Pernau/Pärnu
Pernau/Pärnu
Names in other languages
Latvian: Pērnava; Lithuanian: Pernu; Polish: Parnawa; Russian: Пернов (Pernov); Latin: Perona
Etymology
There are several theories regarding the etymological origin of the town’s name: it may be derived from the Germanic word ‘bernu’ (bear), from the botanical genus name ‘pernä’/‘pärnä’ (lime tree), which has been handed down from the Mesolithic Kunda culture, or from the Vepsian (a branch of the Finno-Ugric languages) term ‘pern’/‘pernan’ (sloping bank).[1]
2. Geography
Location
Pernau is situated at 58° 23’ north latitude and 24° 31’ east longitude, approximately 116 km south of Reval/Tallinn and 200 km north of Riga/Rīga.
Topography
Pernau is situated on the south-western coast of Estonia, on the northern shore of the Gulf of Riga (Estonian: Liivi laht), at the mouth of the river of the same name. The town is characterised by a sandy beach approximately three kilometres long.
Political and administrative affiliation
Estonia. Capital of Pernau County (Estonian: Pärnu maakond, Pärnumaa).
Common symbolism
The coat of arms of Pernau depicts the arm of God, emerging from a cloud, clad in a red sleeve. The hand holds a golden cross; next to it is a golden key to the town.
Prehistory and Early History
Not far from Pernau lie the remains of a Mesolithic Kunda settlement. A significant Neolithic find is the ‘Stone Age Madonna’, the oldest human figure in the Baltic Sea region.
Middle Ages
The first mention of the River Bernu is found in the writings of the Arab geographer Abu Abdallah Muhammed al-Idrisi (1100–1166) from the year 1154. The settlement of Perona (Old Pernau) was founded on the right bank of the river. Following the conquest of the island of Ösel/Saaremaa in 1227 by the Livonian Order of the Sword Brothers, Pernau also came under the jurisdiction of the newly founded Diocese of Ösel-Wiek; with the consecration of the cathedral in 1251, it served as the bishop’s residence. Following the destruction of Old Pernau in 1263 by Lithuanian attacks, the German Order (into which the Order of the Sword Brothers had been absorbed in 1237) built an Order castle near Embeke (New Pernau) around 1265. In 1318, Pernau was granted town privileges; from then on, situated on the trade route between Riga and Reval, it developed into a trading and Hanseatic town.
Modern times
In the 16th century, the rule of the German Order collapsed. During the Livonian War (1558–1583), Poland–Lithuania, Russia and Sweden fought for supremacy over the region; Pernau was ruled by Poland–Lithuania from 1560 and by Sweden from 1617. Under Swedish rule, the town was militarily fortified with bastions. In 1710, Tsarist troops captured the town during the Great Northern War; in 1721, under the terms of the Treaty of Nystad, it was incorporated into the Tsarist Empire as part of the newly created Governorate of Livonia.
In 1838, the first bathing establishment opened, and Pernau was developed into a spa town following the demolition of the historic town fortifications and the construction of sanatoriums. The railway station was completed in 1896.
Contemporary History
On 23 February 1918, the Republic of Estonia (Eesti Vabariik) was proclaimed from the balcony of the Endla Theatre in Pernau; it was occupied shortly afterwards by troops of the German Empire. Following the German defeat in November 1918, Estonian troops waged a struggle for liberation against both the German Landwehr and the advancing Bolshevik forces. In Pernau, the Pernau Defence Battalion (renamed the 9th Independent Infantry Battalion in May 1919) was formed in January 1919 to protect Estonia’s national borders. Following the Treaty of Dorpat/Tartu (2 February 1920), the Pernau Battalion remained stationed in Narva, in eastern Estonia, until 13 February 1920.
