Estonian researchers are mapping the country's fading garden-cottage heritage — the Suvila built across the Soviet era.
Built to strict Soviet rules, they stand apart from what came before and after, embodying both state leisure and private dreams.
Nearly 50,000 were built between 1950 and 1980. Now art historians from the Estonian Academy of Arts and ethnologists from the University of Tartu have joined forces to understand this heritage — what people built, and how they spent their time there.
"The privately owned summer cottage is a type of building constructed en masse during the Soviet era that shows how the state sought to create opportunities for working citizens to enjoy leisure time," said Epp Lankots, dean of EKA, on "Tähelepanu! Tegemist on teadusega."
Dagmar Ingi, head of rural architecture at the Estonian Open Air Museum, stressed the human-centered approach. "For me as an ethnologist, it is extremely important that we study the person and their relationship with their summer cottage," she said.
The researchers spend their summers across Estonia, talking to owners and documenting history. Interviews are free-form, closer to conversation than survey. They examine the whole property — garden beds, small structures, interiors — and spatial specialists measure and draw up plans. "We photograph them if people allow us to, inspect the interiors and draw up site plans so that, at some point, if someone wants to study this subject, all this material will have been properly preserved," Ingi said.
They also dig into archives for rare types, like terraced summer cottages. Owners bring out old photo albums, receipts and construction plans kept for decades — insight into everyday building practices and people's ingenuity.
The researchers approach every participant without prejudice. "For us, it does not matter what work they do or what kind of life they have lived. Every person's story is important, significant and interesting precisely as they have lived it," Ingi said.
The work is limited by time and the subjectivity of memory. Decades-old events arrive filtered through nostalgia, lending emotional color but diminishing factual accuracy.
The knowledge won't gather dust. "The aim of this project is actually to find a Soviet-era summer cottage that can be relocated to the Open Air Museum, where we can tell the story of a summer cottage built in the 1960s or 1970s, together with the story of the person who owned it, what they dreamed of and what they needed the summer cottage for," Ingi concluded.
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