Celebrating Final Victory in Estonia’s ‘Great Battle for Freedom’: The Short Afterlife of 23 June 1919 as National Holiday, 1934–1939

On 23 June 1934 the young republic of Estonia, founded in 1918, celebrated her Victory Day for the first time. An official brochure produced for this occasion explained what had happened during the days of the Estonian War of Independence exactly 15 years before, in June 1919, on the ‘fields of Cēsis’ (Est. Võnnu; Germ. Wenden) in Latvia: here, the text reads, where already ‘our forefathers had fought their fateful wars with the crusaders […], we finally defeated our historical enemy’ (Takelberg 1934: 3). This key sentence, in justifying the holiday, conveys multiple information about the past, in order to define the conflict of 1919 as an event, worthy of state celebration. First, a collective ‘we’, the Estonians, gained a final victory in a decisive battle. Second, the defeated was the ‘historical enemy’ of this collective, so that the conflict apparently solved in 1919 had obviously had a long prehistory. Third, the ancestors of the present collective had already fought on the same battlefield against the ‘crusaders’, presumably the ’historical enemy’ mentioned, thus embedding the battle of 1919 into a locally fixed narrative template dating back to the Middle Ages. This evidence suggests that the particular design of this state-imposed after-life of the battle of Cēsis was meant to stress a coherent story of the Estonian nation defending its independence against a ‘historical enemy’ from times immemorial.