17 September from 10.00
to 16.00
The autumn fair lasts from 10 AM to 4 PM. Program activities take place in the museum buildings and courtyards from 11 AM to 4 PM.
Adult ticket 12 €, discount ticket 9 €, family ticket
24 €
Admission is free for Museum Card and Tallinn Card owners!
Buy tickets!
Bread has always played such an important role in the
lives of Estonian people that the word stands for bread crops, food in general,
one’s livelihood, profession and life as such. All of this can be traced in the
Estonian language as the word ‘leib’ (bread) is a part of numerous words
and expressions, for example, the ones that mean ‘household’, ‘earn one’s
bread’ or ‘have a rest after a meal’.
The Day of Estonian Bread and Autumn Fair this year
focuses on well-known and lesser-known proverbs, sayings and expressions about
bread. What does it mean if you ‘stumble upon good bread’ or ‘bread-winning
profession’? Come to the museum and find out!
You will find the
stalls of our traditional autumn food and handicraft fair right along
the main road and in the cattle yard of Köstriaseme farm while bread
producers will be presenting their goods in front the yard of Sassi-Jaani farm. Hobby
bakers and small-scale bakeries are welcome to take part in the contest for the
best bread of the fair, which will be held at Kolu inn.
GETTING HERE
BY CAR
Drive from city center along Paldiski road. Turn right (look for the sign Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum) before you reach Rocca al Mare shopping mall. Drive along Vabaõhumuuseumi street to the gates of the museum.
Free parking for museum visitors.
BY BUS
- Take bus 21 or 21B from Balti jaam railway station or Freedom Square (Vabaduse väljak) to the museum's gate (stop Rocca al Mare).
- Takse bus 21A from Väike-Õismäe to the museum's gate (stop Rocca al Mare).
- Or take bus 22, 42, 43 from the city centre and get off at the Zoo stop. The museum is a 15 minute walk away along the seaside road.
To get back to the city center:
- take bus 41 or 41B from across the street of the museum's gate.
- walk ca 10 minutes along Lõuka street toward Rannamõisa road. Take bus 4, 21 or 21B from Sõba stop.
- walk ca 15 minutes along sea-side Vabaõhumuuseumi street towards Paldiski road. Take bus nr 21, 21B, 22, 42, 43 at Zoo stop.
Bread Day Game
Find the red books from Sassi-Jaani, Roosta, and Setu farms, as well as the Peipsi Russian house, and solve the tasks inside. Ask the hostess or host for clues, and with the correct answer, the hostess will give you one letter. Once you've collected all the letters, you can create a word related to bread.
For the correct word, ask for a reward from the Setu farm hostess.
Sutlepa chapel – Give us this day our daily
bread. Bread blessing
The first known texts in the Estonian language date
back to the 16th century. The
Kullamaa Wackenbuch (listing peasants’ farms and their duties) features
Estonian translations of Our Father prayer, Hail Mary, and confession of faith.
The texts were written down by Ear using the spelling rules of Low German, the general
public today is likely to find them incomprehensible. In Our Father, ‘daily
bread’ stands for everything a person needs for living: food and clothing,
shelter, fields and cattle, friends and family, health, and well-being.
At 11.30: Bread blessing, singing by the Women’s choir
of the National Library of Estonia.
Kolu inn – Enjoy your bread! Competition for the
best bread; choir performances
In addition to earning your bread, you need to take your
time and enjoy bread and what it goes with and then have a rest because one
does not live by bread alone. The inn is where adults and children can find
bread and more to go with it. The Estonian phrase for ‘Bon appétit!’ is
literally translated as ‘May you have enough bread!’. It dates far back to the
time when it was used in the literal sense of the phrase.
The barn of the inn becomes a stage for
choirs.
From 12.00 to 14.30 Voting for the best bread at
the fair
At 13:00 Sõsarõ choir
At 14:00 EVM mixed choir
At 15.00 Announcing the best bread at the fair
In front of Sassi-Jaani
Farm – Village bread tastes sweeter. Bread fair
In front of Sassi-Jaani
farm, you can find the stalls of bread producers, whose bread is certainly
worth taking home.
Sassi-Jaani farm – Using
a hand grain mill to make flour
You can try to make
flour using a hand grain mill in front of the barn!
Köstriaseme farm
– ‘You need to earn your bread to eat it’. Threshing
Daily bread demanded
a lot of effort and hard physical labour: crops in the field were cut with
sickles, tied in sheaves, and arranged in stacks. After drying on the framework
of the threshing floor, crops had to be threshed and winnowed, grain ground to
make flour with a hand mill, and dough to be kneaded. Threshing was one of the
dirtiest and most physically demanding chores related to bread-making. Sheaves
of grain, dried and laid out on the threshing floor, were threshed with various
types of flails until the grain was separated from the chaff.
You can try how hard
threshing is on the threshing floor of Köstriaseme farm.
Cattle yard on Köstriaseme
farm – Liquid bread and hop water.
The cattle yard of
Köstriaseme farm is where you will find the stalls of craft breweries and wine
sellers. Entrance from the farmyard!
Nuki cotter’s hut – Any
work is good as long as it earns you bread
Wood-carving workshop
where you can make a masher or a traditional shepherd kids’ toy. Depending on the item, the workshop fee is 5–10 €, payment in cash! Allocate 15–45 minutes for the workshop.
