Finland stretches along like a light band. The water has engorged the azure of the clear vernal sky and the wind ripples on it, whisking opaque purplish stripes and circles. Flock of seagulls down at the waves, they swayed lightly, and only under the very front of the keel of the boat flashed their wings. Something unfamiliar and unprecedented has alarmed their peaceful life. A new jet is pushing through still water, it is running into age-old Slavic life, will pass through forests and swamps, will roll through a wide field, arising the Slavic race who will see rare and unfamiliar guests and who will marvel at their strictly combating, outlandish custom. The boats proceed in a long line. The sun shines in red on the sky. The dragon heads on the bows of the boats rise high and slender.”

Nikolai Roerich: По пути из варяг в греки, 1900

Before sailing up along the rivers to the land of the “Slavic race”, the Vikings settled on the shores and islands of the Gulf of Finland. They established several hundreds of villages and thousands of homesteads on the Estonian coasts and islands, sometimes among the Estonians already living there, and sometimes in uninhabited areas. The wave of Scandinavian immigration went on all the way to the 13th and 14th centuries. In Vormsi – in Swedish, Ormsö, “the island of snakes”, the fourth largest island in Estonia –, even at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly two thousand Swedes lived in two hundred homesteads, representing the majority compared to the 100-200 local Estonians.

Swedish population on the Estonian coast before 1944. The majority Swedish population is marked in yellow, the mixed Swedish-Estonian population in pale green. The inscription cut at the top right is Reval, that is, Tallinn. From the Haapsalu (in Swedish, Hapsal) museum of Estonian Swedes

Estonian Swedish calendar written with runes, 1819. From the Estonian History Museum in Tallinn

Swedish room in Estonia. From the Haapsalu museum of Estonian Swedes

Although in the Northern War of 1700 to 1721, the Russian Empire occupied the eastern coast of the Gulf of Finland from the Kingdom of Sweden, the Swedes living here remained here, speaking their own archaic dialect, and seeking justice from the arbitrariness of the local – Swedish – landlords, not with the Russian Tsar, but with the King of Sweden. A few Russians settled only in the port of Sviby, where the Orthodox church, dedicated in 1890 to the Ascension of Christ, still stands, albeit ruined and abandoned. It was built as part of a state-sponsored Orthodox campaign to convert local Lutherans, but the 230 converted Swedes, to whom it did not bring the desired benefits, returned to the Lutheran church in 1905. From the Soviet invasion until independence, it was used as a kolkhoz storehouse.




Driving from Tallinn to the port of Rohuküla takes almost two hours, I have to leave at five o’clock to reach the seven o’clock ferry. In summertime, you usually have to book tickets many weeks earlier, but now I am lucky, as, due to the reduced tourism, there was a ticket there and back. I leave in darkness. The sun rises slowly on the way. Clouds float low above the fields.




The ferry covers the distance of nearly 10 km in one hour. Almost no sea horizon can be seen: the ferry proceeds between small islands to the left and right. Seagulls fly in the ship’s stern waters hoping for prey, and the shallow coastal waters are being watched by various fishing birds.





The island is covered by a network of small, traditional homesteads, one or two kilometers from each other. Most of the houses were built before the war. When, on 16 June 1940, the Soviet army invaded Estonia, a part of the local Swedes immediately fled to Sweden, while those who remained were deported to the Gulag. The island lay in the border zone of the Soviet empire, so settlement and visiting were restricted. The homesteads have been reviving since Estonian independence. The refugees have regained their property, which they largely use as weekend houses, returning here from Sweden. And many Estonians also bought houses here, as the island is considered an elite resort. At the entrance of several traditional homesteads, an archival photograph from the Estonian Ethnographic Museum illustrates what the homestead looked like before the war.



Ecclesiastically, the whole island was one parish, with the 14th-century church of St. Olaf at its center. Consisting of two square spaces – a nave and a sanctuary –, the simple medieval church, surrounded by a low stone fence, stands alone in the woods among the homesteads of the village of Hullo, with a wooden statue of King St. Olaf on its triangular gable. After the disappearance of the Swedes, it was not used again until 1990. A granite monument stands next to it, with the names of the Swedes of Vormsi who fell in the Independence War of 1918-1919. It has mysteriously survived Soviet rule. There are some old tombs around the church, although most of them lie in the nearby cemetery. Blueberries grow in abundance everywhere, I make a lunch of them.

Statue of the Virgin Mary in childbed from the St. Olaf church, late 14th century. The statue was taken by the fleeing Swedes to Stockholm, where it was kept in the Swedish History Museum until 2006. It was then donated to the Niguliste Museum in Tallinn

The cemetery is also located in the woods, surrounded by a low stone wall. Its unique feature are the “sun crosses”, in Estonian rõngasrist, i.e. stone crosses inscribed in a circle. 343 of them survived in the cemetery. Older local historians fantasized that the motif was brought here by the Vikings, as we see in a contemporary mural in the city of Novgorod, founded by the Vikings.


However, the motif is widespread throughout the world, from Bronze Age cultures to Irish crosses, so one does not necessarily have to look for a Viking origin just because the island is inhabited by their descendants. In addition, here, in the cemetery of Vormsi, the crosses show late dates: 1743 is the first and 1934 the last one. This also coincides with the dates when this type of cross appears in other cemeteries in mainland Estonia. As if it would have been a period fashion of the 17th to 19th centuries, whose starting point is not yet known.

Kullamaa, cemetery of St. Nicholas Church, 1624

Ridala, cemetery of Mary Magdalene Church, 1844

But the small sun crosses, scattered on the gently undulating, moss-covered soil streaked with the shade of pines are very archaic indeed. Like runes sprinkled on a fine silk surface. It is no coincidence that the Scandinavian descendants of the island consider the sun crosses as part of their identity and use them as a symbol of the island.


In addition to the sun crosses, the cemetery also has traditional stone crosses from the same era, as well as iron and wooden crosses from the 19th century to the 1940s, all with Swedish inscriptions. The Swedish tombs are apparently still being cared for. Near the entrance to the cemetery there are also modest Estonian graves from recent years.



Traditional Swedish religious hymn from Vormsi/Ormsö. Sung by Sofia Joons, Tallinn

The road from the cemetery to the lighthouse of Saxby, the westernmost point of Vormsi, is just a few kilometers. Swans are swimming and herons fishing in the bay scattered with ice age boulders. This was what the Vikings’ descendants fleeing to Sweden last saw from the island of the snakes.