St John's Church in Tartu Kaur Alttoa
	Tiina Abel

	When a dozen or so years ago I once took a taxi in Tartu and asked to be taken to St John's church, the driver was at a loss. 'St John's church?' The taxi driver's confusion is perfectly understandable: the quite remarkable church in European context had by that time been standing in ruins for decades and continued to crumble, with grass growing in place of the altar. Yet, had someone asked me what the older Estonian architecture had to offer to the world, I would have said: the barn-dwelling house and St John's Church in Tartu. Architecturally, St John's is a rather ordinary urban church with no overtly striking peculiarities. As with the entire downtown Tartu, the church is founded on a marshy ground and thus initially stood on log rafts. It has been repeatedly destroyed, the major wreckage occurring during the Great Northern War when the steeple was hit and crashed down on the central nave, shattering the vaults. After the last battles of WW II in Tartu in 1944 St John's church was bombed to ruin and its restoration in the Soviet era proved impossible. For years, the church also served as a hospital to the prison in the same street and was obviously looted quite thoroughly. The cornerstone for restoration was laid only in 1993, and now in 2005, the church is consecrated once again.
	Written sources yield little evidence of the exact origin of the church, although it is known that it was not built according to one specific design but has gone through numerous changes of plan and reconstruction. In any case, in 1323 the congregation was already in existence. After finding fragments of the east-west orientated wooden building, where funerals took place in the western side, it can be said that the church dates from the second half of the 12th century or early 13th century. This makes St John's the first Christian church building before the 13th century crusades in Estonia, or to be more precise - the first Christian church before the start of the Christianisation of Estonia. True, it took some time to finish the church - the exterior design was completed in the second half of the 14th century, and the upper part of the tower was not realised until some 400 years later. But the significance of St John's church, in the European cultural context, does not lie - as stated earlier - in the architecture of the building. What is important are the one thousand terracotta or burnt clay sculptures both within the interior and on the outer walls. These little figures, of which about a half have survived, form a unique assemblage not only in northern Europe but in the continent as a whole. Terracotta is not totally unknown in contemporary art, but there is no other Gothic building in Europe with quite so many sculptures in that particular technique and on such high artistic level. Thanks to these sculptures the church in Tartu exceeds its local importance and is undoubtedly deserving of a place in the Gothic architecture of the Occident. The Livonian War started in 1558 by the Muscovites was a hot topic in Europe. No wonder then that Tilemann Bredcnbach's book, reflecting these events, published in Cologne in 1558, was reissued four times. The book also gives an overview of the Reformation events in Tartu, especially the looting of pictures. He then describes the church of John the Baptist, built with supreme skill and at great expense, where its various ornaments included the figures of the Redeemer and the Twelve Apostles. There are nevertheless many unanswered questions concerning the origin of these sculptures. It is certainly amazing that a church in a relatively small provincial town acquired such a collection, comprising over one thousand terracotta sculptures that display simple but eloquent heads, and more elaborate human figures too, put together from several blocks. The immensely expensive and time-consuming phenomenon, that required great artistic skill, did not seem to have been commissioned by anyone specific either, although Tartu was at the time a Hanseatic town and was probably reasonably wealthy. We can, however, hazard a guess about the reasons for the sculptures. Considering the time when they were made and the main topic of their composition - the Last Judgement - we could say that at least partly, the sculptures appeared as a memorial. We know that in 1348 Europe was devastated by the plague - the Black Death that reached the Baltic Sea areas a few years later. Maybe the people of Tartu tried to remember that event? Maybe the reason is the same why the people of LŸbeck commissioned Danse Macabre from Bernt Notke one hundred years later?
	The work of probably five to ten masters took place within the interior in three horizontal zones, the lower two of which have not survived. These two zones had sitting figures under canopy. The heads in the third row apparently depicted townspeople, although a figure of a devil and another of a knight have survived as well. The interior, especially the central nave, would have been lavishly decorated. Sadly only few remains have survived. The area between the high wall and the upper part of the nave has a peculiar design. It is articulated by a row of niches, thus forming an illusory triforium with more figures sitting under the canopy, the middle ones with a crown and a sceptre. Such a distinctive feature as the high wall is quite unique in Gothic architecture, and England (Wells, Ottery St Mary) is the place to look for similar examples. Above the high vault of the tower, in the western side of the nave, sits the Throning Christ - Majestas Domini - with the additional figures of six saints. The symbols of Christ and the Evangelists were located on the keystones of the cross vaults. And of the exterior, the western portal should be noted; adorned with decorative gable, the niches contain 15 figurines. The Throning Christ in the middle is surrounded by the intercessors St Mary and John the Baptist, and 12 apostles. This is the so-called 'desis group', referring to the Last Judgement. A frieze of half-figures is higher, on the tower façade, marking the former height and design of the wall in the central nave. After the 1708 battles of the Northern War, the departing Russian troops systematically blew up the entire town. The upper part of the church steeple came down in a crash, destroying the central nave and the vaults of the choir. Various other disasters have befallen the church since then as well. The most damaging, from the point of view of the sculptures, was the reconstruction work carried out in the 1820s-30s according to the plans of G. F. W. Geist. The church was now supposed to resemble an antique temple. Until then, most of the interior sculptures had survived. However, they no longer suited the classicist canons of form, and almost all of them were taken down. Besides total removal, a number of figurines in the niches simply had their protruding parts cut off - thus many sculptures lack a nose or half the face. The niche figures nevertheless had a lucky escape, because rather than empty all the niches, it was preferred to wall them in and cover over them with plaster. The yearning for the medieval emerged together with romanticism, and reached St John's Church only at the turn of the centuries. Since 1899 the church façades were restored under the supervision of the Riga architect W. Bockslaff. The later layers of plaster were removed from the walls thus revealing the exterior sculptures. The joint finishing was restored; the destroyed details and sculptures replaced. However, restoration at that time did not naturally always rely on exact research, and it is obvious that a lot of imagination was used here. The restoration plans were abandoned because of the First World War. Then came WW II and the fatal year 1944.
	On 29 June 2005 the church is re-opened with great pomp and ceremony; the President of Germany has promised to attend, as have many other international dignitaries, as the restoration of St John's has been a joint effort of several countries. And after years of restoration the main principles of the work can now be explained. For a start, we wished to keep as much of the older layers (even in fragments) as possible. Reconstruction based on lively imagination was avoided, and for example the previous vaults of the nave were replaced by a neutral wooden ceiling. Most debates centred on the presentation of the terracotta sculptures. Today's restoration techniques are not really up to guaranteeing the survival of the figures outside the building without any harm coming to them. Thus a decision was made to exhibit the originals inside the church and adorn the outside with copies, whereas their originals would be carefully kept elsewhere. This was the only feasible solution as the sculptures of St John's are far too precious to be taken lightly. Kaur Alttoa (1947), art historian and lecturer. He has devoted decades to Estonian medieval church architecture, including South-Estonian brick gothic. Central in his research has been St John's church, where he actively participated in the preparations for the restoration
	| Estonian Art 1/05 (16) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2005 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |