Ancient Nordic legend has it that the sun fell to earth on an island in the far north of Europe. Marius Kociejowski digs for evidence in Estonia

What is it about island inhabitants that, when one asks how to get somewhere, the directions people give you are almost always incomprehensible? I tested this idea out on a very tall Finn in Tallinn and he agreed, saying: ‘Yes, ask someone on a very small island the way to the sea and he’ll look around him like this,’ and here I must ask the reader to imagine the facial expression, somewhere between mischief and foolishness, which he reproduced for me.

I was on the relatively large Estonian island of Saaremaa, more specifically, in the inland village of Karja, when I asked a shy, plump young woman the way to the medieval church of the same name. She seemed aghast at the boldness of my question. ‘Over there,’ she replied, seemingly wanting to get shot of me, her arm covering an arc of roughly 45 degrees. All I could see on the churchless horizon was a massive barn, the largest I have ever seen, a tumbledown relic of Soviet collectivisation. It looked like a ghost barn – misty white light showing through where the planks had been torn away to be put to other uses. Soon no sign of it will remain except, perhaps, its immense concrete floor, a puzzle for archaeologists in the future. But this mammoth ruin is a symbol of an ideology adhered to for only half a century: I was seeking a more permanent structure.

After walking another 4km, and stopping halfway at the wooden Angla windmills – most haunting when seen in morning fog – I finally found it: Saaremaa’s oldest and loveliest church, dedicated to St Catherine (Katariina). It was a magical church at that – seemingly larger on the inside than on the outside.

There are solid mathematical reasons for this, however, which lie with the vaulted roof being twice the height of the walls, supposedly to give the soul cause to move, swallow-like, beyond its mortal frame. I had been advised to take note of the symbols on the ceiling above the altar, among them a triskelion – a swastika-like figure with three legs bent at the knees – eternally running, or so it seems, in its own space. This curious symbol, found in many countries, is emblematic both of the Nordic god Odin and of the Holy Trinity in these northerly latitudes, and suggests the overlap of pagan and Christian ideas – Christianity being only marginally older on this isle than the church itself.

As well as representing the past, present and future, the triskelion is symbolic of the sun. According to ancient Nordic legend, the sun was buried, only 18km from the church, at Kaali. There are innumerable variants on this legend, and one comes from as far away as Ancient Greece, with the myth of Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, whose tomb – somewhere in the far north – was said to have resembled an island lake.

The witches of ancient Viro, a versatile bunch, were not only capable of plucking the moon out of the skies, but also of hiding the sun away on the iron mountain of an unnamed island. In an attempt to solve this mystery, it is interesting to note that Saaremaa means ‘island’, and is therefore an island without a name; and that it was from here that some of the earliest iron implements came. The Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala, also has passages that refer to a great, cataclysmic event here, and in Estonian mythology the hero Kalevipoeg, son of Kalev, on the road to Hell, finds his journey’s end at a small round lake encircled with trees, which clearly describes Kaali.

There are many other mythic strands, but what they all have in common is the image of a sun hidden or buried. What lies behind this is a real event, for Lake Kaali was created by a meteorite, the most recent of any great size to have struck Europe. Indeed, if one accepts the estimates of some scientists, the strike occurred within historical or folk memory; as little as 2,400 years ago.

The explosion it made was, in all likelihood, as powerful as that of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, although the destruction would have been much more localised. Small wonder, then, that news of it would have spread over thousands of miles. Small wonder, too, that there should be myths and legends aplenty to accommodate such an incredible event. It is said that the name Kuressaare, the capital of Saaremaa, has its linguistic roots in the Nostratic, the hypothetical ancestral language from which many others came – kura – in Mesopotamian meaning ‘lord of the underworld’. The death of the gods, which is how this must have seemed to observers at the time, finds its expression most recently in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

The old gods die hard in Saaremaa. Pagan belief seems to have insinuated itself into even the most Christian of spaces. In Tallinn I meet Karl Kello, one of the great experts on Estonian history and mythology, and the author of a book on Kaali entitled The Pharaoh of the North (2004). There is nothing of a mythological nature that has not been revealed in this work. A gentle, retiring figure, he speaks lovingly of the two places. ‘It is possible to go there and touch it. It is real. With Karja and Kaali geographically so close, they become a single entity, a symbiosis, with a common history and culture.’

When I asked Kello whether there was any one symbol associated with Kaali that for him took precedence above all the others, he said it was that three-legged symbol of the sun. Looking at it in Karja church, and remembering this triskelion differed from others in that it has a broken leg, I could not but admire the coherence of his argument. It seems that for Kello, all roads lead to Kaali.

