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The idea to publish a series of short articles on the history of Tartu came from my late colleague Aadu Must who urged me and my colleagues to profoundly think about the history of Tartu in 2024 and to also write a series of articles on that theme - after all, Tartu is the cultural capital of Europe this year. Moreover, this year marks the passing of 800 years since the city of Tartu was founded. This essay on the prehistory of Tartu is thus the first of a series of short articles, which will be published in this year's Tuna issues. The focal point of my essay is Toomemägi, where my latest archaeological excavations ended just a few months ago. From there, the story of Tartu before it became a town begins to unfold. The oldest archaeological find from Toomemägi, a flint scraper, dates back to the Stone Age. Several settlement and burial sites from this period, as well as stray finds, are known from both Tartu and its surrounding areas. The banks of the Emajõgi River provided suitable living environments for Stone Age hunter-fisher-gatherers since at least 8,000 years BC. During the Corded Ware culture period, in the third millennium BC, settlement and burial sites were established at some distance from the immediate riverbank, which might have been due to raising livestock and perhaps also grain cultivation. Our knowledge of habitation in the Tartu region in the Bronze Age is scant, and is based only on a few randomly discovered stone axes. Clearer traces of settlement, marked by potsherds with a striated surface, date back to a few centuries before and after the beginning of the Common Era. Fragments of such pottery have been found on Toomemägi and in various parts of Tartu's later downtown. They likely indicate the locations of farms. Remains of ancient fields found on Toome due to the ard marks visible on sand surfaces possibly date back to the same period. In the late centuries of prehistory, the establishment of Tartu developed or continued at a much livelier pace. Probably in the 8th century AD, a stronghold was built at the location of the current observatory. Nearby, on Toomemägi, there was a settlement area, which might even have been a pre-fortress. The village was located at the base of the hillfort facing the river. This phase of the settlement site might possibly have ended by the year 1030 as a result of a military campaign led by Grand Prince Yaroslav I of Kiev, which is documented in the Old Russian chronicle Tale of Bygone Years. After the conquest, the settlement site recovered and expanded. The stronghold and the presumed pre-fortress were rebuilt, and an even larger village was established once again at the base of the hillfort, on the bank of the Emajõgi River. A part of a building excavated last year on Toomemägi, which had been burned down, is likely also from this period. Presumably, this fire was part of a conflagration caused by the Sosols' military campaign described in the Russian chronicle in 1061. This ended the Kievan Rus' era in Tartu, which lasted three decades. The subsequent period in Tartu, until the beginning of the 13th century, is characterised by very limited knowledge and requires in-depth archaeological investigations in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, answers are sought to the questions of which aspects of emigration the press paid most attention to, which sources were used in reporting on emigration, and what the message of the published texts was. The way the press reacted to emigration is examined, as are the way attitudes towards potential and actual emigration took shape, and whether and how the reporting of emigration in the newspapers changed over time. Emigration from Estonia to the Black Sea coast, which started in the 1880s, took place simultaneously with several other important processes: modernisation and one of its manifestations, urbanisation, weakened people's ties to the community, while the ideologues of the National Awakening emphasised the nation's strong ties to its homeland. National ideologues considered the homeland sacred and therefore leaving the homeland was seen as being reprehensible. The Black Sea coast was not the first emigration destination for Estonians: they had already migrated to Central Russia, Crimea, and North Caucasus starting from the 1860s. Therefore, by the 1880s, when emigration to the Black Sea coast began, the Estonian press had already been familiar with the topic of emigration for several decades. As with earlier waves of migration, the attitude towards the migrants to the Caucasus was negative: they were accused of betraying their homeland, as well as laziness and stupidity. The press used hypertrophic descriptions of the emigration destinations to ridicule emigrants who were insufficiently informed about the natural conditions that awaited them there. The press eagerly recorded the plight of those who had found themselves in serious trouble in the Caucasus due to their lack of knowledge. Dramatic descriptions were published of the return to the homeland of those who could not cope abroad and swindlers, who took advantage of the inexperience and lack of information of emigrants, were exposed. Yet when the settlements along the Black Sea started flourishing, the press could not hide the fact that many settlers had done very well: villages had been built, and agriculture was making good money. The press gradually began publishing letters from settlers reflecting conditions in the settlements in a neutral and fact-based manner. