Mirja von Knorring never expected to find herself living in a thatched cottage on Muhu, a speck of an island off Estonia's western coast. A Cordon Bleu–trained chef and native of Finland, she visited a friend on Muhu a couple of years ago and came under the spell of its hamlets, juniper forests, and fields of wildflowers. "This is a fairy-tale place, so beautiful and isolated," she tells me and my boyfriend, Alex, as we admire the foxglove gardens at the B&B she now runs with her friend Pirkko Silvennoinen. "It reminds me of Finland when I was growing up."
When I started planning our trip, I was probably as in-the-dark as Mirja had been about Muhu and the neighboring isles of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa. The reason for the visit was in part personal: Alex's dad had fled Estonia for the U.S. during World War II, and Alex, a New York native who'd recently applied for and received his Estonian citizenship, wanted to finally see his father's homeland. Our plan was to fly into Estonia's impressively preserved medieval capital, Tallinn, and then head for the islands, which have remained largely unchanged since Alex's father was a kid.
Ironically, Estonians have their former occupiers to thank for any time-warped charm. The country was overrun three times: by the Russians, the Germans, and then the Russians again in 1940. When the Soviet Union finally incorporated Estonia, it turned Muhu, Saaremaa, and Hiiumaa into military outposts, leaving them cut off from the rest of the world until the country became independent again in 1991. The few locals who stuck it out during the decades of Russian control survived in the old-world way, fishing for pike in the chilly waters of the Baltic Sea and holing up in wood-fired saunas during the long winters.
Today, Estonia is quickly making up for its extended slumber—the country's residents just became the first in the world to cast votes by cell phone. But as with the summer sunsets that color the sky lemonade-pink until nearly midnight, offshore change is very gradual. Rather than build resorts, island hoteliers are converting centuries-old manor houses into inns, and chefs have opened restaurants devoted to native ingredients such as elk, herring, and juniper berries. (Mirja herself has contributed to Namaste, a cookbook of island dishes.) Prices, too, have remained astonishingly low, only a fraction of what they are on the Estonian mainland—a true bargain compared with the rest of Europe.
MUHU: THE TRADITIONALIST
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