Saaremaa island is also one of the candidates for the mythical Ultima Thule, or the region believed by ancient geographers to be the northernmost land in the inhabited world. Joanna Kavenna devotes a chapter to it in her book, The Ice Museum: in search of the lost land of Thule (£16.99, Viking), in which she interviews the first president of the newly independent Estonia, the late Lennart Meri, who had few doubts on that score. Tuli, he said, is Estonian for fire.

In his book, Silver White, Meri sought a mythology that would enshrine Estonia’s independence. The focus for him was the crater of Kaali, whose creation had ramifications not just for Estonian – but for the whole of Scandinavian and Germanic – culture. It was a matter of some irony for him that when the Nazis came to Saaremaa and unleashed their destructive force, they defiled the very birthplace of Germanic myth.

When the fourth century BC Greek explorer Pytheus left us his tantalising glimpse of Ultima Thule, which survives only in the writings of others, he spoke of how the barbarians who lived there showed him the place where the sun was put to rest. What makes Saaremaa an attractive candidate is that for Pytheus, the apocalyptic event that took place there would have been recent news. The question of where Ultima Thule actually is, and whether it is Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard or even Britain, is largely a matter of faith, but Saaremaa became, for me, the agnostic choice.

Somewhat incongruously, the crater of Kaali is reached by walking through a school playground. One passes the white schoolhouse and climbs up a short path of what could be the mound of some old hillfort and from the top of the ridge, surmounted with trees, one looks down into a small round lake, 80-120m in diameter depending on the season. Many Estonians celebrate their marriages here and there are dark hints that once upon a time it may have been the scene of human sacrifice. The remains of a stone wall surrounding the lake point to this having been a cult site, and indeed there are powerful traditions of taboo associated with the place, some of which are sexual in origin.

The very name ‘Kaali’, with its hints of a destructive Indian goddess, raises questions almost too complicated to pursue, and the parish in which it is located is called Püha, which means ‘taboo’. One such taboo has its echoes in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with the marriage between Siegfried and his sister. The meteorite might well be seen as divine retribution. There are similarly disturbing resonances in the Finnish poem Kalevala. One local legend describes how the estate lands of one who sexually transgressed – again involving the marriage of brother and sister – sank into a hole, which was thereafter filled with water.

Curiously, nobody has explored the bottom of the lake yet. Kello tells me a terrible story of 19th-century farmhands who dug there for mud to use as fertiliser in the neighbouring fields, and were overcome by the methane gas that was released. Ancient curses sometimes have a physical, or even chemical, aspect to them.

Kaali can be seen as either the most magical of places, which it was for me (probably because I was lucky enough to be there alone), or – as the tall Finn in Tallinn told me – it can be seen as nothing more than a hole in the ground. It is quite reasonable that the site of such a terrible event should have so many legends attached to it – it would be more curious if this were not the case. But what survives into the modern age, which sees mostly holes where once there were wondrous tales?

I asked Kello if he could summarise whether the legend of Kaali could be said to have touched the soul of the Estonian people. He thought for a while, and then said it was a beautiful fairy tale, as all such tales should be, but that when one thinks of the sky falling to earth, and the darkness that ensued, then the Estonians’ fatalistic ‘come what may’ attitude to life makes more sense. ‘The whole of time goes round and round,’ he says, and one could see the triskelions past, present and future turning in his mind’s eye, ‘and it does not depend on you’.

His answer, if one considers the many vicissitudes of Estonian history, was by no means a cursory one. There is a joke doing the rounds in Tallinn, which has Estonians in stitches. Apparently it helps to know something of the characters involved. Standing on the rim of the crater are three people: President Lennart Meri, his successor, Arnold Rüütel, and President Rüütel’s Minister of Education, Mailis Reps, who always for some reason raises a chuckle. President Meri, ever mindful of mythic significance, muses on the ancient event, speaks of the fate that allowed the meteorite to have landed here. President Rüütel says: ‘And what a coincidence that it should have fallen into the lake.’ ‘Yes,’ the Minister of Education chimes in, ‘and so close to the schoolhouse, too’.

Marius Kociejowski’s latest book, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey, is published by Sutton, price £8.99 ($17.35).

HOW TO GET THERE

A ferry operates hourly from the mainland port of Virtsu to Kuivastu in the summer and every two hours during the rest of the year. The journey takes around half an hour. www.slk.saaremaa.ee www.eeke.ee www.saaremaa.ee/eng/

WHERE TO STAY

BEST WESTERN HOTEL TALLINK A Laikmaa 5 Tallinn Tel: (+372) 6300 800 www.tallinkhotelsgroup.com