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new, liberal attitude towards emigration emerged in the Estonian press: blaming of emigrants ended, replaced by justification of their decisions. Before the outbreak of the First World War, articles were already published in the Estonian press comparing the Estonian diaspora to the diasporas of other nations. A vibrant diaspora was seen as playing a positive role and understood as contributing to the continuation of the nation on a global level: the nation's home is in both the historical homeland and the diaspora. When the First World War broke out, followed by the Bolshevik revolution, the Estonian settlements in Russia were soon cut off from their motherland by the Estonian-Soviet Russian border. The settlements did not receive new residents from Estonia, and the organic connection between the motherland and the diaspora communities was broken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study focuses on third grade pupils' (9 to 10 years old) ability to predict their performance in a given task and on the correspondence between the accuracy and adequacy of the predictions on the one hand, and the academic achievement on the other. The study involved 713 pupils from 29 Estonian schools. The pupils' performance predictions about a short-term memory recognition task and their actual scores were used to specify differences in prediction errors and the correspondence of these errors with academic achievement. In line with earlier research, the results indicate that low performers often overestimated themselves and their predictions tended to be most inaccurate, whereas high performers were more accurate although they often underestimated their performance. Pupils with lower academic achievement often provided extensive overestimations of the memory task. Underestimations, together with better accuracy, characterised children with a higher achievement level. This can indicate a meaningful accord between specific prediction errors and broader achievement at school.

During the Bologna process, from 2003 to 2006, degree programmes, including teacher education curricula, were developed in line with the two-tier system--the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and modularization. The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the development of teacher education profiling measures by comparing the Finnish and Estonian curricula covering initial teacher education. The aim was to analyze and compare studies in the science of education as part of the class teacher education programs through the development of a sufficiently universal meta-structure. The written curricula were subjected to discipline-based content analysis, which covered the main elements of the curricula and the contents of the theoretical substance studies in the science of education. The resulting differences and similarities between the Finnish and the Estonian curricula are reported. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

An emigration movement was triggered in Estonia in the latter half of the 19th century, as a consequence of which a large number of Estonians made their way to Siberia, the Volga region, North-western Russia, and Caucasia. National Awakening developed as a new movement in Estonia simultaneously with the emigration movement. Estonian nationalist ideologists formulated the needs and perspectives of the Estonian nationality, in which patriotism played a key role – an attitude that set loyalty to one’s homeland in first place. Estonian patriotic poetry exalted the beautiful, although poor, Estonian homeland and severely criticised those who recklessly left their homeland. Discourse on the Estonian homeland was in conflict with discourse on emigration, and a disapproving attitude towards emigrants took shape among the Estonian public. Individuals who encouraged people to emigrate were subjected to especially sharp criticism. Sometimes these attacks were unjust. The Estonian secondary school teacher Joosep Robert Rezold (1847–1909), who lived in Tbilisi (which bore the name Tiflis at that time) and who published a series of articles on Caucasia in the Estonian press, is the topic of this article. He inspired emigrants with his texts, although this was initially not his plan. Rezold became a target of opponents of emigration in the Estonian press. He was criticised in various publications. The accusations were exaggerated because Rezold did not actually want to encourage anybody to emigrate. The article traces how Rezold was turned into an apologist on behalf of emigration in the Estonian press. At heart, this man, who worked as a schoolteacher and tried out several other occupations later in his life, was an enlightener of the people. He published diverse writings over the course of several decades in the Estonian press. The need to introduce, mediate, and teach was a running theme in these writings. His letters sent from Caucasia to Estonia and published in the press were first and foremost overviews of a region that was far away from Estonian peasants. When he later started being accused of encouraging emigration, the