In the years that followed, Pernau continued to develop as a seaside and spa resort. In 1939 and 1940, the German-Baltic population left the town at the behest of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). In 1940, Pernau was captured by the Red Army, recaptured by the German Wehrmacht on 8 July 1941, and reoccupied by the Red Army on 24 September 1944. Soviet air raids destroyed large parts of the town. Following its reconstruction, Pernau developed from the 1950s onwards into a spa and seaside resort frequented by the Soviet upper classes. Alongside tourism, the textile industry, wood processing and furniture manufacturing, electronics and metalworking play a particularly significant economic role today. Small businesses with up to ten employees account for around 80 per cent of economic output.
Population
| Year | 1881 | 1897 | 1922 | 1934 | 1959 | 1970 | 1979 | 1989 | 2000 | 2011 |
| Population² | 12,966 | 12,898 | 18,499 | 20,334 | 22,367 | 46,316 | 49,623 | 52,389 | 45,500 | 39,728 |
Of the 20,334 inhabitants of Pernau in 1934, 18,436 (90.7 per cent) were Estonians, 871 (4.2 per cent) Baltic Germans, 469 (2.3 per cent) Russians and 248 Jews (1.2 per cent).[ By 1979, the proportion of Estonians had fallen to 74.1 per cent, whilst the proportion of Russians had risen to 19.5 per cent. The 2011 census recorded 83.1 per cent Estonians, 12.8 per cent Russians, 1.7 per cent Ukrainians, 0.6 per cent Finns and 1.8 per cent others.
History of Religion and the Church
From the 13th century onwards, Pernau belonged to the Diocese of Ösel-Wiek. This was followed by the construction of the cathedral and the town church of St Nicholas, which served as the religious centre for the German Balts until their departure in 1939–40 and was destroyed during the bombing raids of 1944. The Reformation took root only slowly in Pernau. In 1525, the German-Baltic town council appropriated church property, and on 15 May 1526, an iconoclastic rampage took place. Under Swedish influence from the mid-16th century onwards, Protestantism came to dominate. St Elizabeth’s Church, built in 1747, was the first Estonian Evangelical Lutheran church. In 1768, Catherine the Great (1729–1796) had theRussian Orthodox Church of St Catherine built for the Russian garrison in Pernau. The historicist Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1904, is now Pernau’s largest Orthodox church. Towards the end of the 19th century, a Jewish community and cultural life began to flourish. During the Second World War, the Jewish population was largely wiped out.
Education and Science
From 1699 to 1710, the University of Dorpat was based in Pernau due to the Great Northern War. Today, the town is home to a branch of the Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences and the Pernau College of the University of Dorpat. Pernau has eleven state schools and three private schools, as well as a vocational training centre and the German Technology School (Saksa tehnoloogiakool) run by the internationally active education provider foundation Bildung & Handwerk.
Architecture and Art History
When the town was founded by the German Order in 1251, the cathedral was built on the right bank of the river. Around 1265, a German Order castle was built on the left bank, consisting of two outer bailey and a monastery (built in 1311), which was later extended to include a town wall. During the Livonian War at the end of the 16th century, the castle was severely damaged and was demolished from 1710 onwards. The Red Tower (Punane torn) bears witness to the medieval town fortifications, and the Baroque Reval Gate (Tallinna värav) has also been preserved.
The Neoclassical town hall was built in 1797 by the German-Baltic merchant P. R. Harder as a private residence. An example of early Art Nouveau is the villa of the German-Baltic merchant Hermann Leopold Ammende (1855–1934), completed in 1905. The town centre is characterised by distinctive timber-framed houses, which served, amongst other things, as summer retreats. The Kursaal (Kuursaal) was built near the beach in 1880, followed in the 1920s by a neoclassical mud bath facility. Soviet functionalism is evident in the beach hotel built between 1935 and 1937 by Anton Soans (1885–1966) and Olev Siinmaa (1881–1948) (now the Scandic Rannahotell).
History of books, printing and media; film
The *Pernausche Wöchentliche Nachrichten*, aimed at a German-Baltic readership, was published from 1811 to 1821. From 1822 to 1869, the *Pernausche Wochenblatt* was published, followed by the *Pernausche Zeitung*. Pernau is the birthplace of the Estonian poet Lydia Koidula (1843–1886), daughter of the newspaper publisher Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819–1890). From 1857 to 1885, he published the *Perno Postimees*, the country’s first Estonian-language newspaper.
