INCEPTION

Next to Southeastern Estonia the Russian state was born. And right here the Mongol Empire’s advance into Europe came to a halt.

The Seto village of Izborsk, today once again under the control of a neighbouring state, was one of the first towns of Russia. According to legend, Truvor — one of the three mythical Viking brothers who founded the Russian state — settled there. They and other Varangian Vikings of the Rus’ tribe arrived from Sweden across Lake Peipus and continued south along the rivers, eventually reaching the Black Sea. Alongside Novgorod, Pskov and Kyiv, Izborsk is one of the central places in the origin myth of the Russian state.

A few centuries later, when the Vikings had already merged with the Slavs, Mongol vassals from Novgorod and Pskov repeatedly launched raids from this very region — yet they never managed to advance permanently beyond it, and Europe remained untouched. Whether because of the complex terrain, strong resistance, or something else, the Russian state that began here also stopped here.
From the other direction, South-Eastern Estonia remained a frontier as well. In the centuries that followed, neither Germans, Poles nor Swedes were able to push much further east from here.

Conquerors from both East and West claimed these lands and then withdrew again, until the end of the last century. Through all those times, however, this has remained the permanent home of one and the same Võro-Seto people, who have lived here since the beginning of written history.

The lands of the south-eastern tribes also formed a triangular border between East and West in religious terms. Three major branches of Christianity meet here — Setomaa is Orthodox, Võromaa Lutheran, and Latgale in south-eastern Latvia Catholic. Today Latgale may seem somewhat distant from South-Eastern Estonia on the map, yet in earlier times these were also the settlement areas of the same south-eastern tribes. In north-eastern Latvia lived the Leivu, close relatives of the Võro, and further south, in the heart of Latgale, the Lutsi people — Setos who fled there in the 18th century to the Catholic stronghold to escape the Lutheran Reformation.

Today’s South-Eastern Estonia is smaller, framed by state borders. At the centre of the region — among old villages, fields and forests, on the banks of a primeval valley — lies the town of Põlva. Only a century ago this area consisted of the rural municipalities of Koiola, Kioma and Peri — place names that no longer stand out on the map. A major change came with the opening of the Tartu–Petseri railway in the 1930s, when the small and quiet borough of Põlva began to grow and develop much faster than its surroundings.

Yet Põlva’s central position at the crossroads of roads and cultivated lands is already visible on an 18th-century map, when only the old church and the manor stood here, on the bend of the Ora River. It is no coincidence that Jakob Hurt — Estonia’s great folklorist and linguist — came from Põlva. Today, next to that same church, stands a growing town well connected by railway, highways and the nearby Tartu Airport. Around it, South-Eastern Estonia remains what it has always been — at once wild and mystical, yet also inhabited, alive, and deeply infused with culture and history.

A borderland by its very nature means a divided identity, inevitable contact with the unfamiliar, intertwining with the other, and differences compared to the “core” areas. In South-Eastern Estonia this distinct identity and the closeness of the different and the foreign are still felt — despite the fact that today’s administrative borders are more rigid than in the past, when villages of different peoples stood side by side. South-Eastern Estonia is once again a civilisational frontier — the north-eastern edge of Europe, marked into the ground at the very last line with steel and concrete.