reasons for this lay elsewhere – primarily in his writings, where he took the courage to assess the overall quality of the Estonian press and openly criticised newspaper editors. The offended newspaper editors did not forgive him for that and started accusing him of encouraging peasants to emigrate. Rezold’s impetuous personality did not benefit him in the process. On quite a few occasions, he chose to launch sharp attacks of his own as his tactic in his attempt to defend himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Segmentation of brain regions affected by ischemic stroke helps to overcome the main obstacles in modern studies of stroke visualization. Unfortunately, contemporary methods of solving this problem using artificial intelligence methods are not optimal. Therefore, in the study we consider how to increase the efficiency of segmentation of the stroke focus using computer perfusion imaging using modifications based on UNet. The network was trained and tested using the ISLES 2018 dataset. The publication includes an analysis of the results obtained, as well as recommendations for future research. By choosing the appropriate model parameters, our approach can be easily applied to detect ischemic stroke. We present modified U-Net models with two ResNet blocks as U-Net+ ResNetblock 1 and U-Net +ResNetblock 2, as well as a modified UNet model. Due to the small number of images for training the model, the best results were obtained by applying data preprocessing and object representation approaches, as well as data normalization methods to avoid overfitting. The results show that the modified UNet model is superior to other models in terms of average distance and recall, that are significant parameters for segmentation of the stroke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A thin industrial corrosion-protection nanostructured coating for the Al alloy AA2024-T3 is demonstrated. The coating is prepared in a two-step process utilizing hard anodizing as a pre-treatment, followed by sealing and coating by atomic layer deposition (ALD). In the first step, anodizing in sulfuric acid at a low temperature converts the alloy surface into a low-porosity anodic oxide. In the second step, the pores are sealed and coated by low-temperature ALD using different metal oxides. The resulting nanostructured ceramic coatings are thoroughly characterized by cross-sectioning using a focused ion beam, followed by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray microanalysis, and nanoindentation and are tested via linear sweep voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, salt spray, and energetic atomic oxygen flow. The best thin corrosion protection coating, made by anodizing at 20 V, 1 °C and sealing and coating with amorphous Al2O3/TiO2 nanolaminate, exhibits no signs of corrosion after a 1000 h ISO 9227 salt spray test and demonstrates a maximum surface hardness of 5.5 GPa. The same coating also suffers negligible damage in an atomic oxygen test, which is comparable to 1 year of exposure to space in low Earth orbit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Maetagused is the property of Estonian Literary Museum, Department of Folkloristics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the conquest of the Caucasus in the context of the aggressive expansion of the Russian Empire, where Russians themselves and representatives of peoples who had already been conquered implemented Russian power politics. From among non-Russians, a large number of Germans, of whom the greater portion originated from the Baltic provinces of the Russian tsarist state, rose in the war to leading positions in the Russian Army. The position of Germans in the Russian army units in the Caucasus corresponded to their position in the Russian Army as a whole - the higher the rank, the more represented Germans were among non-Russians. The article demonstrates how important the role played by Baltic Germans in particular was in the conquest of the region and the subjugation of the land. Lieutenant General Georg (in Russian fashion Grigori) Johann von Glasenapp, a man with a great deal of experience and a lengthy military career whose roots were in Livland, was appointed commander of the Caucasus defence line in 1803. His brutal and arrogant attitude towards the indigenous population of the land made Glasenapp a necessary individual for the tsarist army at that volatile time, and allowed his superiors to confidently entrust the responsible position of commander of the Caucasus line to him. In 1821-1826, Count Paul Demetrius von Kotzebue, son of the writer August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, who lived and worked in Tallinn, served in the Special Caucasus Corps, which played the main role in conquering the Caucasus. Moritz von Kotzebue, another son of August Friedrich Ferdinand, also served in the Caucasus and was appointed senior quartermaster of the Special Caucasus Corps in 1822. In 1826, Baron Carl Wilhelm Gottlieb von Wrangell entered military service under the command of General Yermolov, commander of the Special Caucasus Corps, at the headquarters of the Corps in Tbilisi. After serving in Tbilisi, von Wrangell was sent onward to Karabakh together with another Baltic German officer, Baron Eugen Mengden. C. W. G. von Wrangell rose quickly through the ranks while