I Never Saw A Zombie Dwarf in Kuremäe

To all of the lovely residents of Kuremäe: I just want to say, um, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell the world that you were Ground Zero for a zombie invasion. On the other hand, this is probably the most exciting thing to happen in your village since that painting appeared in an oak tree. So you know, yes, I’m sorry but also, you’re welcome.

I found Kuremäe on the Baltic Trails website as the start point for Day 34 with a twice-a-week bus from Tallinn. Every Monday at 5 am, the #198 leaves Kuremäe and trundles on up to Tallinn. I don’t know what it does while it is here, maybe some shopping or visiting family at the bus station? Then, at 17:25 (5:25 pm for the holdouts and the Americans), the 198 doesn’t bother to change number but just heads back home to Kuremäe, arriving about 8:30 in the evening, after everything has closed.

This means that if you wanted to visit Kuremäe by bus, you would be trapped there until the bus trundled back up to Tallinn on 5 am on Friday morning. The question was: is there enough to do in Kuremäe to make it worth staying?

The short answer is Yes. Once you know where to look, you’ll discover that Kuremäe is pretty amazing, with healing springs and a sacred hill and an ancient oak and a beautiful convent and zombie dwarves.

There’s no tourist information center in Kuremäe and almost nothing on the tourist sites. The English Wikipedia page offers a single sentence:

The footnote goes to the 2014 edition of the classification of Estonian administrative units and settlements, which does not sound like thrilling reading.

To find out more about the village, you need to focus on Estonian-language sites and use Google Translate to find out what’s there.

I have a love-hate relationship with Google. They read my email, they watch everywhere I go and they send me creepy messages. When I was on the way to Narva, Google kept sending me messages: “If you turned around now, you could be home in 43 minutes!” Like it knew something that I didn’t.

Nevertheless, I was surprised when Google Maps decided it didn’t like the 198 bus. Why not? The bus is recommended on the Baltic Trail site, it’s listed on the Visit Estonia site, and I even checked the Ekspress website, which lists the full timetable, Tallinn to Kuremäe and back again.

But Google was like, Nope. I’m not helping you plan this trip because this bus is a figment of your imagination.

A quick phone call to Ekspress to check the bus schedule did not go well. The person on the other end regretfully informed me that Google was right and their website was out of date. The #198 bus was no more. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-bus. I could, however, take a train to Jõhvi and a bus from there to the village, three times a day.

Google agreed that the Jõhvi-Kuremäe bus definitely existed. We were back in business.

So score one for Google. And Google also allowed me read the Estonian Wikipedia page, where I discovered that Kuremäe had a lot going on than the English page implied.

The village has a population of 270 people, most of whom are nuns. There’s a convent there, a Russian Orthodox Nunnery built near the holy hill. A 16th-century Lutheran shepherd was hanging out by the healing springs when he saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, beckoning him to climb up the sacred hill.

He didn’t. Not right away. He got his mates to come with him a few days later. They climbed the hill to the ancient oak–already ancient in the 16th century, apparently–which had folded itself around an icon. A painting of the death of the Virgin Mother was preserved in a cavity in the wood.

This was clearly a miracle, but they were Lutheran, so they didn’t believe in icons. They gave the painting to some Russians who were happy to claim the miracle for themselves. The Russians built a wooden chapel next to the tree and later established the convent to celebrate the death of the Mother of God.

Now, if I were a nun, I’m not sure I’d think of that as welcoming. “Hey, come settle here! We like dead women. Especially virgins.” But it worked. Today, the convent is the largest Orthodox community in the Baltics.

The hill became known as Pühitsa, “the consecrated place”. To be fair, it was already considered sacred before they built the chapel. The hill is said to have been created by Kalevipoeg himself.

Kalevipoeg is a famous Estonian giant hero, whose famous deeds are chronicled in the landscape of Estonia. He was the son of Kalev and Linda. Kalev was said to have been an ancient Finnish ruler and although Linda sounds like a divorcée from New York, the truth is that she hatched from an egg, which is much more believable.

The story goes that Kalevipoeg became bored of Russia and went to Kuremäe. There, he dug a ditch in order to pile the dirt into a mountain where he could rest his weary head. That “mountain” is the sacred hill and the ditch filled with water, becoming Lake Konsu, and the oak tree grew from where Kalevipoeg’s walking stick struck the ground.

Kalevipoeg is credited with creating a lot of mountains, but actually, the highest mountain in Estonia is Suur Munamägi, the Great Egg Mountain. Suur Munamägi has an elevation of 318 meters, which is just over a thousand feet. One thousand feet is the minimum that a mountain needs to be considered a mountain by geologists. So Estonia barely has one actual mountain, which is tiny in mountain terms. All the rest are hills.

