Multimedia installation
To Return To Toila is the outcome of research into the history of the Estonian side of Olga Jürgenson’s family, who were pioneer migrants from Virumaa (Estonia) to the Volga area (Russia), where they started a farm on poor sandy soil in 1869. Thanks to their hard work and resilience the new migrants had thrived in Tsarist Russia; however they lost all their land and possessions after the 1917 Revolution. In 1920, when Estonia gained independence, they all applied for Estonian citizenship, but faced the tough decision on whether to go back to Estonia, leaving behind those in the family who were not granted citizenship, or stay in Lenin’s War Communism policy devastated Russia as a whole family. In his 1920 application for Estonian citizenship Olga’s great grandfather Eduard Jürgenson mentioned his aunt’s family living in Toila as his closest relatives in Estonia, but was totally unaware that his aunt’s husband Maddis Strauch, who took part in the 1905 revolution in Estonia, had moved his family into hiding in Ukraine in order to escape persecution, where he then died in an accident in 1909. Nor did Eduard know that Maddis’ son Engelbert Strauch, who had to become the breadwinner for the family at the age of 15, had joined the Bolshevik party in Tallinn and in 1918 led over 4.5 thousand people working 16 hours shifts at Tallinn’s Military Port preparing an ex-Russian Warship fleet for evacuation from Tallinn to Helsinki to prevent it’s capture by the advancing German army. Later that year Engelbert escaped to Petrograd, Soviet Russia.
And these are just a small part of the whole story…
This Saturday, February 15, everyone is invited to the opening of a new exhibition – Olga Jürgenson’s “Back to Toila” tells the story of her family. Olga Jürgenson was born in Siberia, grew up in Kohtla-Järve and has been living in Great Britain for the past twenty years.