serving in the Caucasus, becoming commander of the Yerevan regiment in 1837. He embarked on a punishment expedition to Abkhazia in that same year at the head of that regiment. Baron Georg (in Russian fashion Grigori) Andreas von Rosen became commander of the Special Caucasus Corps in 1831. In the summer of 1832, von Rosen went on a military campaign to Chechnya, crushing pockets of resistance there by the autumn and forcing the Chechens to pay tribute. Alexander von Wrangell, who was born in Tartu, operated in the Caucasus as von Rosen's adjutant. Von Wrangell stood out in aggression against Western Caucasian peoples in the latter half of the 1830s. After the death of Gazi Muhammad, who had led the resistance of the indigenous people, the 37-year-old Shamil, Gazi Muhammad's relative and close friend, became the new imam and organiser of resistance against the Russian Army. Shamil led the resistance movement for nearly a quarter of a century in total, and von Rosen failed to subdue him. The war spread in the 1830s from Dagestan and Chechnya in the eastern part of the Northern Caucasus west to the coast of the Black Sea. In April of 1837, von Rosen set out from Sukhumi-Kale on a military campaign against the Abkhasian mountain settlement Tsebelda and captured it. In the following month, he organised an attack on Ardiller, a Dzhigit settlement on Cape Adler, and captured it with supporting artillery fire from the sea. Yet since the tsar was not satisfied with his activity in subjugating Shamil. He was dismissed from his post as commander of the Special Caucasus Corps in 1838. When the population of the Western Caucasus rebelled against the Russian invaders in February of 1840, Joseph Carl von Anrep, a general from the Anrep noble family in Livland, was sent to crush the uprising. He was appointed commander of the Black Sea coastal defence line in 1841. General Paul Gustav Grabbe, a member of the Knighthood of Estland, led the suppression of resistance along the Caucasus line in the east. Georg Benedikt Heinrich von Maydell, a member of a family that belonged to the Knighthood of Estland, served for a brief period of time in the Caucasus under the command of Grabbe in 1842, participating in many military operations against the mountain people. General Georg (Grigori Hristoforovich) Otto Ewald Freiherr von SaB also served under Grabbe. Regular destruction raids against auuls (villages) of the mountain people brought von SaB recognition from the tsarist authorities. Although his terrorist methods were known, he was appointed commander of the Kuban line in 1835. He was promoted to Major General in 1836. Caucasian historians describe him as a brutal and merciless coloniser of the Caucasus and a sadist. Shamil surrendered on 6 September 1859. General Alexander von Wrangell - the man who had arrived in the Caucasus together with Baron von Rosen in 1831 and made a brilliant military career in the intervening years in the Caucasus - organised the attack on the village of Gunib, where Shamil was in hiding. After the subjugation of Shamil, the Russians were able to send their forces from Dagestan to the Western Caucasus. Now the decisive Russian operation for subjugating the Western Caucasians began. Paul Grabbe's son Mikhail Grabbe participated in battles in the North-western Caucasus at the start of the 1860s. The greater portion of Baltic German officers who have hitherto been named had already left the Caucasus by then. The last centres of resistance in the Caucasian War were liquidated in 1864. A large portion of the local population was forced to leave the country to make room for the following agrarian colonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Maetagused is the property of Estonian Literary Museum, Department of Folkloristics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

So-called border states emerged one after another in the territories of the former tsarist state under the conditions of the Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed it. The birthdays of the following states are important from the standpoint of this article: Estonia on 24 February 1918, Abkhazia on 11 May 1918, and Georgia on 26 May 1918. The Georgian Democratic Republic annexed its neighbouring country Abkhazia, where the Estonian villages Salme, Sulevi, Upper- and Lower-Linda, and Estonia were located, in the summer of 1918. Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with the Republic of Estonia in Tartu on 2 February 1920 and with the Georgian Democratic Republic in Moscow on 7 May of that same year. Both agreements also included articles on opting. This article considers present day arguments among the eastern diaspora of Estonians, primarily Estonians living in Abkhazia, on the subject of the question of citizenship, which has revolved primarily around the clauses on opting in the Tartu Peace Treaty. In recent years, Abkhazia's Estonians have been a vivid standard, on the example of which to discuss the possibilities for interpreting the clauses on opting in the Tartu Peace Treaty signed between Estonia and Russia. Yet the paradox lies in the fact that the Tartu Peace Treaty could not actually apply to the opting of Abkhazia's Estonians, since Abkhazia was not part of Russia at the time when the agreement was signed and the Tartu Peace Treaty did not make provisions for issues