Establishment of the Estonia village on the bank of the Kodor River at the end of the Tsarist era, by Marika Mikkor
This article was first published on March 1, 2023 in Russian in the Athens-based Greek diaspora newspaper "Aфинский Kурьер" No. 4 (1059) in the section "ГРЕЧЕСКИЙ СУХУМСКИЙ ВЕСТНИК" (No. 201).
Marika Mikkor is a historian who graduated from the University of Tartu and has worked at the Estonian National Museum and Estonian Agricultural Museum as researcher and senior researcher. She has expertise in topics such as Estonian customs, Izhorian and Mordovian family customs, Nazi skinheads in Estonia, identity of Caucasian Estonians, and the home birth movement in Estonia. Mikkor has conducted extensive fieldwork and has been actively involved in raising awareness about the challenges faced by Estonians in the Caucasus.I dedicate this article to Elviina Jakobson, at whose house I stayed several times in the village of Estonia in the 1980s.
During the colonisation of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, Mingrelians and other Georgian tribes from neighbouring counties settled in the region, as well as Greeks, Armenians, and other refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Georgian officials wanted to relocate compatriots suffering from a lack of land plots to the region, while some bureaucrats preferred settlers of other nationalities. In 1864, the migration of landless peasants from Mingrelia began. In 1866-1867, the first small settlements of Orthodox Bulgarians and Greeks were founded in Abkhazia. Soon, Estonians, Germans, and Latvians, mainly Lutheran economic migrants, arrived.
Estonian settlements were established around Sukhum and in the area between Gagra and Adler. One of these settlements, the village of Estonia (also known as Estonka), was situated on the right bank of the Kodor River at the foot of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, twenty kilometres from Sukhum in the direction of Tiflis. This area was part of the Guma District within the Sukhum Military District of the Kutaisi Governorate.
The settlement of Estonia was founded in 1882 by Estonians from Samara, and later, migrants from Crimea and homeland Estonia joined them.
Jakob Pint wrote about the migration of his ancestors from homeland Estonia to Samara around 1864. His grandfather, Adam Pint, from Tartu County, went to St. Petersburg with other envoys to obtain permission for resettlement. Upon returning home, the peasants faced corporal punishment for such actions. Thirty years later, as wealthy men in the Caucasus, the former Samara Estonians bitterly recalled how they left homeland Estonia: "We had to escape at midnight, but the unfortunate escorts were punished and received 30 lashes." At that time, Estonian peasants were ruled by German landlords.
After twenty years of living in Samara, Estonians achieved prosperity thanks to favourable conditions—they no longer had to serve German landlords. However, they grew tired of blizzards in the open spaces and long trips to the city. Moreover, the region suffered from crop failures for several years. The main reason for their migration, though, was to obtain new land that was not taxed.
They began to move to Siberia, Bashkiria, the Ufa province, and the Caucasus. The Samara Estonians learned about the resettlement to the Caucasus from the newspaper articles "Kaukaasia kirjad" (Caucasian Letters) by Joosep Robert Rezold, a gymnasium teacher living in Tiflis. Representatives of other nations also called for the colonisation of Abkhazia. Georgian public figure and educator Jakob Gogebashvili published an article titled "Who should be settled in Abkhazia?" in the newspaper "Tiflis Vestnik [Тифлисский вестник]" in 1877. In his opinion, the Mingrelians living nearby were the most suitable settlers for Abkhazia.
Estonian pioneers initially chose a plot of land near Sukhum, in a place called Abzhakva, but this did not satisfy the 27 families who arrived from Samara in May 1882. They needed flat land, and the new location chosen was the bank of the Kodor River. Only 10 out of the 27 families became the founders of the village of Estonia, while the rest returned to Samara disappointed.
The settlers became tenants of state lands, initially granted 10 years of tax exemption, a period that was later extended for another 10 years. The nearest Abkhazian village was located across the Kodor River. Since 1877, Abkhazians were considered a "guilty population" in the Russian Empire and were not allowed to live near Sukhum. They were suppressed by the tsarist government after the anti-colonial uprisings of 1866 and 1877. On the right bank of the Kodor, the tsarist government established a buffer zone of loyal and grateful settlers from various nationalities and Christian denominations.
Estonian settlers camped on the bank of the Kodor River until a colonial government official rode up and pointed out the village's borders with the handle of his whip. The settlement bordered the Moldovan village of Dranda, the Mingrelian village of Pshap, and the Russian-Bulgarian village of Vladimirovka. The Estonians named their village Estonia.