School

Orthodox Education among the Swedes of Vormsi

The blossoming of Orthodoxy across the Baltic in the 1840s brought almost immediately in its wake a concomitant wave of school building and religious education. The Orthodox Church was, of course, aware that schooling was fundamental in its competition with the Lutherans, whose well-established network of educational institutions had already provided a springboard for comparatively high literacy rates in the region [1]. With another conversion wave in the 1880s, Orthodox schools acquired further significance in the eyes of the government as a potential tool for russification, with 493 schools in existence by 1900 across all three Baltic provinces. However, the strategy suffered numerous flaws. Throughout the period, schools often lacked their own buildings and had to be housed in rented accommodation that was rudimentary in the extreme. The teachers were mainly the clergy themselves, already overburdened with their parish duties: secular staff were paid a low salary and easily poached by private or state schools. While instruction was supposed to occur in Russian from the 1880s, practical reasons often meant that Latvian and Estonian were preferred as teaching languages. However, while the pre-eminence of Russian in schools drew (and continues to draw) the ire of local national movements, knowledge of the language could very much facilitate the imperial careers of graduates. In particular, those who had passed through the parish school system were often able to gain access to the priesthood and the teaching profession, thus contributing to the formation of the first generations of Estonian and Latvian intelligentsia [2].

Orthodox education on Vormsi, an island off the western coast of Estonia settled predominately by Swedish speakers, presented its own challenges, mainly that of language. Knowledge of Swedish was practically non-existent among the available corps of Orthodox clergy [3]. Following the conversion of around 500-600 islanders in 1886, the Church thus had to try and train clerics and teachers who not only could teach in Swedish, but also understand the rather distinctive Vormsi dialect. Thanks to the gossipy diaries of Jakob Vaarask (1862-1938), an Orthodox Estonian who first went to the island as a teacher and then became its priest, we have a detailed insight both into the tribulations of providing Swedish-speaking educators and the daily experience of schooling on the isolated isle.

The first priest to be sent was Father Nikolai Fedorovich Orlov (1838-98), who had gained at least some knowledge of Swedish two decades earlier during an abortive conversion attempt by the Swedes of Ruhnu, an even smaller isle to the south [4]. However, all acknowledged, including Orlov himself, that the choice was very imperfect. Orlov spoke even standard Swedish hesitantly and was totally at sea with the local dialect: several years into his ministry, he still had to converse through a translator. While he was an experienced and decorated educator, Orlov suffered from other deficiencies. He had no desire to be on the island: he went there as part of a deal with the bishop that he would be assigned to the larger and more prosperous parish of Paldiski (Baltiiskii Port) as soon as a replacement was found.

Then there was his personal life. Orlov was cantankerous and ill, plagued by ever-worsening rheumatism. He and his wife were separated, with her residing in Tallinn (Reval): if gossip is to be trusted, this was the result of Orlov’s love trysts. His wife’s absence deprived Orlov of vital support: other priests in the Russian Empire often depended on their wives for assistance with matters like teaching. Equally, as he was committed to supporting his estranged spouse financially, he found himself perennially in debt to his own parishioners, hardly raising his esteem on the island. His large brood of daughters and sons were no help [5]. Lonii (Leonid) Orlov once went on a drunken escapade and stole a horse from his father’s neighbours: Orlov senior nearly broke his hand administering a punitive beating and then exiled his dissolute offspring to Hiiumaa (Dago). Nikolai Orlov junior wedded a local woman, only to accuse her of being a prostitute and, together with his father, beat her up, an action that provoked furious scandal. Aleksandra and Olga, the priest’s flirtatious young daughters, generated endless salacious rumours. Finally, Orlov himself could command neither respect nor dignity: according to one account, he refused to regularly wash either himself or his clothes, thus presenting a visage that was dirty, dishevelled, and malodorous.

The others sent to the island were not much better. Kirill Wiebe (1865-?), an Estonian graduate of the Second Teaching Seminary in Tartu (Dorpat/Iureev), had to learn Swedish from textbooks in order to serve both as a psalmist and a teacher. Although he seems to have had some success establishing a choir, he was forced to relocate to the nearby mainland town of Haapsalu after he struck one of his pupils, the son of the church’s lay elder, hard enough to leave a mark during riotous wedding celebrations. Vaarask also claims that Wiebe was an unapologetic reveller whose habits verged on alcoholism. Grigorii Androsov (1867-c.1917) was a Russian born and raised in Finland. A mere nineteen years of age when he came to Vormsi in 1886, he had been educated in a Swedish school in Helsinki, but he seems to have lacked both teaching qualifications and any passion for pedagogy: on one occasion, he simply abandoned the classroom mid-lesson, leaving his pupils to run riot in the village, much to the displeasure of the inhabitants. Jaan Spuhl (1859-?), Vaarask’s brother-in-law, had nearly no knowledge of Swedish when he arrived on the island. Konstantin (Gustav) Kreek (1852-1916), the father of the famous composer Cyrillus Kreek, confessed years later that he had converted to Orthodoxy only to ease his career.

