Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

In my hand I am holding an edition where our children have 20,000 times tried to answer the question ''Home Decoration: Why and How?''

Why? Because home is where a citizen starts. Think of the connection between these words: home and citizen. It is natural for the citizens to begin the decoration of Estonia from their homes.

The history of our homes is part of the country's history. If you visit a farmer's family where people have held on to their roots, you will see and hear amazing things. Their memory goes back as far as the Great Northern War, but not through the history lessons at school but in another way. It rather goes through emotional strings, through the understanding that we should care for each other, because a farmstead has never been the place to spoil anyone.

There was a time when inanimate objects lived much longer than people. There was much respect for work and the working tools. A beautiful tool, polished by the work of our parents and grandparents, is alive with the warmth of their hands.

I read the memories of Gustav Ränk. He has written of his visit to Pakri in 1940. The families living there had to leave their homes because a Russian military base was to be established on the island. The women were packing, the men sat sullenly over their mugs of beer. But when Mr. Ränk wanted to buy some mugs from the year 1732, the men said that they couldn't sell because they still needed the mugs. On the next day, the island was deserted. Mr. Ränk could take all the mugs; there was no one left to buy them from. He has described the storehouse of a farmstead: 200 wooden spoons, 100 bowls on a shelf. A farmstead was like a small nation, they had to manage everything on their own.

At the present time, we are living in a spiritual vacuum. Whisky contests are more attractive than football, and sports nowadays have nothing to do with keeping people healthy. We are in a state of weightlessness. It is now that we have to find our home, to build it up stone by stone - I do not mean building a house, I mean the restoration of home in the most prevailing, the most sacred sense.

The call for home decoration was a waking signal. It was a question posed to everyone all over Estonia. And everyone will come with his or her own answers. Everybody in Estonia is a master, everybody can be a creator and cover Estonia with love step by step, so that the litter from Soviet times would finally disappear.

''Some people said of home decoration that President Meri wants to be like President Päts, others claimed that the president was out of his mind,'' three girls wrote in their home decoration essays. Almost as if two more political parties were to emerge. And yet they did not. Instead, both kinds of people tackled the task, and Estonia became cleaner. The people, too, became cleaner. They were melted together by their common longing for home.

20,000 children wrote about home decoration, and this was our most important achievement - the children started to ask their parents questions. It is through your children that this question reached you. If we unite our will and our trust this way, we could make Switzerland out of Võrumaa. But why should we? Võrumaa and Vooremaa are much more beautiful. They maintain the warmth of our own working hands.

I thank you all!

back | archive of speeches | main page