regarding the opting of individuals from other countries that were not party to the agreement. Abkhazia was part of the Georgian Democratic Republic at that time. Estonia had diplomatic relations with Georgia, and Abkhazia's Estonians could apply for Estonian citizenship through the mediation of the Estonian consulate located in Tbilisi, which is indeed what hundreds of Estonians did. While the Estonian authorities have in recent years started recognising the Estonian citizenship by birth of the descendants of these individuals, the citizenship by birth of those people who are from the Estonian villages of Salme and Sulevi in the northwestern part of Abkhazia still continues to be left unrecognised. The article demonstrates that although these villages belonged to a neutral zone according to the Moscow Peace Treaty, it was still part of the Georgian Democratic Republic, for which reason the Estonian citizenship by birth of the descendants of the residents of those villages who opted for Estonian citizenship should be recognised. The article also considers citizenship questions of Estonians who remained in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, which the Estonian and Soviet sides interpreted very differently. Both the Republic of Estonia and the Soviet Union considered Estonian citizens who remained in the Soviet Union, and who later adopted Soviet citizenship, to be their citizens. This was essentially dual citizenship, although the citizenship laws of neither country permitted dual citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Titanium dioxide coatings of different thicknesses were deposited on the acid-treated multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) using controlled atomic layer deposition (ALD). Pt nanoparticles (NP) were deposited on TiO2/MWCNT supports using two deposition methods, viz. sputter-deposition and photo-deposition. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) measurements revealed successful application of ALD for the deposition of TiO2. Both magnetron sputtering and photo-deposition were found to be efficient and well-controlled techniques for the deposition of Pt NPs on oxide-carbon support. Electrochemical decontamination and characterization of the catalysts surfacewas carried out byCOstripping and cyclic voltammetry in 0.1 M KOH solution. The prepared Pt-TiO2/MWCNT catalyst showed comparable oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity to that of commercial Pt/C (20 wt%), while long-term durability test revealed better durability of the prepared catalysts due to strong metal-support interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet authorities carried out mass repressions in several stages in the 1930s. The most extensive of these was the declaration of the more enterprising and prosperous sector of the rural population as kulaks in the course of the collectivisation of agriculture in 1929, after which up to 2 million people were repressed. Yet purges also took place within the Communist Party, when in 1933 alone, 400,000 people were expelled from the Party. The mass operations of 1937-1938 were the culmination of the Stalinist repressions directed against their own land and people. In these operations, the NKVD arrested approximately 1,575,000 individuals, of which 681,692 are known to have been shot. The overwhelming majority of repressions was carried out in the course of so-called mass operations, which unlike the show trials of the accused persons who belonged to the elite, were processed outside of the attention of the public. 'Mass operations' primarily mean 'nationalities operations' and 'kulak operations'. Germans and Poles were targeted first of all in these nationalities operations (the corresponding directives were issued in July and August of 1937), but later on, other nationalities were also targeted, the countries of origin of which were countries bordering on the Soviet Union. The people targeted in these operations were prevailingly charged with spying for the countries of their origin. So-called nationalities operations were carried out in the Georgian SSR against Germans, Poles, Greeks, Iranians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Austrians, Romanians, Finns and Turks. The uncovering of a German-Estonian espionage network was staged in Abkhazia in the summer of 1937 and the NKVD conducted the proceedings for this prosecution within the framework of the so-called Diplomats' Case. While the organisation of the Germans allegedly operated under the cover of Lutheran and Baptist congregations, the organisation of the Estonians allegedly operated under the cover of Estonian cultural and educational circles. Both organisations allegedly dealt actively with espionage, and prepared for the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Western countries, primarily Germany. Sixty-three persons were arrested in the course of the NKVD 'uncovering operation'. The arrested persons were charged with long-term espionage for Germany and/or Estonia - local Germans spying chiefly for Germany and Estonians for Estonia, but some individuals were made spies of both countries. The elite of Estonians in Abkhazia was destroyed in the course of the kulak and nationalities operations that were carried out in parallel. These were individuals who had already promoted local Estonian