I think about this a lot. If the mountains are hills, then was Kalevipoeg really a giant? Or was he normal sized, maybe taller than the dwarves, and just really proud of himself, piling up hill after hill and telling everyone, “Look at my mountain!”

Anyway, on the top of this hill is the sacred oak, a short and squat thing, nine metres in diameter and 17 metres high. It does not look healthy. Some caring soul has put a fence around it to stop pilgrims from peeling the bark off. The oak is said to be magical: the last tree of the Old Forest, like something out of the Lord of the Rings.

Which brings me to the Zombie Dwarves. If you look at the Estonian Wikipedia page for Kuremäe and ask Google Translate to put it into English, you’ll find two references under See Also: Kuremäe Dwarf Cemetery and Wooden Leg.

Wooden Leg isn’t as interesting as you might think. It is a literal translation of another village in the area. The name sounds a bit silly but, quite frankly, it’s no worse than Deadhorse, Alaska or Scratchy Bottom in Dorset. My mother lives near Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, so to be honest, a village called Wooden Leg does not excite me.

A Dwarf Cemetery, though, now that’s interesting.

Google Translate is pretty confident about its translation:

Kuremäe kääbaskalmistu is certainly the Kuremäe something cemetery, so it seemed sensible to look up the middle word, kääbas. It has a Wikipedia entry but Google Translate still thinks that page should be titled “A dwarf”.

If someone, someone who wasn’t me, someone who actually wanted to find out the truth, were to read the whole page, then truly, the photographs would be a good hint that kääbas is the Estonian word for barrow. There are barrows all over Eastern Estonia, remnants of the Votians, farming people who lived in this area from the Middle Iron Ages to the 11th and 12th centuries.

But I didn’t actually want to find the truth, so I focused on the disambiguation note at the top of the page:

Now here is an Estonian word that I already know, although I think home walker is a better translation than home visitor. The kodukäija are a type of undead related to the German Wiedergänger, literally “one who walks again”. In other words, if I assume that the dialectal form is correct, this is a cemetery for zombies.

That’s at least as logical as a cemetery for barrows, isn’t it?

I decided that I would break the story of the dwarf zombies as my true story for Tell Me A Story, a stage show in which five people tell the truth and one tells a lie. It was surprisingly easy to find more evidence for my theory.

This is my script from the show that Friday night; you’ll just have to imagine me standing on stage and talking too fast:

Now, I will stand by that: every single word I said could be backed up with citations from Wikipedia as long as you stuck to the Google Translate version of the Estonian pages.

I keep telling people that they should not rely on Google Translate for information. If this doesn’t convince them, nothing will.

Also, I’ve been reading about the idea that in creative nonfiction, truth is more important than just a recitation of facts. Many writers, including Hunter S Thompson and Neil Gaiman, talk about how facts can get in the way and that it is the greater truth that matters. What I did with my story for the stage show was (I hope) to show how focusing on facts can actually move us away from the truth.

Note that I never said that there were zombie dwarves, just that I found a lot of proof on Wikipedia that they existed and could be found somewhere on the convent grounds. I was very clear that I was disappointed that I never saw one.

I concede that there was no direct reference to nuns protecting us from the undead but once we start into conspiracy theories, then a lack of information can become its own truth. I tried very hard to find the barrows, which clearly do exist, but once I was at the convent, I could find no reference at all, as if someone wanted to hide their existence. Add to that the fact that the convent was allowed to practice uninterrupted through the Soviet regime, and it is an easy conclusion that these two facts are related. If you’ve seen Good Omens, you know exactly the type of religious order I am thinking of, charged with a mission to contain and control (or protect) the supernatural beings.

There’s a serious theory, by the way, that the painting of Mary was from a Votic forest chapel, those same people who built the barrows. The oak tree, just a sapling at the time, had grown through the chapel ruins and around the painting, preserving it for hundreds of years. This seems to me to be just as much a miracle as a shepherd seeing the Virgin Mary.

After the stage show, a number of people approached me to say that they had never been to that part of Estonia, that they had never even heard of Kuremäe, but now that I’d told them about the place, they were planning a trip to the village and the convent.

I can only imagine that sleepy village filled with Buffy-the-Vampire-Hunter fans searching for the secret site of the last remaining Zombie Dwarves. The people of Kuremäe are not going to know what hit them.

If the Estonian Tourist Board had any sense, they would hire me to do all of their marketing.