Finally, there was Vaarask, the son of a somewhat prosperous east Estonian peasant and a fully qualified graduate of Tartu’s teaching seminary. An abstemious vegetarian who abjured both drink and conjugal relations with his wife, he was energetic and ambitious when he arrived on Vormsi in 1889. Studying Swedish during an intensive two-month-long trip to Helsinki in 1890, he seems to have wielded the language better than his colleagues. Unlike the other clergy, he learnt from the activities of the local sectarian movement spawned in the 1870s by the Swedish evangelical missionary Lars Österblom: he quickly aped the practice of providing popular sermons in villages and the holding of an annual “children’s holiday” in the summer, both of which earnt him the suspicion of his superiors. When Vaarask became priest in 1894, he pushed the parish’s resources into these endeavours: the “children’s holiday”, initially a rather humble affair of sermons and gift-giving, became full-blown expeditions to the island’s most prominent height, complete with colourful gonfalons, icon processions, and full choral accompaniment.

However, he lacked subtlety. Although mimicking and adapting sectarian methods, Vaarask launched an energetic campaign, complete with police support, against their Sunday schools, replacing them with Orthodox equivalents. In an effort to seed Orthodox customs, Vaarask decided to encourage his parishioners to create “beautiful corners” in their homes, the place where Russian peasants put icons and candles for domestic worship: however, by his own description, this encouragement took the form of barging into people’s houses and forcibly installing the religious paraphernalia, regardless of the protests incurred. As priest, he was now in charge of the parish’s land and the income that could be drawn from it: this involved him in several long-lasting and bitter lawsuits with his parishioners. Finally, there was his own personality. Despite being of peasant stock himself, he viewed the islanders as barbarous savages and boors, complaining constantly about their laziness, hypocrisy, and greed. Island life bored him: once he acquired property in his wife’s home of Mäemõisa, he became increasingly interested in it rather than his parish, a fact that ultimately led to his expulsion from the Estonian Church in 1925 [6]. As a person, he was prickly, sententious, imperious, and phenomenally self-righteous: negotiation and compromise were not words he knew well. He treated his wife, the beautiful and ever-patient Helena, like a child, striking her or making her kneel in the corner when she ‘misbehaved’.

This, then, was the rather sorry bunch entrusted with educating the young of the Vormsi Orthodox. A parish school was built in the central village of Hullo by 1889, manned initially by Orlov and Wiebe. Upon his arrival, Vaarask headed an auxiliary school, first in the settlement of Förby and then in Fällarna. Androsov ran another auxiliary school in Sviby, but his lackadaisical teaching style (one parent complained his son, a pupil, did not know the answer to two times two) led to its closure in 1891 for lack of students, with Androsov transferred to the parish school. The teaching year at both establishments lasted from mid-October to mid-March, with a break over the Christmas and New Year holiday. This ensured the children would be free for agricultural work during the summer, but it left lessons vulnerable to Vormsi’s insalubrious winter weather. In the three years before he became the priest, the rather short schooling semester left Vaarask with very long (and fully paid) vacations, which he spent visiting friends and family on the mainland and learning Swedish in Helsinki.

The study week was supposed to be six days long, with half days on Saturday. The school day began at nine and concluded at three, with a one-hour lunch break at twelve. The school in Fällarna allowed some pupils from more distant villages to sleep over.

The curriculum at both the parish and auxiliary schools during Orlov’s tenure was limited to six subjects: religious lessons, Swedish, Russian, mathematics, singing, and (relatively seldom) gymnastics. An initial attempt to offer handicrafts to girls and young women in 1889 was stymied by Helena Vaarask’s early inability to speak Swedish. By 1900, however, Father Vaarask had significantly expanded the subjects on offer in the parish school, with lessons being given in Church Slavonic, drawing, geography, history, and science. Estonian was taught by Spuhl throughout his stay on Vormsi, perhaps because of his rudimentary Swedish or perhaps because of the demands of the island’s small Estonian population.

