Traces of battle and history

I saw it when scrolling around Viimsi on Google maps: Peeter Suure rannakaitsepatarei: Peter the Great’s beach battery, or something like that, anyway. I’ve followed random references to Peter the Great a few times here and generally been disappointed. Many of the “fortresses” turn out to be an unnatural slope of earth works on an abandoned piece of land. Perhaps if I were a student of Russian history, I would find these worth exploring but really, I find it hard to get excited.

This looked like more of the same. The map route had me turning off of the main street onto a dirt road with patches of asphalt still visible under the scrub. From here, the directions said to turn right onto an even smaller and more overgrown trail that ended up going directly up a hill. Probably the remains of Peter the Great’s fortifications in the area but impossible to get up, even with the trace of a single limestone step placed halfway up the slope. There was some sort of broken piece of wall and really, not much else.

As I had walked this far, I decided to keep going along the wider path; I could see that the grass was trampled down so it seemed worth finding out where it ended up. I found myself on a small street — I didn’t realise, but it was the same street I had started on, reducing in size and important as it turned the bend out of my sight. I was now in the village of Miiduranna, which appeared to be exactly like Viimsi.

More interesting was a sudden slab of concrete at the side of the road. I appeared to have found something.

The rough ground seemed to have concrete spouting all over it, cracked and spray-painted and tilting, looking like the post-apocalyptic scene of a great earthquake or maybe a bomb.

There was a sign in the distance in the middle of the grass, which turned out to be an explanation of the scene I had stumbled upon.

This was the location of one of the four-meter high star-shaped soil forts of Peter the Great, one of three built in 1726-1727 in the local area. Then in 1915, Battery No. 13 was built on the location as a part of a Russian marine fort and outfitted with four 130m cannons set on concrete bases. In 1918, the site fell to the Germans, who took the cannons and ignored the rest. This was the year that Estonia originally declared independence.

In 1922, it was renamed to Battery No. 7 and 120 mm cannons were put into place. In 1927-28, the Estonians planted spruce and willow trees to conceal the battery, which had a permanent guard of four recruits and one overtime recruit.

In 1941, the battery came under assault and was ruined. This led to the remains that I had found, a victim of both blasts and time.

I originally wrote this in 2019 and today I found my notes planning another trip to explore, including the start of an essay about the Viimsi frog who wants to be a dragon. I post it now as a public commitment: I will go back. And I will tell you all about the frog.