Abstract
The Orthodox island monastery of Valaam in Russian Karelia is today a popular destination for Finnish tourists visiting Russia’s western borderlands. Many of these tourists are descendants of the Karelians who had evacuated the area following World War II. The monastery’s institutionally sanctioned genealogies construct it as the civilizing force, which had brought Christian enlightenment to the local heathen population. This discursive template is played out in the way the place is presented to visitors, with each highlight telling a carefully constructed story that promotes the monastery’s significance for the Russian religious and national identity. Yet, drawing on lived experience, as well as on popular culture, family lore and meanings from collective memory, the Finnish visitors break the monolithic official discourse and produce a complex “thirdspace” in their own measure. This paper is based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted during a homeland visit to Ladogan Karelia in June 2010.
Highlights
At the northeastern fringes of Europe, Ladogan Karelia is a place where visible traces of a traumatic recent history seem to be strangely at odds with landscapes of extraordinary beauty
As will be discussed in more detail below, the institutionally sanctioned genealogies of the monastery construct it as the civilizing force, which had brought Christian enlightenment to the local heathen population
This discursive template is emphatically played out in the way the place is presented to visitors, with each highlight of the itinerary contributing to the narrative promoting the monastery’s unique significance for the Russian religious and national identity
Summary
At the northeastern fringes of Europe, Ladogan Karelia is a place where visible traces of a traumatic recent history seem to be strangely at odds with landscapes of extraordinary beauty. One man admitted that the physical encounter with the place triggered in him a feeling of loss and bitterness, like no other location we visited during the trip, his ancestral home-site included (Interview 9) This meant that further questions needed to be asked, both in face-to-face interaction and by email, with that particular focus. Additional research needed to take into account the fact that the tropes of the ceded Karelian territory and of Valaam itself as a Karelian place of memory are firmly established in the Finnish popular culture Those popular cultural texts that were mentioned in the interviews or in the follow-up emails were given particular attention, because of their mythopoetic quality, which plays a central role in the formation of collective memory. The paper concludes with a section that explains how this study engages with relevant theory
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