the summer island

Take a walk in the woods

Maarika Naagel bounds from plant to plant, stopping to examine a marsh orchid, point out the green berries of a juniper bush or to pick wood sorrel to add to the St John’s Wort, yarrow and wild thyme in her basket. ‘Even after 800 years of Christianity, we still have one eye on the forest,’ she says, threading wild strawberries onto a blade of grass, for future snacking. ‘Instead of going to church to pray, if we want to find peace, we go into the woods.’

A guide since 1980, Maarika takes people into the forests and along the craggy coastline of Muhu, to teach them about local flora and its many uses through history - from the rowan trees that are said to keep evil away to the necessity of home-pickling during the collective-farming days of the Soviet era.

Spend an hour in her company, and you’ll soon know which plants will cure a headache, and which will poison you. In the process, her guests find themselves slowly switching to island time. ‘You come here, you walk, you pick, there’s no need to rush,’ she says, handing over a bunch of primula with instructions how to make tea from it. ‘You soon see that Muhu has a special atmosphere. Everything feels different here. This is a place where even time rests.’

Make wine, drink wine

‘In the beginning, the islanders were a little surprised!’ says Peke Eloranta, popping open a bottle of sparkling wine. ‘But they’re OK now.’ The guesthouse and restaurant he runs with wife Ingrid are home to Muhu’s least likely enterprise: Europe’s northernmost winery. ‘This place belongs to Ingrid’s mother,’ he says, pointing to the red villa behind him, the words ‘Muhu is great’ chalked on one its walls, ‘I was here on the steps drinking a glass of wine one evening and looking at all the empty fields, and it made me sad that nothing grew here. So I had the idea – why not grow vines?’

He taught himself viticulture, crowdfunded some of the costs and planted his first vines in 2009. He now has 800, running off in neat lines towards the forest, the sea glinting beyond. ‘We are learning all the time,’ he says, ‘but come back in five years and the vines will be singing!’ What brings most people to the farm is not an interest in viticulture so much as an interest in drinking the product.

Throughout the summer, Peke and Ingrid run feasts on the lawn overlooking the vines. Guests sit down to dinner at a long table beneath a string of festoon lights and fishing nets. The highlight, produced just as the sun begins to drift behind the trees, is a leg of lamb that’s been cooked all day over an open fire.

‘I calculated that this place needs a new kind of spirit,’ says Peke, ‘We don’t want to be like a manor or château – we are a farm. We are easygoing and we don’t worry about etiquette, but the food and the wine is top quality. It suits the pace of life on the island very well.

Catch a fish

It takes half an hour to drive from one side of Muhu to the other, which means an afternoon here is all it takes to become fully familiar with its features: the forests in which lurk wild boar, elk and roe deer; the meadows over which swoop hawks and barn swallows; the quiet gravel lanes lined with wildflowers and thatched wooden farmhouses; and beyond them all the bright blue sea.

Down one such lane lies a small harbour, and the boat shed of Tarmo Korv. Several boats dip and bob in the waves, the neighbouring island of Saaremaa visible across the channel behind them. Born in a house just up the road, Tarmo has been a fisherman all his life, as his father and grandfather were before him, spending long months out at sea, but always returning to Muhu.

‘I tried living on Saaremaa for a bit, but I came home,’ he says, smoothing down silver hair whipped by the rising wind. ‘I’ve seen so many faraway countries, but Muhu is the very best place,’ he says with a laugh. ‘If I didn’t think that, you wouldn’t find me here!’

Tarmo is recently returned from a fishing trip and stands in the shade of a tree, checking over his nets and taking calls on his mobile about the day’s haul. People used to come to the harbour to buy their fish, but Tarmo and the 10 or so other fishermen on the island opened a fishmongers in the main town of Liiva a few summers ago, and their catch is now taken there to be sold.

