by Stefano Caprio

While in Ukraine the conflict is entirely internal to Orthodoxy, on the shores of the Baltic Sea it is the great Christian traditions of all Europe that are vying for a small piece of land and a small people, on which the destinies of all others are concentrated. Among the battlegrounds is the historic Pjukhtitskij convent, located just twe

Estonia has long been on alert for a possible “new special operation” by Russia, similar to the one in Ukraine, which is still far from over.

The northernmost of the three states bordering the Baltic Sea, together with Latvia and Lithuania, has always been one of the sensitive targets of Russia's imperial ambitions. In the 16th century, it was attacked by Ivan the Terrible, when this area was called Livonia, with the explicit intention of imposing Russia as the “Third Rome” throughout Eurasia, from the Baltics to the last Tatar-Mongol khanates, from Turkey to Siberia.

In Narva, Estonia's main port, in the early 18th century, the young Peter the Great suffered his most humiliating defeat at the hands of the Swedes, commanded by the 15-year-old King Charles XIII, and to make up for it, the Russian emperor had to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives to build the new capital of St Petersburg in the evil lagoon a little further north, the New Rome that projected Russia onto the Baltic and the whole of Europe.

Now Narva marks the border point - of ukraina - between Estonia and Russia on the river from which the Estonian name of the city derives, which the Russians call Ivangorod, “Ivan's city”, in honour of the first tsar.

The armies of the two sides are deployed on the banks of the river, with a clear imbalance in favour of the Russians and growing fears on the Western side, considering that Estonia is part of the EU and NATO.

This was also the site of an important battle during the Second World War, after Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler, signed by foreign ministers Vjačeslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939.

The three Baltic countries were granted to Soviet rule, and when the Nazis decided to invade the USSR with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, it was the Estonians who were the most convinced supporters of Hitler's regime, hoping to free themselves from Russian oppression.

Today, in the event of an attack, they would proclaim the “liberation of the Estonians from Nazism” with even greater conviction than the Ukrainians.

Even more than Narva, the Russians claim the “Russianness” of the country's second city after the capital Tallinn, Tartu (Yuriev for the Russians, Dorpat for the Germans) on the Emajygi River, which according to ancient chronicles was founded by Prince Yaroslav the Wise, son of Vladimir the “Baptiser”, who later assumed the title of Grand Prince of Kiev and “unifier” of the principalities of Rus'.

Here, conflicts have followed one another throughout various historical periods, from the free republic of Novgorod to the Livonian Order of the Teutonic Knights, the Reczpospolita of Poland and Lithuania and the Kingdom of Sweden, up to the Russian Empire and the Socialist Republic of Estonia in the USSR.

The Soviets concentrated the best specialists in Slavic studies at the University of Tartu, above all the father of semiotics, Yuri Lotman, but also Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others.

The Estonian population is less than 1.5 million, yet ethnic percentages have great symbolic significance, with 25% of Russian speakers now increasingly being pushed to return to their homeland.

The Estonian language is of Finno-Ugric origin, spread across Europe from north to east and west, related to Hungarian and Basque, but the Russian language is difficult to eradicate from the cultural and social life of the population.

This is all the more so because, in addition to linguistic differences, religious differences also count for a lot, with the Russians' centuries-old claim to impose Orthodoxy on a people who were greatly Latinised by the Teutons and therefore mostly entrusted to the free Christian profession of the Lutherans, who reached Estonia as early as 1523, six years after Martin Luther's theses on indulgences.

For these reasons, Estonia is the scene of an “atomic” confrontation between Christian denominations, in some respects much more dangerous than that of nuclear warheads.

While in Ukraine the conflict is entirely within Orthodoxy, on the shores of the Baltic Sea it is the great Christian traditions of the whole of Europe that are vying for a small land and a small people, in which the destinies of all others are concentrated.

