ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the cultural history and the unique heritage landscape of Russian Old Believers in Estonia, popularly known for their high onion beds on narrow plots, stretching outward behind each house from the street-village, and for their fish-selling booths along the roads nearby. The chapter explores how food, together with ecology and material geographies, is deeply rooted in a community’s dwelling and construction of cultural identity. Due to poor natural conditions, the Old Believers’ foodways are witnesses of hard manual labour in particular, with a faith-driven rigorous work ethic and routine.
In recently expounded relational understandings of landscape (Harvey and Waterton, 2015), landscape is treated as a processual, material, and perceptual engagement between body and world (Reinert et al., 2015). Whether this traditional food-providing landscape of Old Believers is culturally sustainable (Soini and Dessein, 2016) in this marginalised, ageing, close-knit community remains to be seen.
