Open on Museum Night from 18:00 to 23:00. Admission €1. The Tammsaare Museum at Vargamäe is the writer’s birthplace, which inspired him to write the novel ‘Truth and Justice’. This is the place where the strong-willed neighbours Andres and Pearu wrestled with the bog, dug a shared ditch, and displayed the much-discussed stubbornness of the Estonian character. At the museum you can get to know the writer’s cultural and literary heritage, look for and find parallels between the novel and the writer’s birthplace, and gain an overview of 19th-century farm life in Järvamaa. Vargamäe Museum Night focuses on the freedom to move. The development of machines and roads has brought more opportunities for movement. In the time of Tammsaare’s parents, they carried planks in the wagon to get through softer places. Only in winter could they travel to the nearest village, Järva-Madise, where the church, tavern, and parish hall were located, by using the winter road across Kodru bog. In summer they still had to go by the watery road. These themes are explored in the museum’s annual exhibition ‘100 Years of Draining the Bogs at Vargamäe’, which Museum Night visitors can explore. In the exhibition we look at the first and last parts of ‘Truth and Justice’ and see what the landscape of the novel and of Tammsaare’s parents’ time was like. At 19:00, Järva-Madise pastor Jane Vain will be at the museum, and we will speak with her about the cultural-historical pilgrimage route that also visits the Tammsaare Museum at Vargamäe. We will discuss why people go on pilgrimages and which pilgrimages Jane Vain has taken in Estonia and abroad. On Museum Night it is also possible to visit Järva-Madise Church, one of the smallest single-nave churches in Estonia. It was precisely the tower of this church that the farmhand Juss in ‘Truth and Justice’ compared to the length of the hayloft ladder, and it was the bells of this same church that rang across the bog to Vargamäe and let its inhabitants know that the service was taking place.
