Rauchsauna und der Süden

Tartu is where Estonia thinks. The university was founded by Gustavus Adolphus in 1632 and the town has been arguing with itself ever since. The National Museum is the surprise: a long glass wedge that rises out of the runway of a Soviet military airfield, deliberately pointing down the old flight line, holding the fullest account of Finno-Ugric life anywhere.

Lake Peipus is the fifth largest lake in Europe and the Russian border runs down the middle of it. The Estonian shore is a thirty-kilometre ribbon of Old Believer villages: one street, one row of houses, and behind each house a long barn where the onions dry. They have farmed this strip since the 1700s, kept the old liturgy, and turned onion-growing into something close to an identity. Lunch takes two hours and nobody hurries you.

Leelo is sung by women, in two parts, with a lead voice and a chorus that comes in underneath and holds. It is loud, close-harmony and slightly unnerving at a range of two metres, and it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2009. Once a year the Seto elect a regent, the ülemsootska, who stands in for a king said to be sleeping under a hill. This is presented entirely without irony and it is the better for it.

A smoke sauna has no chimney. You light the stove in the morning, the smoke fills the room and blackens the walls all day, and at dusk you clear the embers, air it out, wipe the benches and go in. The heat is soft and the air smells of birch and soot. Eda leads the rounds: a whisking, a rest, a plunge, repeated three times, with herbs and honey and nothing rushed. It is a healing ritual first and a wash second, and it is treated that way.