Saving the UNESCO-recognised culture of making canoes in Estonia’s Soomaa National Park
Words by , photographs by Mati Kose
Every year, before spring, Soomaa National Park transforms into a semi-submerged world of drowned meadows and tangled waterways. This is Estonia’s ‘fifth season’, when water from melting snow in the eastern uplands rushes down through the rivers and floods the low-lying forests, wetlands, roads and yards of the residents who still live here.
It’s said that during past floods, the water level rose so high that villagers could paddle a dugout canoe right through their windows and into their living rooms. The natural annual phenomenon has shaped the people of this region, as well as the surrounding landscape and its wildlife. Everyone has had to learn to adapt.
According to the archaeological evidence, the dugout is the earliest form of boat. The oldest of all is known as the Pesse canoe. Excavated from a peat bog in the Netherlands, it was cut from a single Scots pine log 10,000 years ago. Grooves in its hull suggest that it may have been made using flint or antler tools. Little has changed in either the appearance or construction of the dugout since. Although they continue to be used in many parts of the world, in Europe, the culture of crafting these traditional boats has barely survived the arrival of the 21st century. Here in Soomaa, however, the floods have helped to preserve the tradition.
Aivar Ruukel seems to shy away from being called a boatmaster, despite his extensive knowledge of the craft. He’s only ever sold two, choosing to build them as a way to connect with the history of the area rather than for money. Yet he’s one of only five Estonians who still retain the skill, each having made between ten and 20 Estonian extended dugout boats, or haabjas. Last December, the dugout boat culture of Estonia’s Soomaa region was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Enthusiasts hope that its inclusion will safeguard the ancient practice and attract the next generation of boatmasters to keep the tradition alive.
There have always been boatmasters in Estonia – people who relied on boat making, if not as a full-time profession, then at least as part of their income. It’s difficult work that requires specific skills. Today, the 400-square-kilometre national park is home to around 60 permanent residents, but 100 years ago, it was ten times that number. During the 1920s and ’30s, dugout boats were still the main mode used to transport milk, butter and hay from the farms that dotted the landscape.
Intangible cultural heritage
UNESCO defines ‘intangible cultural heritage’ as being community-based and representative of that community, its customs and skills. It’s a simultaneously traditional and living practice. Among the 629 UNESCO-listed traditions are examples of performing arts, craft making and natural practices. Estonia has five entries on the list. The most recent, the building and use of dugout canoes in the Soomaa region, joins the smoke sauna tradition (the actual bathing customs, but also the making and maintenance of wooden saunas, bath whisks and sauna-smoked meat) and the ancient tradition of polyphonic singing among the Seto community in southeastern Estonia. Known as leelo, it’s performed by all-female choirs using a technique that lets them sing two notes at once. The safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is considered an important part of sustainable development. Traditional food gathering, hunting and farming practices contribute to food security, while quality global health care can be provided with the aid of traditional health practices that use local natural resources.
Estonia is rich in peatlands and a fifth of the country is covered in bogs, fens and other wetlands, although many of these landscapes were degraded and drained during the Soviet occupation; peat continues to be extracted – 1.5 million tonnes is exported annually, with 40 per cent destined for the Dutch flower-growing industry. Soomaa National Park is the largest and best-preserved peat bog system in Europe. ‘It’s unique for its network of these big peat bogs and marshlands, which are separated or connected, whichever way you look at it, by an expansive network of rivers,’ says Mati Kose, a biologist, nature guide and photographer.
The park sits within the largest floodplain in northern Europe. When the floods come, the water can reach a depth of five metres and span 175 square kilometres. It might seem improbable that people would choose to live here, but Kose explains that the floodplains are very fertile thanks to the sediment dispersed over the fields by the water. ‘It’s like free fertiliser,’ he says.
In anticipation of the floods, families used to tie down their belongings and move into the upstairs rooms of their houses. Some farmers even built rafts to keep their cows afloat. ‘It was said that the flood was like some rich relatives coming to visit,’ says Ruukel. ‘There was a need to prepare and a certain excitement, but it wasn’t negative. Nobody left the area because of the fifth season.’
In the end, however, many did leave. In the wake of the Second World War and the advance of technology and urbanisation, people moved away from agriculture. Also on the decline are the old-growth forests with trees big enough to sustain both the canoe-making practice and the country’s wildlife, such as the IUCN Red Listed capercaillie, elk, lynx, wolves and Europe’s densest population of brown bears. Dugouts have gradually been replaced by plastic or wooden plank boats, which are cheaper to produce. Ruukel laments the lost skills, not just of boat building, but of handicrafts more generally. ‘We’re very quickly losing the knowledge of how to handle an axe, even to make firewood,’ he says.
Boat building
Building a dugout canoe requires a good trunk of an aspen (Populus tremula), which grows throughout the forests of Estonia. ‘Good’ means big enough and old enough – usually with a count of 80 rings – and straight as a pencil. Trunks must be healthy and checked for Phellinus tremulae, a parasitic fungus that causes heartrot, resulting in a hollow core that makes them unsuitable for building but an excellent home for the large-eyed Siberian flying squirrel. Once felled, the trees are peeled and shaped like a cigar using an axe or a chainsaw. ‘Even my teachers used a chainsaw 30 years ago,’ says Ruukel. ‘I don’t want to copy everything as it was done hundreds of years ago. Our boats are still handmade, we just use some modern tools.’ From here, the interior of the boat is carved out to give it shape. Ruukel works with an adze, an ancient tool like an axe but with a curved cutting blade set at a right angle to the handle, whittling the hull down to a few centimetres in thickness. A long log fire is then built alongside the canoe, which is filled with several bucketfuls of water and left to warm up. After a few hours, and once the water has evaporated, sticks are wedged into the hull lengthways to open it up. Aspen is a soft wood and a trunk half a metre across can be expanded into a metre-wide boat. It takes around six hours to spread the hull with longer sticks, watching out for emerging cracks in the wood and knowing when to stop or risk splitting the hull in two. The boat is then left to cool in the shade and is traditionally finished the following spring, once the wood has fully dried, when it’s given its final design and sealed with tar.
And yet, in recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in building dugouts, as reflected by the UNESCO designation. As a young man, Ruukel attended workshops led by two master boat builders, both in their 70s at the time. He hopes that by the time he’s 70 there will be more young people doing the same. ‘Maybe one day it will become something that a man feels he must accomplish in his lifetime,’ he says, ‘to build a traditional local Estonian old boat.
