The Swedes on Ormsö (curious)

In the Middle Ages, many Swedes moved to Ormsö outside Estonia. During the superpower era, the island also belonged to Sweden. With the Second World War came the end of the Swedish settlement, after 700 years of Swedes on the island.

Many of the Swedes were put on trains to the east, others were forced to fight for the Soviets. Swedish authorities managed to evacuate the islanders to Sweden by boat in 1944. After the war, there was a scattering of Swedish speakers, around 1000 people, mostly old people who refused to flee. In 2016, Oskar Friberg was the only resident with Swedish as his mother tongue. He was then 98 years old and the island’s last original surviving Estonian Swede.

At the outbreak of World War II, Ormsö was almost entirely Swedish-speaking, and today is the only place in Estonia where the old Swedish place names have not been Estonianized.

The area had its own dialect, customs and traditions, something that today is unfortunately history.