Estonian museums in changing times

Abstract

The Estonians are a small nation. Therefore, our relationship to our own culture is to a certain extent different from that of the big nations. The peculiarities of ones own culture are mainly perceived through comparison with others. The wave of national awakenings reached Estonia in the middle ofthe 19th century. By that time some Baltic-German organizations of an enlightening character had emerged, mainly focusing their attention on native people - the ones whose ethnic ancestors had lived in Estonia long before the Germans, Danes, Swedes, Poles, andfinally, the Russians had reached here. The main policy of alien authorities was to occupy our strategically and commercially important territory. The best means for achieving this was war: In the course ofthese conquests, attention was mainly focused on towns and churches; the changing of the everyday lives of the local people was not particularly in anybody's sphere of interest. As a result, two relatively different kinds of living conditions and ways of life existed side by side - on the one hand, the traditional culture of Estonian peasants and town craftsmen, and on the other, the European culture characteristic mainly of Baltic-German nobility and bourgeoisie.If we tried to describe these two different communities in museum categories, we could say that the first one represented a living open-air museum with its ethnographic look and folklore; the other a specimen of manor architecture with its art collections, and town architecture with the relics of a bourgeois way of life.