Breaking the ice – Estonia comes in from the cold

11.03.2024 - 14:21 / theguardian.com / Art

“First we have to cross the icebergs,” our guide, Herling Mesi, says, pointing to a barely visible ridge on the otherwise flat expanse of frozen lake.

She is worried that a patch of broken ice won’t take the weight of the truck with all its passengers, so we climb out, walk over the slushy chunks, then hop back in. As with many vehicles from the Soviet era, the truck is a homemade mashup of whatever parts were available: the front of an old VW welded to a trailer, with giant bouncy wheels taken from Russian bomber planes.

Lake Peipus, on Estonia’s eastern border with Russia, is the fifth largest in Europe. On clear nights you can see the lights of Russian villages nearly 20 miles away. Later in March the ice will start to melt, but today it is 50cm deep and covered in snow. The sky is white and it feels like we’re in a world devoid of colour.

There are several fishers in the trailer with us; they’ve travelled from the island of Saaremaa, more than 200 miles to the west, to try Peipus’s renowned ice-fishing. As we watch the fishers drill holes in the ice, Herling’s husband starts to prepare lunch, ladling water straight from the lake into a pan containing five unpeeled onions. Next a perch goes in, whole. “It cooks for about an hour. It’s the best fish soup,” says Herling. I’m not entirely disappointed when I discover we won’t be having this sparse meal. Instead, Herling passes round slices of warm onion tart.

The prevalence of onion dishes is not surprising … after all, we are on the Onion Route, so called because it was once the main crop in the area. The name isn’t purely literal. “It’s the onion route because there are layers of culture here,” says Herling.

About 5,000 people who live on the Estonian side of Lake Peipus are the descendants of “old believers” – Orthodox Christians who escaped persecution in Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries after rejecting reforms to church rituals. They still speak Russian and practise the old Orthodox rituals in prayer houses. A museum exploring their history and culture has just reopened after a three-year revamp, recreating the inside of old believers’ homes and giving a glimpse into usually closed religious services through VR headsets.

Herling and her husband are Estonian but have embraced the culture of their neighbours. Their bright green guesthouse, Mesi Tare (Honey House), is a traditional wooden old believer’s house with dorm rooms. They also offer overnight stays in tiny houseboats on the lake.

This obscure-but-fascinating enclave of eastern Europe is about to get its moment in the spotlight as one of the European capitals of culture 2024. Encompassing the city of Tartu and the surrounding region, the year-long festival is themed on the arts of