Occupying the building where her father ran a primary school from 1857 to 1863, the Lydia Koidula Museum honours Estonia’s leading nineteenth-century poet, a woman whose verse inspired a new patriotic spirit in the country as well as evoking the unique beauty of its landscape.

The museum remembers Koidula through a modest collection of family photographs and first editions, with period furnishings helping to recreate the ambience of a nineteenth-century Estonian home.

Koidula in history

Born Lydia Jannsen, Koidula (1843-1886) helped her father produce Estonia’s first weekly newspaper, initially publishing poetry collections anonymously due to social preconceptions about the inappropriateness of literary careers for women. Adopting the pseudonym Koidula (”The Dawn”), she penned Estonian-language poems at a time when German literature enjoyed intellectual dominance. Her patriotic poem Mu Isamaa (My Fatherland) was set to music for the first-ever Estonian Song Festival in 1869, and has been a rallying cry for Estonian patriotic feeling ever since. Marrying stolid Latvian doctor Edvard Michelson, she moved with him to Kronstadt near St Petersburg and died an isolated figure, far from the Estonian intellectual circles for whom she had been such an inspiration.