At any time of day, a long line snakes out the door, customers queuing for Baltic herrings, perch and flounder. Some fill bags with pickled or smoked fish and Muhu’s distinctive black bread from the neighbouring bakery and head down to Koguva, a wide harbour round the bay from Tarmo’s. Here they sit with legs dangling over the quayside, staring out at the old wooden fishing boats hoisted on to the shore and the waves beyond, enjoying their spoils with the smell of salt hanging in the air.

Visit your neighbours

There are two ways to get from Muhu to the islet of Kõinastu: you climb into a trailer and have a tractor pull you across through the water, or you strip down to your pants and wade over. Its inaccessibility proved its downfall, and has ensured its preservation as a place where time passes even more languidly than on Muhu.

‘Forty of fifty people lived here from the 17th century to the early 20th century,’ says Kadri Tüür, stopping to scoop up a tiny pale octopus from the clear water. ‘But they all left. There’s no transport, no electricity and no running water. If you wanted to send your kids to school or listen to the radio, you had to move.’

Once on the other side, with trousers back on, the visitor finds an island just 600m by 1,200m wide, ringed by a pebbly shore and crossed by a couple of overgrown tracks. A professor of semiotics at the University of Tartu on mainland Estonia, Kadri has spent time conducting fieldwork on Kõinastu, talking to the ancestors of former residents, and discovering a wealth of local cultural knowledge, from ways to predict the weather to songs known only here.

The farmsteads that made up the village still stand, and there’s a wooden windmill too, sail-less and bald. The barn that was turned into a cinema by the Soviets, and showed only Soviet war films, also remains. The islanders have found a way to return to the abandoned farms, reclaiming them as summer cottages. At one, a cheery gentlemen comes out to show Kadri grainy black-and-white photos of his grandfather standing in the same garden at the turn of the century.

His own children race past, ready to spend the day in a way that would be immediately recognisable to their predecessors: hunting fossils on the beach, spotting sea eagles and oyster catchers, following wild-boar tracks through the woods, or simply dozing with a book in the shade of a rowan tree.

Make something

There are three smiling scarecrows at the gates of Männiku Käsitöötuba, welcoming you down the long drive to the back garden. Here, Sirje Tüür spends her days in a light-filled studio that her husband built for her, returning to their house, she jokes, only to sleep.

Sirje moved to the island from Tallinn 14 years ago – and almost immediately got crafty. Muhu is particularly known for its traditional embroidery, and Sirje threw herself into the artform, despite having no prior impulse to do so. ‘If you live on Muhu,’ she says with a laugh, ‘anything that is creative inside of you will come out! If I lived anywhere else, I would not do such crafts.’

Examples of her work line the studio, amongst reels of cotton, rolls of fabric, chalk markers, clippers and measuring tapes. There are leather shoes with embroidered tongues, woven rugs still on the loom, blankets and slippers with poppies, strawberries, cornflowers, wheat and margaritas – all the colours of a Muhu summer captured in thread.

‘There are different periods in the history of embroidery here,’ says Sirje, pulling a needle through a piece of cloth. ‘Traditionally, brides were expected to prepare something for their wedding guests, and a blanket for the marital bed and the carriage to take them to church. Their grandmothers, mothers, sisters and friends all helped, and still it took six months to make it all.’

To keep the craft fresh and relevant, Sirye finds modern inspiration everywhere on the island: from nature, the islanders themselves and other craftswomen. Her reputation is sufficiently far-reaching that she has a student from Japan spending the summer with her, learning something of her skills.

‘What brings me joy is that people come from so far and my art makes them happy. I can’t really consider it work,’ she says. ‘This island to me is paradise,’ she says with a final, conspiratorial laugh. ‘I must be careful though - if word gets out, everyone will want to move here.’

Respect the ancient ways

‘I am an old soul,’ says Martin Kivisoo climbing into the trap of his carriage. ‘I think I’ve probably been here on Earth before.’ With a gentle flick of the reins, his horse trots off, the cart juddering behind it along a sun-dappled forest track.