economic and cultural activity in the tsarist era and maintained connections with their Estonian motherland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As is usual in the case of armed conflicts, the war that broke out between Georgia and Abkhazia in the autumn of 1992 also raised the theme of refugees. The Republic of Estonia decided to evacuate Estonians from Abkhazia, whose ancestors had emigrated there in the 1880s and established the villages of Estonia, Lower and Upper Linda, Salme and Sulev. The evacuation that Estonia carried out in the autumn of 1992 was the first humanitarian mission of the once again independent (1991) Republic of Estonia. It was motivated by an essentialist discourse of relations between homeland and diaspora: the metropolis forms a common ethnic space with the diaspora and compatriots going from abroad to the motherland are persons who are returning home. The young Estonian state, where nationalist sentiments carried great weight, wished to help its compatriots to return home. The rescue operation attracted a great deal of attention in Estonia's media. It provided subject matter for discussion on the theme of what the relationship of the motherland to communities living in diaspora is and should be like. Or as was written in the press a few years later, the once again independent Republic of Estonia had the opportunity during this conflict to show for the first time that the "nation state is capable of helping people closely connected to it". Thus the need unexpectedly arose to quickly work out a repatriation policy. Repatriation makes it necessary to establish acclimatisation conditions for the evacuated persons, and requires the existence of an integration policy - the events of that time provided material for discussion from this aspect as well. The events of that time are reconstructed in this article on the basis of the recollections of different participants, both evacuators and evacuees. The reasons for the evacuation, and at whose initiative the evacuation of Estonians from Abkhazia took place back then, are considered, along with what the motives for action were of the different sides. The acclimatisation processes of the evacuees in Estonia are also analysed. One hundred seventy Estonians and members of their families were brought from Abkhazia to Estonia using three airplanes (on 23-24 October, 29-31 October and 21-23 November) in the course of the evacuation operation. The overall coordination of the rescue operation was delegated to the Estonian Migration Board, while at the same time the Rescue Board team did much of the actual work. Both of these agencies had just been established and tried to prove themselves in the best possible light in the course of the operation. Both were sufficiently ambitious to lead the substantive coordination of the operation, which caused mutual tensions. Similarly, the professional background of the employees of the two different agencies inhibited mutual understanding: the visions of the Migration Board's people with civilian backgrounds and of the Rescue Board's people with military backgrounds regarding the operation's tactics differed considerably based on the recollections of participants. Differences of opinion nevertheless did not directly inhibit the success of the operation since the aim was unambiguously comprehensible. Forty-two of the 170 evacuees that arrived in Estonia were children and 20 were of retirement age, the remainder were of working age. Why did primarily younger people capable of working leave, while older people mostly stayed at home? To the extent that there is no reason to believe that elderly people would suffer less in wars than younger people, such statistics bear witness to selective factors. For instance, there were also people among the evacuees who by evacuating carried through with their longtime wish to leave Abkhazia. Alongside actual fear of war, which certainly cannot be underestimated, socio-economic calculations also played a role. What followed the rescue operation, including the acclimatisation of the evacuees in Estonia, is considered in Estonian public opinion mainly on the basis of the back to one's roots discourse, so to speak: Estonians whose forefathers left Estonia more than a hundred years ago are now returning home. Interviews conducted a few years later with Estonians who relocated from Abkhazia to Estonia bear witness to the fact that for them, the concept of home is associated more with their home village in Abkhazia. This also induced the circumstance that many of them experienced difficulties in acclimatisation and integration in Estonia. It emerges from this that the essential homeland discourse that ties the motherland and the diaspora together into a unified cultural-territorial body based on nationality, and views the movement of members of the diaspora to the motherland as returning home, so to speak, certainly does not apply in every individual case. Nor is it capable of explaining why people who have returned home feel uncomfortable at home, are in some cases altogether motivated to reformulate their hitherto existing identity, and in many cases yearn to return abroad. Returning to one's roots does not necessarily always mean arriving home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on the construction of the Livonian school system in 1708.