The class journals and Vaarask’s diary give us some glimpses into what was taught. Religious lessons usually encompassed the teaching of biblical history and explanations of key Orthodox rites and prayers (including the Nicene Creed): Vaarask once deprived his entire class of their lunch break for giggling as he tried to demonstrate how the children should make the sign of the cross when blessing themselves. Visits to Sunday services obviously complimented these lessons, as did Vaarask’s sermons: indeed, students were often obliged to attend the latter, where they received exhortations to avoid smoking and vodka and to ask their parents to give generously to the regular whip rounds he organised for the most impoverished of the islanders. In a rather touching scene at these donations, the little pupil Marie Alberg burst into tears because her brother had donated her family’s contribution and she had nothing to give: Vaarask returned the five-kopek donation to her so she could then place it into the collection, thus getting to share in the act of communal charity.  

Singing occupied an important place, since it allowed the children to participate in the choir and impress visiting state dignitaries. An avid bean-counter, Vaarask listed the 48 songs he had taught on Vormsi during the three years before his priesthood, a list he compartmentalises in terms of language (Russian or Swedish) and character (secular or religious). The song which seems to have received by far the most attention was the empire’s national anthem, God Save the Tsar, although the Swedish Vårt Land (Our Land, the basis of the modern Finnish national anthem) was also a popular choice. In the academic year 1899-1900, geography proffered knowledge on Vormsi itself, the Baltic Sea (especially the Russian littoral), the topographical features of the empire, and the continents and countries of the world. Science mostly focused on explaining frequently observed natural phenomenon (especially the weather), while history related the foundation of the Russian state. Mathematics, unsurprisingly, was dedicated to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

When it came to language, students were expected to learn to read, write, and speak both Swedish (in its high, rather than dialect, form) and Russian: they also had to translate (orally and in writing) from Swedish into Russian. All the other subjects could also serve as vectors for Russian teaching: for instance, pupils were obliged to describe mathematical sums in both Swedish and Russian. Whether any of them ever mastered the latter language is unknown, although perhaps the fragments they picked up served them well as adults when they, like many of the islanders, voyaged on trading trips to St Petersburg. None of the evidence gathered so far gives an indication about whether the island’s population appreciated or deplored the focus on Russian in their children’s education, although one young girl did start to bawl when she was told she would have to learn the language.

What is clear is that the education provided was aimed at giving the pupils a clear sense of themselves as both Orthodox believers and loyal subjects of the Russian state. We might also suggest that geography lessons perhaps gave the children an idea of their island’s place within the worlds of both the Baltic Sea and the Russian Empire, something that may have played a role as the Swedish minority began to assert itself during the first Estonian Republic. Contrary to the assertions of Swedish historians writing on Vormsi, Orthodox education obviously did not neglect Swedish in favour of Russian: the former had an equal number of hours dedicated to its study, along with the learning of Swedish songs (often surprisingly Lutheran and patriotic in character).

In terms of the pupils themselves, they were relatively diverse. At the Fällarna auxiliary school in 1890-91, we find that 27 boys and 20 girls were registered as Vaarask’s pupils. Of these, 24 were Orthodox and 23 Lutheran. Meanwhile, in the same year, the parish school had 13 registered learners, 6 boys and 7 girls. Absenteeism was also rife in the latter school. This rather peculiar situation, where the auxiliary school had more pupils and better attendance than the main parish school, is perhaps down to Vaarask’s popularity compared to the rage-riddled Orlov, the drunken Wiebe, the uninterested Androsov, and the almost monolingual Spuhl. This is the interpretation Vaarask pushes in his writings, although the church chronicle blames poverty (the islanders could not afford to properly equip and clothe their children) and a generally negligent attitude towards child-rearing for the low attendance.

The practice of accepting Lutheran children into such schools was widespread in the Baltic provinces and indeed was valued by the Church as a kind of missionary tactic: it generally did not cause issues on Vormsi, although Orlov, in one of his characteristic spasms of fury, once drove the Lutherans out of the classroom of the Hullo parish school. Quite what the Lutherans did during the explicitly Orthodox religious lessons (which were taught almost every day for one hour) is not stated. In distinction from the Orthodox, the Lutherans were supposed to pay for tuition, although Vaarask did on occasion waive the fees if the children came from families that were very poor or had recently suffered tragedy. Less charitably, Androsov barred all his Lutheran pupils from his short-lived Dviby school for collectively failing to pay their fees.

In terms of age, the pupils ranged from six to fourteen. This was the basis of a pedagogical problem widespread in the empire: given the range of ages in the classroom, teachers found that they often could not provide collective lessons and had to spend time coaching each individual. An effort was made to divide the class in the parish school into groups, but this meant the teacher was in effect fulfilling two or three different lesson plans simultaneously.