It is no coincidence that the last Patriarch of Moscow of the 20th century, Alexy II, predecessor and “tutor” of the current Kirill (Gundjaev), was an Estonian nobleman of Teutonic descent, as attested by his surname Ridiger, the “Baron Alexis von Rüdiger” who led the Russian Church from 1990 to 2008, bishop of Tallinn from 1961 to 1978, then metropolitan of Leningrad until his election as patriarch at the end of the Soviet era.

As patriarch, he wanted to grant the Estonian Church autonomy similar to that granted to the Ukrainian Church, which demanded autocephaly as an autonomous Church within the Moscow Patriarchate.

However, Estonia also had an Orthodox Church dependent on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, established in 1922 with a Tomos of autocephaly, which was later suppressed by the Soviets.

After the end of the USSR, this became a major source of contention with the Russian-Estonian Patriarch Alexy himself, anticipating what would happen in Ukraine in the following years.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Estonian parliament demanded that all Orthodox Christians in the country sever all ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, under penalty of suppression of jurisdiction, incorporating it into the autocephalous Constantinople Patriarchate. As in Ukraine, this process is provoking strong reactions and great confusion among the faithful.

A particularly striking case concerns one of the strongholds of Russian Orthodoxy in Estonia, the Pjukhtitskij convent, just twenty kilometres from the Russian border.

It was founded in the late 19th century on the site of a miraculous apparition of the Mother of God, called pjukhtitsa, which in Estonian means “holy place”; a kind of Russian-Estonian Lourdes where healings took place through immersion in the river waters, and where a farmer had found a miraculous icon of Mary with the Baby Jesus in a crack in an oak tree.

Even today, it is a destination for pilgrimages, which continued even during the Soviet era, when the monastery was the only female religious community permitted by the Moscow authorities.

Today, almost a hundred nuns live in the monastery, and the Tallinn Interior Ministry has recently described it as “the symbol of the Russian world in our country, where religion, nationalism and imperial nostalgia overlap”, insisting on the need to close it down permanently, which could indeed prompt the Russians to invade the Baltic country as well.

Igumena Filaretja, superior of the monastery, protested vehemently, saying, 'Think of your children, who have a good father, and they want to force them to accept another father who has lots of oranges in his fridge... Doesn't that seem like deception and betrayal to you? The nuns categorically refuse to break with Kirill's patriarchy, accused by Estonians of being one of the main inspirers of Putin's war.

The igumena insists that ‘we are not participating in any war, everyone knows that, many people follow our celebrations by connecting to our website, there is no need to come and visit us in person, listen to who we pray for, for peace throughout the world... We are not responsible for all the words of our patriarch, we just want to be faithful to our tradition.’

The 95 nuns live independently, working the fields and raising animals, with a large apiary for honey production, which is highly appreciated not only in Estonia and Russia. Yet they are relentlessly accused of ‘Russophobia’, as local Orthodox priests complain, to the point that The Telegraph published a long article entitled ‘Russia uses nuns as spies and propaganda agitators in Estonia’.

The priests of the Constantinople jurisdiction insist on the need to counter the heretical ideology of the “Russian world”, which characterises the “magisterium” of Patriarch Kirill.

Father Aleksandr (Sarapik), parish priest of the Church of the Transfiguration in Tallinn, where he celebrates the Orthodox liturgy in Estonian, tells Currentime the story of his vocation, when as a young man he sought answers to his thirst for rebirth in faith among Lutherans, Baptists and Catholics, until he felt truly welcomed only in the Orthodox Church, where he was ordained a priest in the 1980s in the Moscow Patriarchate.

When, in the 1990s, the local Orthodox split between Moscow and Constantinople, ‘we saw the world ignite in a new holy war,’ says Father Aleksandr, ‘as if we had returned to the Middle Ages in the crusades against the Muslims, and today Patriarch Kirill must answer for his words and actions before God.’

In Estonia, in the far north of Europe, people live in anticipation of a new apocalypse, praying in monasteries and churches in different languages, hoping that the Most High will understand all those who truly want peace.

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