Suuremõisa manor

Suuremõisa manor

Suuremõisa is the only Estonian place name on Vormsi and it was also the seat of the manor, which encompassed all of Vormsi in the second half of the 18th century. In Swedish and German the manor was known as Magnushof.

The first manors were established on Vormsi in the 17th century. Before this, the island’s peasants belonged to Haapsalu Castle. At the beginning of the 17th century, the island had Söderby and Bussby manors, the latter of which, founded in 1604 and originally belonging to ensign Magnus Brümmer, is the predecessor of Suuremõsa, as the first manor was located in Bussby. Records from 1625 and 1645 refer to the manor by the name of its founder, Magnushof, and sometimes by the name of the village as Hof Busby.

In 1636, Magnushof was acquired by Jakob De la Gardie, the owner of Suuremõisa in Hiiumaa. He had the largest village on Vormsi, Bussby, emptied and built what was then considered a modern manor house just north of the centre of the village. The legend of the Bussby wedding tells the tale of how the village was emptied.

At the end of the 17th century, the manor passed to the Königsmarck family. In 1747, Suuremõisa was bought by Karl Wilhelm von Stackelberg, the lord of the Tumala and Roobaka manors in Saaremaa. Soon after that, he also acquired Söderby manor. The Stackelbergs owned Suuremõisa for more than 150 years. While the first landlords of Suuremõisa did not live on the island and rarely visited Vormsi, the Stackelbergs made it their home. The Stackelbergs also had a new main building built instead of the earlier wooden structure. Only the foundations of the main building can be seen today.

The main building of the manor was completed in 1814. It was a two-storey stone building in classical architectural style. In the 1860s, the main building was rebuilt in the historicist style, and it was given arched windows on the second floor, some of which were designed with triple windows on the façade. The side avant-corps of the façade were adorned with pediments. The building was crowned by a three-storey polygonal projecting tower structure with a domed roof in the centre of the façade.

The manor also had numerous outbuildings, also built of stone. Today, all that remains are the ruins of a barn and carriage house with four round columns, an icehouse on the other side of the road and a Dutch-style windmill further away from the heart of the manor.

The Stackelberg era on Vormsi was marked by constant quarrels and violence against peasants. The first conflicts flared up in the second half of the 18th century when the Stackelbergs arrived on the island. The main source of strife was the old charters of freedom issued by the Swedish kings to the peasants of Vormsi, according to which the peasants were personally free, not serfs like Estonians. As a result, the Vormsi peasants were unwilling to do more work days or take on more duties than agreed. The peasants protested to various authorities, even to the King of Sweden. The baron used corporal punishment against peasants who resisted. Conflict with the peasants became especially heated in the first half of the 19th century under the rule of Friedrich Arent von Stackelberg, who was said to be particularly cruel. The quarrel ended with the manor being taken from him in the early 1840s and placed under the rule of the authorities.

Already in 1844 the rule of the manor was given to the baron’s son, Otto Frederik Stackelberg. His widow sold the manor to the Russian state in 1894, after he has passed away. The manor’s main building was put into use as a sanatorium for girls. The Russian army stationed on the island during the 1917 revolution razed the manor complex, triggering its decline. The main manor house was demolished in the 1930s.

Bussby wedding (Bussby bröllop)

In ‘Eibofolke’, Russwurm records the story of the Bussby wedding, during which the village was depopulated.

The Bussby peasants were rich, but they were also very proud. Young boys from Bussby never rode their fine horses bareback, and wore riding boots with big spurs, while girls adorned themselves with gold and silver rings and brooches. One year, Bussby had 15 weddings accompanied by a lavish celebration, and on top of that there were 15 couples who had never been married. There was no end to the dancing, feasting and drinking. In their exuberance and drunkenness, they danced to pipe music out in the open. Suddenly, a denizen of the sea, in the figure of a large man, emerged from the water to join the dancers. When the piper did not play as he demanded, he grabbed him by the head, snapped his neck and took the instrument or himself, playing it with such mastery that everyone danced with wild joy and delight. When he finally returned to the sea, the whole party followed him and drowned. At the same time, the sea flooded the village, and only a single groom was able to get to the attic of his own granary. He grabbed his bride by her brass-buckled belt and heaved her up as well. When the other villagers came home, Bussby seemed all but extinct. The only human they found was the dead piper, stretched across a door with the bagpipes on the ground beside him. After a long search, the bride and groom who had been in hiding were also found.  Since then, bagpipes are no longer played on Vormsi.

The legend of the wedding of Bussby seems to have arisen as a result of De la Gardie resettling the people of Bussby and turning the former village into manor fields.

There is another lost village on Vormsi called Tompo. No one knows the exact location of the village, but it suffered the same fate as Bussby. In the 1770s, the village lands were incorporated into the manor and its residents resettled. According to legend, the peasants from Tompo went out fishing in the spring, and Baron Otto von Stackelberg used the opportunity to chase their wives and children out of their farms, tear down their houses and sow the village fields with crops for his own needs. He also declared that misfortune would befall anyone who took the abandoned into their care.

Sea cows

When the manor was owned by von Helvig, livestock from the farm were grazed on Bussby beach. One day, a herdsman noticed that seven sea-grey cows emerged from the water to join the herd. They stayed with the others, eating and drinking. In the evening, five of them returned to the sea, while two stayed with the herd of the manor. When the manor lord heard what cows he had gained and how, he told the herdsman that he could have them. The herdsman was delighted and kept the animals. The cows from the sea soon turned out to be the best milk producers on the entire island.

(Vormsi Veri II)