Author: Saara Kolehmainen

When I was little, we had a book called ‘Masterpieces of Russian Painting’, which I loved to look through. On our first day on the boat, when we went out to the open sea, I couldn’t understand for a long time what this situation, which was so new to me, reminded me of. And then I realised that I was inside a painting. A painting from my childhood, from that very book. It was called ‘In the Blue Expanse’, and its author was the artist Rylov.

In this painting, I found myself every time we went out to sea. In the first days, I was simply there, sitting on the boat, listening to the wind, smelling the air. I hardly talked to anyone, was alone, and didn’t think about anything. Such a state and way of spending time are rare, and it felt very unusual. Gradually, I began to come out of it. I had a large textile project with me, which I am currently working on. I am glad I completed one of its parts during our boat trip. Our final destination was the island of Gotland, where we will have an exhibition next month. 

I brought five flags with me for it, which I sewed myself. We hoisted a new flag on the mast daily, and it was great. Previously, these flags had been displayed in exhibitions, and finally, for the first time, they were used for their intended purpose. I looked at them and rejoiced like a child. Before embarking on the journey, I was slightly afraid — my relationship with water is complicated. Sometimes, I am afraid to go into the water, fearful of the depth of the current and the waves. I didn’t know what it would be like to sail and not see the shore, with only the sea around. My worries were in vain — the sea accepted me. I felt no anxiety, only gentle rocking when we went ashore. I would like to sail more. I thought one week was a lot, but it was very little.

Godzilla

I was always afraid of water. Sometimes I have nightmares about drowning. In this repetitive dream, I’m trying to stay on the surface, floating on something not meant for water, such as a sledge. The sledge is drowning, and I see how it disappears in the darkness. I am afraid of sharks. This fear is absurd, as I fear them even in the lake or river. It is rather an abstract fear of something unknown and wild in the deepness below me. Sometimes, when travelling on ferries in a cabin below the waterline, I can’t fall asleep because of the fear. Lying on my bed with eyes open and with ears catching all the sounds behind the metal walls separating me from the sea.

Therefore, I was a bit anxious about joining the ‘Imagining Godzilla’. But surprisingly, during the week of sailing, I felt comfortable. I relied on the Godzilla boat and the physics of sailing. The excitement of adventure didn’t leave a space for my fear. I was lying on the net stretched above the water, watching the flow under the deck, and felt confident and protected.

Travelling by water is one of the most ancient ways of travelling, but I was born far from the sea, and sailing was unfamiliar to me. However, my home place – Karelia, sometimes called ”The country of lakes” is the land of fishermen. Any settlement in Karelia is placed along the shore of a lake or a river. When I moved to St.Petersburg, I was shocked to come across some settlements without water nearby. Such places felt like houses without windows.

I was brought to the Godzilla boat by my project in which I’m studying the fate of the Ingrian Finns, the national minority I’m part of, who used to live in Ingria, the historical area between Narva and St.Petersburg. We were repressed by the Soviets, occupied by Germans, shipped to Hanko harbour from Klooga concentration camps by Finns and deported to the USSR at the end of the war to end up in exile or even in prison camps. But some of us had escaped to Sweden. I heard some of my relatives did the same. But we lost connection. In 2022 in Sweden, I met Anna Monahof, the Ingrian-Swedish writer whose family avoided deportation by escaping to Sweden by the sea. They were smuggled on the fisherman’s boat but were cached by a storm. They arrived at an unfamiliar shore and feared it might be Estonia. If it were so, they would be caught by Soviet authorities. The Swedish box of matches found on the shore was a happy sign that they had reached Sweden.

It was conceptually essential for me to approach the Gotland shore on a sailing boat. During the stay on the island I discovered that the Soviet refugees played a considerable role in Gotland’s history, and many people were involved in the refugee evacuation. We visited the monument for the refugees from the Soviet Union. Latvians and Estonians installed it in memory of those who were helping to escape from the USSR to Gotland. The monument is the actual metal green-painted boat that was used for smuggling people over the border. It is impossible to imagine how they managed to get over the sea on such small boats. There is an inevitable parallel with the situation on the Mediterranean Sea and Lesbos Island with the refugees from the African continent. But the fate of survivors in Sweden is better than those of Africans on the coast of Greece. The memorial plaques installed near the boat thank Gotland on behalf of Estonian and Latvian escapers. On the other shore, in Latvian Mazirbe, the so-called boat cemetery is situated. The Soviets destroyed the boats during the occupation to prevent people from escaping abroad. I met one person on Gotland who told me the story of his neighbour who was smuggling people from the Soviet shore. They would send balloons with messages from Gotland to the Soviet side. The message contained the time and the place of evacuation. Then they would cross the sea, and meet people waiting on the shore. They smuggled many people this way, but one day, his team was caught by Soviet guards. He was lucky as he had to cancel the trip at the last minute because his wife was giving birth.

Sailing across the Baltic Sea is not just an exciting adventure but an alternative fate of my family. My grandfather recalled how at the end of WWII, their entire family was sitting around the table in Lohja, Finland deciding whether to obey and come back to the Soviets or dare to escape to Sweden. Their father suggested to vote. They voted to come back home. However, they were doomed to never return home again. All the Ingrians were gathered in the transition camps in Oitti, loaded on the cargo train and sent to Vyborg. After that, instead of going back to St.Petersburg and their home village, they were sent to Siberia, Yaroslavl Oblast, Yakutia and other remote places. They were considered politically unreliable by Soviet officials and were never allowed to live closer than 100 kilometres to the big cities. This is how I ended up being born in Soviet Karelia. Our family’s fate would be totally different if they would take different decision that day. That’s why, when meeting writer Anna Monahof whose family had taken a risk and reached Sweden in 1945, I considered her life story an alternative path for us. Travelling on the Godzilla boat helped me to bring these collective memories of Ingrians to life.

I have always been fascinated by borders, but borders on water are special. The border is somewhere far, but at the same time, it is right here, on the shore. The other shore is unreachable, but only the vast emptiness of the sea separates you from it. When I think about far distances by land, it’s discontinuous. There are cities, forests, lakes and rivers, fields and villages between me and the destination. But when standing on the shore and looking at the horizon, I feel that there is only one step between me and the place behind the sea; it’s the sea itself.

During our visit to Fårö island, we were standing on the shore, and Saara mentioned that the sea there looked like an ocean, as if it had no limits. I realised that after the sailing trip on the Godzilla, I felt the opposite – the sea did not feel big enough anymore. A sea for me was always the territory of the unknown but after crossing it on the boat, I learned there is land on the other side, even if it is invisible at the moment. The sea is not a mystical and uncrossable void for me anymore. I can imagine walking by water to the other shore. Before the trip, the sea was, for me, an empty space opposite to the solid matter of the land which you could step on. This binary opposition is gone. Now the sea, for me, is also a matter. Like an ocean from the Solaris by Stanislav Lem, this matter has its own agency and can let you cross it or block your path, but it is not an empty indifferent space anymore – the sea is another land.