Nätsi windmill – sweat as you work, then you'll devour your bread (food). Capoeira training and performances
Our ancestors cultivated the field, tended animals and put food on the table by working hard. It required a lot of strength and physical activity, which in turn made the workers hungry. All the better was then the bread, the food at mealtimes. These days, while most people use their brain for work, there are a plenty of opportunities for physical activity, many of which originate form all around the world.
Tallinn Capoeira Sportschool invites to an open training. Capoeira is a non-violent sport that teaches how to become stronger, faster, how to be self-confident, motivated and interested in studies. At 12.30 pm, 1.30 pm, and 2.30 pm the members of the sports school give a performance of the training.
Pulga farm – Let’s
put our loaves in one breadbox. Exhibition about weddings; smoke sauna
Only married people were regarded as full-fledged
members of rural society. So, getting married was what everyone desired, and
the wedding day was the highest point of a farmer’s life and had to be
celebrated in the grandest possible way. The guest list included not only
families on both sides, but the entire village as well. The new household had
to receive the support and approval of everyone around it.
You can see a wedding
celebration on Pulga farm. There is a table laden with the best food in the
kiln room: an abundant feast was supposed to ensure that the young couple has
enough bread for life.
An exhibition ‘Hooray to the wedding!’ introducing
Estonian wedding traditions is located on the threshing floor.
In the sauna and
summer kitchen you can see how barley cakes are made and the smoke sauna is
heated for the wedding guests.
Nulli-Maie sauna – Bread
with chaff and soup with nothing
Adverse weather
conditions, poor soil and pests affected crop yield, causing crop failure in
the worst case. Even in a good year, farmers’ food stock would thin out by the
time spring arrived. The poorest peasants who did not own land faced especially
tough circumstances. To save grain, bread was made with chaff and other fillers
such as tree bark, ground acorns and other available substitutes. The resulting
bread was so dry it could catch fire.
Härjapea
farm – Stumbling upon good bread. Baking bread and churning butter
Farm owners who made their way in life started
building more modern dwellings. A house built in accordance with the latest
trends was a matter of pride and a symbol of status as well as the farm’s success.
These new dwellings were accompanied by decorative gardens and even parks while
the interiors of the wealthiest mansions were by no means inferior to manors.
A bride from a poor family has married the heir of the
wealthy Härjapea far, and now she wants to refurbish the outdated parlour of
the building. Could a new sofa or a chair be enough to freshen it up?
On this farm, you can also see how festive bread was
made and butter was churned.
Kuie school – Putting
one on bread and water. Live history
The 19th
century laws regulating peasants’ life also established the creation of manor
commune courts in manor lands. Courts would also deal with people whose
children failed to attend school. More serious cases were regulated by parish
courts, which were also the ones to receive appeals concerning the decision of
manor commune courts. Manor commune courts could impose fines and order
corporal punishment or incarceration in the form of a couple of days in a cell,
or, as it was known back then, the ‘cage’. The manor commune court would meet
regularly, mainly once a month, and the sessions were held in the village hall
or school building.
In the school
building, you can see a parent held in the cell for refusing to let their kid
go to school because the farm needs workers.
Kolkhoz apartment building – Who wants stale bread when there’s fresh to
get? Dishes made of bread. Caft dolls
from straws.
One must treat bread
with respect, and an old saying goes “Respect bread, bread is older than us”.
Of course, freshly
baked bread tastes better, but wasting food won’t do. In the apartments of the
kolkhoz building, you can see which foods were made using bread and leftover
bread in various time periods.
Not a single piece goes to waste, even the straw left from the threshing is not discarded. In the cellar, you can craft dolls from straws.
Sepa farm – ‘Bread-winning profession’.
Blacksmith’s work
Most
people in rural Estonia earned their living by working in the fields, which
brought bread to the table. Still, there were people doing other jobs in the
village than farming. One of the oldest rural trades was that of a blacksmith,
who shod farmers’ horses, repaired carts, made or repaired arm tools, sickles,
scythes and household items. The village blacksmith would normally work alone,
and the customer take on the assistant’s role, working the bellows or the
hammer. The payment was given in wheat, meat, eggs and other produce. The trade was often passed on from father to
son.
The smith is busy in
the smithy, and you can hear how the hammer bangs from afar.
Sepa farmyard – Herd
no cows and eat no bread. Shepherd kids’ games
In the yard of Sepa Farm, you can play shepherd kids’
games: ‘weigh the farmhand’s bread bag’, ‘tame a young horse’, take part in a
sack race or ‘folding linen’.
In the Food Academy Cabin, you can enjoy various oven-baked meat bites and grilled lard on bread. The food is prepared over an open fire right before the visitors' eyes and tastes especially delicious in the open air.
During the event, the Factory House is also open, located outside the museum's restricted area, and admission is free. You can read more about the Factory House here: www.tehasemaja.ee.
The organizer has the right to make changes to the program.
Partners and sponsors:
Tere,
Veski Mati, Tartu Mill, Estonian Bakers' Association, A Le Coq, Tallinn Capoeira Sports School. Rye for threshing
provided by Rebasmäe farm (Rapla County).