The auxiliary school on Vormsi did not have its own dedicated building, instead residing in rented rooms in the distinctive longhouses of the islanders. This led to some horrendous teaching conditions. The first classroom in Förby was situated in the house of Johan Öman, a trader with good connections in Finland: Vaarask’s tiny apartment was right next door. According to the rental contract, Öman was supposed to provide the classroom with heating, but he conspicuously dragged his feet over this. Teaching in the dead of winter, Vaarask had to heat his own apartment to extreme levels in order to share warmth with the classroom: this filled both the apartment and the classroom with smoke from the stove, but Vaarask could not open the windows or doors for fear of letting out what little warmth there was. Vaarask relates one instance where the ice that had formed all over the classroom walls melted, ruining the floors. A tiny stove, taken from one of the Vormsi boats, was finally provided, but it scarcely provided warmth. In the end, Vaarask acted without his superiors’ knowledge and rented new rooms in Fällarna: the Orthodox dean in Haapsalu complained that there was no guarantee the diocese would cover the increased rent, while Öman insisted that the Orthodox clergy had violated their promise to renew the rental contract and so threatened to complain to the civil authorities. When Vaarask and his wife held temporary classes in Diby, the village most distant from either the Hullo or Förby schools, for two weeks in 1892, they had to live in a tiny room full of farming equipment and a broken window: they were so cold they had to sleep fully dressed. “Thus we began to live like Laplanders”, remarked Vaarask. Even the parish school in Hullo, with its own building, suffered from heating problems: it was repeatedly closed due to a lack of fuel for the stove. It was expensive to import the fuel and parishioners were notably stingy when it came to providing this valuable resource.    

Vaarask’s diaries also occasionally give insight into how discipline was maintained in the classroom. The most frequent punishment for minor infractions (such as skiving) was deprivation of the lunch break and being forced to stand or kneel during the course of the lessons. Much more rarely, more serious chastisement was administered through caning with a rod. This was the fate that befell boys who shared tobacco out prior to entering the classroom and those who had attacked a classmate and severely injured his back. Both times, Vaarask made sure to summon the parents of those concerned and get their consent. Discipline was also extended over the teachers in the form of regular inspections by the Orthodox dean of Haapsalu, who could quite suddenly appear to quiz pupils, examine their written work, and check the school’s documentation.

Ultimately, the Orthodox parish of Vormsi dwindled to only a slight fraction of its original size following the Edict of Toleration on 17 April 1905: most of the convert islanders made use of their new privileges and returned to Lutheranism. What is damning in terms of the island’s Orthodox schooling is that many of these ‘apostates’ were people who had only been small children when the 1886 conversion occurred: in other words, they were people who had gone through either the Orthodox auxiliary or parish schools. In that sense, the schools failed in their most fundamental task: to solidify Orthodoxy’s position on the island. But this may have always been a fool’s errand: absolutely lacking in Swedish-speaking clergy or educators, the Orthodox Church had been forced to deploy a motley and barely qualified band to care for parishioners whose conversion had very little to do with conviction. Even the most talented and energetic of their number, Vaarask, had numerous personal and professional flaws that made him unsuited to leading an extraordinarily difficult and demanding missionary parish. These troubled clergy, mostly young and inexperienced, neither understood Vormsi nor really wanted to. All of this was only exacerbated by the same problems that plagued the Church’s educational system in the Baltic provinces and indeed across the empire.

Notes

[1] 95% of Estlanders and 92% of Livlanders could read in 1897, compared to 30% of the population in European Russia.

[2] See T. Shvak, ‘O formirovanii estonskoi pravoslavnoi intelligentsii i ee deiatel’nosti v XIX v.’ in I. Paert, ed., Pravoslavie v Pribaltike: Religiia, politika, obrazovanie 1840-e – 1930-e gg. (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2018), 271-285.

[3] Knowledge of Swedish was confined to those of the diplomatic clergy who served in Russian consulates in Sweden: however, they were hardly likely to sacrifice such prestigious and well-paid positions for the hardships of parish life on a remote island.

[4] See T. O. Tollefsen and J. M. White, ‘Navigating an Orthodox Conversion: Community, Environment, and Religion on the Island of Ruhnu, 1866-7,’ Scandinavian Journal of History (2021).

[5] Orlov had eight children in total, although only four spent any significant time on Vormsi: the others were fully grown and had jobs elsewhere.

[6] Vaarask was defrocked for violating those canonical rules stipulating the presence of the priest in his parish, a ruling he attempted to overturn by appealing to the Estonian government.

Author

James M. White

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