The Statue in the Tunnel
Central Tallinn has one fewer infamous monument since I last visited the city 15 years ago. But to my surprise, the Old Town has a statue of an unknown homeless man.
It wasn't one of those real-life wintertime statues I had stumbled across, as happened one frigid January in Moscow in 1994, and, to my horror, a second time in February 1996. Nor had I misidentified the Sean Connery statue, a relatively new (and completely incongruous) Tallinn landmark, which can also have a grizzled hobo-like look.
We were 10 meters underground inside Harju hill, and technically the homeless statue was a mannequin in a museum exhibit in a labyrinth of tunnels. Now the tunnels can be accessed only on a guided tour from the Kiek in de Kök Museum, but from 1991 to 2007, the passageways had been home to a community of 30 homeless people.
I was more intrigued than I had been at any time during my return to Tallinn - at not just the fact that people lived here by lamplight for so long and so recently, but that the city had chosen to commemorate them.
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Becoming obsessed with one unconventional statue in a tunnel is somewhat of a departure from the usual articles about Tallinn, and my editor in Paris pleaded with me not to file a story on it.
I should point out quickly here that Tallinn has probably never looked better.
In the last three days, my wife and I had experienced a glut of old culture and new features. Stone ruins and wooden churches were now surrounded by nearly 30-story financial towers, a bold modernist update to the Gothic spires of the famous skyline. There was now a building with a funny cubical hat named after a 1920s industrialist. The KUMU museum was absolutely beautiful, carved out of a limestone cliff and seemingly inlaid with oxidized copper. We goggled at the architecture along Pikk street as we had in '97, but this time we also visited hip cafes in North Tallinn as the New York Times bade us do, and sought out SPA treatments (capitalization theirs).
We dined, of course, exclusively on New Nordic cuisine. As the coup de grace, a restaurant laid out dainty mounds of elk caviar and cold-smoked salmon on a bed of rye chips and semolina foam whipped with what we were told was sea-buckthorn-scented nitrous oxide.
The whole time, our laptops were out and we were using WiFi, which was free, to converse.
But something was missing.
Here in the tunnel, was semiotic confirmation of that, acknowledgment of a down-and-out subculture that had all but disappeared from the stony streets of the above-ground city. Meeting the statue of the unknown homeless man - a semi-official representation of a recent, ephemeral and completely uncommercial past - was even rarer than, say, seeing the odd street sign with Russian on it. It was like seeing an accidental slip of the mask. And it made me wonder. Could there still be people living in the farther reaches of the tunnel system?
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In 1997, just before my plane touched down at Tallinn airport, the wheels seemed to come precariously close to the roofs of summer cottages where squatters tended allotments. In the city center, there were no Schengen-era Roma yet, but a white-haired old woman sat begging near Vesiveski cafe (now the "Savoy"). I gave her a five-kroon note, which now seems unforgivably shabby of me. Rather than heading to, say, the Ararat liquor store across from the Sõprus cinema, the woman walked into the cafe and bought a large bag of pastries for that five kroons. She thanked me. And gave me a pastry.
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I left a five-euro note for the statue of the unknown homeless man in the tunnel.
He didn't say anything. Nothing that can be reproduced in writing. But, in a nod to multimedia and interactivity, the statue emitted a rattling, tubercular cough and other noises as our group filed on past.
The sound effect was unsettling, and the word gratuitous also crossed my mind. But I gave the curators the benefit of the doubt, reasoning that the homeless suffered from respiratory ailments and that they must have been a gruff bunch, living in a 7-10 C environment.
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It was probably natural that tourism would eventually reach the tunnels below the Old Town - passageways built by the Swedes in the 17th century - because they have never been used for their intended purpose.
They never saw military use. Tallinn fell to the Russians in 1710 without much of a fight.
They were later used as a bomb shelter. In March 1944, the tunnels saved the lives of hundreds of Tallinners during Soviet air raids.
Estonian punks hid out from the militia there in the late Soviet period. Then in 1991, the previously homeless found a home there.
Sentimentality for any of these events has no place. The true kings of the tunnel are European cave spiders, a rarely seen species living in a deeper area of the tunnel system. They are under strict protection. If the cave spiders say no to further exploration, they will probably get their way. If there is a 6-kilometer tunnel that leads all the way to Pirita, as rumored, the cave spiders will probably be found guarding the entrance.
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Can you learn something about a city by the way it depicts its lowliest inhabitants? I have no idea how to respond to such a pretentious-sounding question. But certainly our tour of the tunnels parallels aspects of above-ground Tallinn - the semi-darkness for one thing. And the fast pace of life, which hasn't changed in 15 years.
Above ground, people still hurry on their way purposefully, on their way to stimulate the economy, with a fixed stare. No one sings while walking down the street - the singing revolution isn't a perpetual revolution in that sense. Girls who have dyed their blond hair black for some inexplicable reason still provide blank, inscrutable service in many cafes. You wonder if you have done something to inconvenience them, like arriving just before closing, and then you look at your watch and it reads 15:00. Like the black hair, it's a mystery.
Below ground, the tour is rushed. The guide is pleasant but perfunctory. There is a flutteriness and tension that makes it difficult to enjoy the moment. It's almost as if our guide is telling us, "hurry on, nothing to see here," even as she points out what is interactive about the exhibits. It is a strange dissonance. Yet here and there are offshoots that lead left or right.
The guide is concerned for our safety. She warns us about the treacherous steps hewn by Swedish soldiers, but there's nothing dangerous about them and we have a more difficult time with the steel grating on the next flight of steps.
There's no time to read what the 1930s posters on the wall say. To linger here is to become separated from the group in an unexplored tunnel system inhabited by cave spiders.
At one stop, we sit on the benches in mid-tunnel and watch a film, made in a silent movie style, about children who enter the tunnels to find a lost cat. Spectral images glow and bony skeleton fingers clutch keys, and the past comes to life - at the same time that it withers in the minds of those watching.
It doesn't fill you with a sense of wonder and mystery to sit on a bench in the dark watching kids on a secret adventure. Not when you're actually in the dark and secret place. You want to go off and have an adventure, and look for spiders, or that passageway that leads all the way to Pirita convent, even if you don't find it. It's a failure on the part of the museum to understand human psychology.
My wife and I discussed what would happen if we separated from the group and went off looking for the Pirita tunnel. There was a partially water-filled tunnel leading off to the north.
My wife said that a motion detector would probably detect us and our adventure would not last very long.
Maybe we could use the lost cat excuse also, I say, lamely.
Excuses didn't work earlier in the day at a SPA, where we had not been allowed to leave because our electronic bracelets had become caught in the machine. We received a lecture, and dirty looks from girls with black-dyed hair.
I wonder what the 30 homeless people talked about down here, and were they frustrated by the bracelet-eating machines of their time? Or did they only cough and mutter? If they only coughed and muttered, then they must have been reduced to it by the system, I say peevishly, to no one in particular.
I have decided that the 30 homeless people must have actually been a radical group of artists on the run from the establishment.
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We exit the tunnel in a different location, by Freedom Square. We have descended 15 meters over 600 meters of horizontal walking but we are still on the surface of the city. A giant cross glows in the distance, softly lighting falling snow. It is dinnertime, and time to go to F-Hoone again.
Pat Coudenhove is a Paris-based writer. He looks forward to returning to Tallinn in 2027.