lithic letters
Field Research on Nordic-Baltic stones and mines, and their lores
as part of the Inspiration Forum Lab cohort
in collaboraton with Kark Kaisel and Magda Kopańska
It is not a silly thing at all to enjoy a stone in a tray. I see the whole world in a tiny stone. Some objects in this world are huge, and others are small, and they come in all shapes, but they are not that different when you look at their essence.
- Marushima Hideo, 1934
Once upon a time, there was a stone in Southern Estonia. It hadn’t been there for a long time. At least for a stone 10,000 years doesn’t feel long, as it came on the back of the glaciers from Scandinavia. Now it sits on the edge of a stream across an Orthodox Church. It has been engaged with by people since time immemorial, way before Christianity arrived in its lands. Once, the stone showed its power across vast areas. People came as far as from Moscow to give gifts to the stone in return for blessings and fortune. The stone has made its mark on history through various records as a site of conflict between pagan beliefs and the Christian faith, between the original inhabitants and newcomers. There is a story that tells how the lords of the land destroyed the stone to stop the worship. The stone was blown up and its body was used to build a cow shed nearby. The story goes that the animals in the shed fell ill. The lord was informed by the local wise person that the stone has to be returned to its original location in order to solve the situation. Now the broken stone sits on its original place still attended by many pilgrims offered dairy and coins.
Regional road number 190, at the borderland between Estonia and Russia, crosses through the sparsely inhabited village of Miikse. On one side of the road, there lies an Orthodox chapel of Saint John. Its wooden facade looks towards Jaanikivi- the stubbornly silent, covered by murky moss, sacred stone of the Seto people. We place an offering in a place where gifts were laid throughout the centuries. The wishes for health, wealth, and fertility, all confined in the cold surface of Jannikivi. Karl gently puts a chocolate-covered dairy candy together with 20 cents. We collectively wish for prosperity and inspiration.
Just like the geography rejects the categorisation by being located on a border, the stone itself rejects taxonomy. Inhabiting the world between living and non-living, culture and nature, pagan and Christian, powerful and passive.
Jaanikivi silently accepts our modern wish- the same way it did since the dawn of history. We cannot know how long it listened to the people’s sorrows and demands- it’s not only impossible but also not in our interest. Jannikivi lies on the border of categories, the placement which speaks to its resistance against taxonomies and the incapacity of people to capture its meaning. Named after an orthodox saint, but worshiped by those deemed pagans; placed in modern Estonia, but once uniting Ugro Finnic people from faraway lands; oscillating between the world of living and non-living, nature and culture, passive and active.
The ecological and social life of Jaanikivi reveals itself as a reservoir of knowledge that invites both study and visceral understanding. The landscape we focus on stretches from the sideroad of Miikse village and links to other places held within the borders of present-day Estonia. Scattered across the country are 1750 stones that bear the traces of old rituals. Each one stands as a quiet witness to the glaciers that once moved across this land thousands of years ago.
From the micro-story held within this landscape, we begin to trace three strands of understanding. These strands form an analytical framework shaped by the themes of colonialism, economy, and folklore. We are focusing on how micro stories (a stone in Estonia) can attest to macro-scale counterparts. These subthemes are not specific to this story and geography but resonate with universal struggles.
خانه