Estonian National Museum (Eesti Rahva Muuseum) (review)

According to local residents, the distance between the Town Hall Square in Tartu and the Raadi neighborhood, on the city’s outskirts, where the Estonian National Museum is located, is exactly 1,909 meters. This number is significant because 1909 is the year that the Estonian National Museum was officially founded, even though it did not exist in physical form until 1922, when it moved into a nineteenth-century manor house in Raadi. This building was destroyed during World War II, but most of the collections were saved. During the period of Soviet occupation (1944–91), the Estonian National Museum continued to exist in various forms—though primarily to exhibit ethnographic materials—and in various locations around Tartu. Raadi, the original location of the museum, however, was off-limits because a secret Soviet airbase occupied the territory adjacent to the old manor house.

After Estonia regained independence in 1991, fresh plans emerged to build a new museum that would be national in scope. Despite some calls to relocate the museum to the capital city of Tallinn and some objections to using Raadi—which symbolized for many Estonians the most despised and painful elements of Soviet power—the new Estonian National Museum now sits directly on one of the airbase’s former concrete runways. With a roof that slopes from twelve feet tall on the eastern end to fifty-one feet tall on the western end, the building (388 yards in length and 78 yards wide—or 355 by 71 meters) resembles from certain angles a supersonic aircraft about to lift into the air. Designed by an international team of young architects—Dan Dorell (Italian-Israeli), Lina Ghotmeh (French-Lebanese), and Tsuyoshi Tane (Japanese)—and costing 75 million euros, the building is stunning, and entirely appropriate for the wealth of materials inside that highlight the breadth of Estonian history and culture.

The exterior of the Estonian National Museum. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Although visitors may enter the museum from either the eastern or western sides, most enter from the latter. Both entrances lead visitors into “Journeys in Time,” which is the largest subsection of Encounters, the museum’s permanent exhibition on the ground floor. “Journeys” covers eleven thousand years of Estonian history and culture from the Stone Age to the present. Entering from the west side, however, means starting in contemporary Estonia, not in ancient history. Accordingly, one of the first objects encountered is an office chair—entirely unremarkable, except that this was the chair used by Jaan Tallinn (b. 1972), an Estonian computer programmer who helped design the software for Skype. Not starting visitors in the Stone Age, as most national museums might do, was deliberate: in part to broaden appeal to younger visitors, but also to lead with artifacts that are able to tell compelling stories more vividly. The artifacts that greet visitors entering from the east include stone axes, potsherds, and bone pendants—all of them potentially fascinating, but probably less so for many visitors.

From its opening in October 2016 through December 2017, the museum attracted 356,377 visitors, approximately 85 percent of them from Estonia. To accommodate those international visitors who do not speak Estonian, the museum offers electronic cards that will change the language of almost all exhibition panels to English, Finnish, French, Latvian, or Russian—with German soon to come. I did not spot a single typographic error in any of the English-language panels I read.

Reading happens to be one of the themes of the museum—albeit not only in the reading of exhibition texts. Midway through “Journeys in Time,” the visitor encounters a dramatically illuminated double-sided, sixteen-foot-tall display of books, from the first printed book in the sixteenth century to books printed in more recent times. The display reminds visitors of the significance of literacy among Estonians, and of how the...