Martin’s main business is overseeing his farm, tending to the cows and horses that mill about the fields surrounding his thatched house. ‘During Soviet times, there was a law that you could not own your own horse because then you are capitalist,’ he says, ducking beneath the branches of an ash tree. ‘Everyone else got used to the fact that you didn’t own horses, but I always wanted my own.’

He now has 240, making his one of the biggest horse farms in Estonia. His interest in preserving island culture stretches much further back than the Soviet era. ‘People have been living on Muhu for over 3,000 years,’ he says, white hair fluffed by the breeze. ‘There are 65 ancient cultural sites here connected to those old times, and they’re still in use today.’

Martin takes people out to a few of them, sharing his knowledge of pagan beliefs and rituals, of old healing practices and cultural ceremonies.He stops by a meadow and walks a trampled path through wildflowers to a limestone boulder, its surface mottled with lichen. ‘Before Christian times, people believed fairies controlled the energy of places,’ Martin says pulling a handful of oats from his trouser pocket. ‘When our ancestors started to build roads or stone walls or houses, they had to make a sacrifice to the road fairy or the field fairy or the house fairy.’

He demonstrates with an elaborate ceremony, offering the oats as a gift to thank the fairies. They join a pile of 30 or so coins left in a rain-filled hollow on the boulder. ‘It is a favourite place of people who live on Muhu,’ says Martin. ‘Some go to church on a Sunday and some come to the rock.’

As he turns back through the meadows, a large copper butterfly flits across his path, and a fox barks sharply from among the trees. The grey clouds of morning have lifted, and the skies are blue and glorious. ‘See,’ says Martin with a wink. ‘The fairies are happy we came.’

Feast

Albert Veenendaal stands in the stone-floored kitchen of Nami Namaste and ties a fat fillet of locally reared beef with string. Behind him, Flynn the dog stands at the doorway and peers in, desperately attentive. ‘We Dutch are traders,’ says the chef. ‘We go for the best price. But Muhu people would rather take less and it’s the best quality than the other way around.’

Dutchman Albert has been a chef at Nami Namaste guesthouse for 10 years, arriving from his home in Tallinn each summer, to prepare with owner Sikke Sumari the best local recipes using the best local ingredients. ‘I didn’t used to understand why people would rush to the island from Tallinn on a Friday night, spend hours queuing for the ferry, have a day here and go back again.’ He smiles. ‘Now I understand.’

He leads the way through the garden to a field of raised beds containing dill, cucumber, rocket, rhubarb, pak choy and strawberries. ‘Our garden is the heart of what we do,’ he says, offering the tips of some tenderstem broccoli to try. ‘It dictates the menu. You eat here and you can taste that the vegetables were plucked two hours ago.’

That menu is eaten by the fire in the thick enveloping walls of the old cottage, or outside under apple trees lit by festoon bulbs. Diners share stories from their day as Albert and Sikke appear with a constant stream of jokes and dishes – home-baked bread, Baltic herring topped with breadcrumbs, radish salad, beef rubbed with pastrami salt.

Sikke, a chef of some fame in her native Finland, has been on the island since 2001 and slowly repaired the old buildings that make up Nami Namaste, turning the old blacksmiths into a sauna, the piggery into the kitchen, and reinstating all the tin roofs that were once outlawed by the Soviets as too potent a symbol of local culture. ‘Maybe people think that it is good that someone is looking after these old buildings,’ says Sikke, ‘To feel like an islander, that takes time, but I think they respect what we do here, and we are a community.’

Checking that all her guests are well fed and happy before they waddle back to their rooms, nightcap in hand, Sikke says, ‘Food is part of the tradition on Muhu. And we at Nami Namaste are part of that now too.’ She leans down to feed a grateful Flynn a tiny chunk of bread. ‘Everyone feels like they come to Muhu and they are in an embrace,’ she says. ‘The island is a real treasure in that sense.’