Pernau was the filming location for the first Estonian feature film, *Bear Hunt in the Pernau Region* (*Karujaht Pärnumaal*) by Johannes Pääsuke (1892–1918) from 1914, which explores the conflict between Estonians and Baltic Germans through the lens of the mayoral elections on 18 December 1913.
Culture of memory and remembrance
Since 1945, the Estonian national movement has been commemorated at the Koidula Museum, the former home (1850 to 1863) of the writer Johann Voldemar Jannsen and his daughter Lydia Koidula. A statue of Lydia Koidula has stood in the town park since 1929. In 1993, a German military cemetery was inaugurated on the outskirts of the town, containing the graves of 960 soldiers who fell in both World Wars. Nearby is a burial ground for those who fell in the Estonian War of Independence of 1919–1920. Since 1997, a sculpture has stood in memory of the ferry Estonia, which sank in 1994.
Bibliography
- Matthias Asche: The Baltic States in the Age of the Reformation and Confessionalisation. Vol. 3. Münster 2011 (Catholic Life and Church Reform in the Age of Religious Schism 71) [esp. pp. 17–99].
- Hans Feldmann, Gertrud Westermann: Historical Encyclopaedia of Baltic Places. Estonia (including Northern Livonia). Cologne, Weimar 1985 [esp. pp. 444–446].
- Heinrich Laakmann: History of the Town of Pernau during the Era of the German Order (up to 1558). Marburg 1956 (Scholarly Contributions to the History and Regional Studies of East Central Europe 23).
- Constantin Mettig: Baltic Towns. Sketches from the History of Livonia, Estonia and Courland. 2nd, expanded edition. Riga 1905 [esp. pp. 59–81].
- Inna Põltsam-Jürjo: A Small Town in Livonia on the Threshold of the Early Modern Period. A Study of the History of New Pärnu in the First Half of the 16th Century [A small town in Livonia in the early modern period. A study of New Pernau in the first half of the 16th century]. Tallinn 2008. URL: www.digar.ee/arhiiv/nlib-digar:18742.
- Raimo Pullat: The inventories of the inhabitants of the town of Pernau. 1702–1800. Tallinn 2005.
- Toivo U. Raun: Estonia and the Estonians. Studies of Nationalities. 2nd, revised edition. Stanford 2001 [esp. pp. 33, 70ff., 90ff., 131, 206ff.].
- Rolf Dietrich Schmidt: Pernau. A Livonian Port City. Essen 1986 (Publications of the Carl Schirren Society 5).
Web links
- parnu.ee/index.php/en/ (Official website of the town of Pernau in English)
- www.herder-institut.de/bildkatalog/wikidata/Q102365 (Images of Pernau from the Herder Institute’s image archive, Marburg)
Notes
[1] Marje Joalaid: Estonian Toponyms of Baltic-Finnic Origin. In: Biblioteca Tècnica de Política Lingüística: Names in Everyday Life. Proceedings of the 24th ICOS International Congress on Onomastic Sciences. Barcelona 2014, Annex. Section 6, pp. 1199–1206.
[2] Statistics Estonia: Query from the statistical database. URL: pub.stat.ee/px-web.2001/I_Databas/Population_Census/databasetree.asp (accessed 10 October 2015).
[3] Ethnic groups by administrative unit in 1934. In: Herder Institute (ed.): Documents and Materials on East Central European History. Thematic module ‘Estonia in the Interwar Period’. URL: www.herder-institut.de/resolve/qid/2189.html (accessed 21 November 2015); Eugenia Gurin-Loov, Gennadi Gramberg: Eesti Juudi Kogukond – The Jewish Community of Estonia. Tallinn 2001.
[4] Raun: Estonia and the Estonians, p. 207.
[5] Statistics Estonia (note 1).
Citation
Anna Derksen: Pernau/Pärnu. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32504 (accessed 15 February 2022)
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