September 28, 2024, is the 30th anniversary of the sinking of M/S Estonia. The ship sunk on the outskirts of the archipelago of Turku, Finland, my home town.
The rescuers who arrived at the scene after 2 AM, did not see the ship anymore; it had disappeared from their radar screens. It was like said in the Bible, the Book of Proverbs 1:28: “Then shall they call upon me, and I will not hear: they shall rise in the morning and shall not find me.”
Most people know about the sinking of Titanic in 1912. But the sinking of Estonia was a much bigger accident. At Titanic, 68 per cent of the passengers perished, while the death toll on Estonia was 86 percent. There were 989 people on board of Estonia, of whom 852 drowned or froze to death.
Sailing on cruiseferries is very popular where I grew up. In the 1970s two companies, Viking Line and Silja Line started passenger and cargo shipping between Finland and Sweden across the Baltic Sea. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the former Soviet Republic of Estonia gained her independence, the company called Estline started to sail its own cruiseferries to Sweden and Finland. This video is from a TV program by a Swedish reporter Täppas Fogelberg. It was made in 1990, when Estonia was known as Silja Star.
My home town Turku is a harbor town, and since I have family in Stockholm, Sweden, I travelled onboard those ships, too. One of the cruiseferries my family used was Estonia, which in those days was known as Viking Sally. It was briefly known as Silja Star, before it was purchased by Estline and renamed Estonia.
Estonia left for her last journey from Tallinn, Estonia, on September 27, 1994, at 7:15 PM. It was meant to arrive at Stockholm the following morning at 9:30 AM. But in the middle of the night on September 28, shortly after 1 AM, the visor of the ship broke away because of the stormy waters. The visor tore open the loading ramp behind it, and water started flowing in.
While the ship took a heavy list, her crew communicated a mayday call at 1:22 AM. In this call a conversation took place between the third mate of Estonia Andres Tammes and the chief mate of the ship Silja Europa Teijo Seppelin.
The conversation is chilling to listen. When Tammes gives the mayday call, Seppelin asks in disbelief: “Estonia, are you calling mayday?” On sea mayday is the most urgent call of distress; a ship or boat never calls mayday unless it is literally question of life and death. So naturally, a ship of that size calling mayday was an indication that something was horribly wrong.
What is also remarkable is that when Tammes addresses Seppelin, he says: “Good morning. Do you speak Finnish?” This has always drawn my attention. If there ever was a day – what for hundreds onboard would be their last one – which definitely had not a good morning, it was this one. But even in the midst of death, the sailor thought of good manners.
When other ships headed to help Estonia, they were confused why the radars showed only water. No one could imagine that a ship of that size would be even in danger of sinking. Several big cruiseferries sailed at Baltic Sea day and night, and there had been much worse storms in the area without any accidents. But when the rescuers got there, and saw some singular survivors and bodies of people who had managed to get to the rescue rafts, they realized how horrible an event they witnessed: the whole ship had sunk.
The sinking of Estonia is the deadliest peacetime shipwreck to have occurred in European waters. Most of the victims were Swedes and Estonians, and the ship sank in Finnish waters, so the sinking was a huge shock for everyone in Finland, Sweden, and Estonia. It was also a huge emotional stress not only for the survivors and the families of the dead, but to the rescue workers, too. One of the rescuers was interviewed on TV. He was a rough and experienced sailor, and had seen a lot while sailing on seas; but the memory of seeing the dead floating on water was too much, and he started to cry on air. Most of the passengers, though, did not make it on the surface to be rescued or buried. Their final resting place is at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
I have a personal memory about the time of the event. On the evening of the accident, I attended a Lutheran service at a parish hall across the street from my school. The minister who gave the sermon, Heikki Haataja, quoted a verse from the Canticle of Canticles (chapter 8, verse 7), which has remained in my mind ever since: “Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the floods drown it: if a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.”
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