ERR continues to report on the Tehumardi monument:
After the Tehumardi war graves were buried last year, Saaremaa municipality also wanted to remove propagandistic symbols and texts from the Tehumardi sword. However, the texts on the monument are still there today, because the heritage protection authority and the Estonian Academy of Arts wanted to reinterpret the monument artistically.
Until last summer, there was a propagandistically designed burial place for Red Army soldiers on the Tehumardi, which was reburied last summer by the Estonian War Museum. However, the Tehumardi sword still bears the Red symbol and a text calling the Red Army the liberators of Saaremaa, according to the news agency “Aktuaalne kaamera”.
Liis Lepik, deputy mayor of Saaremaa, said it was embarrassing, but the municipality had no right to touch a monument of high artistic value.
“As the monument of Tehumardi is a monument of art, the situation has been such that we have had to coordinate all activities with the heritage protection authority, and EKA has played an important role here. So the municipality really has not had the right to act here,” Lepik said.
Jüri-Martin Lepp, adviser to the Heritage Board on art heritage, said there had been no delay on the part of the heritage board. “Discussions with the municipality as to who owns the monument really started last year. The decision was taken to involve the EAA in the discussions, because the EAA is currently working on a research project called ‘New Frames for the Monument’, which aims to deal with such a complex heritage and propose solutions,” Lepp said.
Last year, the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Estonian Heritage Agency organised a competition to artistically reinterpret the sword of Tehumardi. From three entries, a variant was chosen in which a wild grapevine would be planted along the pillar. However, there was a recent setback from the Environmental Protection Agency, which refused to allow the planting of a non-native forest vine or Saaremaa broom.
“So we can’t think of any such species, even native ones,” said Eike Tammekänd, head of the Environment Agency’s nature conservation bureau.
They wanted to go further with a piece of work whose keywords would have been words. The new design would have cost more than €20,000. It was hoped to get the money from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, but on Thursday it was turned down. Now Saaremaa municipality decided to help.
“At times, it seems that looking from Tallinn, perhaps the problem is not as acute as it is here in Saaremaa. And we feel really embarrassed that today it is really still there in this form on the Tehumardi monument. And in order to somehow remove this embarrassment, we have decided to install a temporary solution that would be as cheap as possible, but at the same time would not damage the monument itself. With this temporary solution, we want to move forward as quickly as possible. Hopefully we will be able to put it in place in the coming weeks,” said Liis Lepik.