Major changes with far-reaching consequences took place in educational conditions and church activities and life in Livland in the last quarter of the 17th century. The development of Latvian and Estonian literary language, stocks of ecclesiastical books, and public primary schools progressed particularly energetically, so that it is not an exaggeration to see this as the protracted Lutheran Reformation finally reaching its goal. The leader of these reforms was Johann Fischer (1636-1705, in office in Riga 1674-1699), the Chief Superintendant of Livland. One of the most important sources concerning the educational work and publishing activity that he initiated is a collection of documents known as Emanuel Reger's account book (collection 4038, register 2, archival record 732). Reger himself has remained practically unknown. He is mentioned in historiography only as the secretary and bookkeeper of the chief superintendent. The "memoirs" published here are in fact an undated letter (1708) from Emanuel Reger to the hovrätt of Livland (literally "royal court", the highest court in Livland in the 17th - 19th centuries) in Riga. The letter is preserved at the Latvian National History Archives in the Consistory of Livland (Vidzemes konsistoria) collection (collection 233, register 1, archival record 840). A handwritten copy of Reger's letter from the end of the 18th century is found at the University of Latvia Academic Library (Ms. 1140-96, 21). It forms the main part of a file entitled "Notice of how the Chief Superintendent of Livland, Mr. Dr. Johann Fischer blessedly worked in his position a hundred years ago and of the benefits that brought". Reger was of German extraction, born in Regensburg. In his letter, Reger mentions that Fischer invited him to come to Riga from Stockholm to do proofreading. He initially lived under Fischer's roof and took upon himself some of the errands connected to schools as a token of his gratitude. In 1681, he became secretary to the Supreme Ecclesiastical Commission of Livland, and in the following year, he became a notarius publicus. Reger defends himself in the letter against two accusations. First of all, the Supreme Consistory had submitted a complaint to the hovrätt concerning ecclesiastical books and school textbooks that Reger had distributed free of charge to persons who wanted the books. The other accusation concerned official documents in private hands that were supposed to be handed over to state and ecclesiastical authorities. It cannot go unnoticed from the tone of the letter that Reger was irritated not only by those unjust reprimands but also by the shadow that was cast on Fischer. As the closest long-term assistant of the Chief Superintendent, he was as if living history and as such was aware of his value, especially after Fischer left Livland in 1699. In his letter he dwells quite thoroughly on the educational work initiated by Fischer without forgetting to highlight his own role and merits. The letter provides viewpoints of someone who participated directly in the relevant events and valuable descriptions that are more detailed than the corresponding sections of chronicles written by his contemporaries Christian Kelch or Arvid Moller, for instance. In terms of their content, Reger's "memoirs" can be compared to the biographical descriptions by Ernst Glück and Adrian Virginius that have been preserved from that same time period. The letter leaves no doubt that Emanuel Reger was the actual coordinator of school matters in Livland, as well as book distributor and bookkeeper in everyday practice. His activities need to be researched in greater detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]