[Kaalin kraateri]

An iron meteorite fell at the place where Lake Kaali now is situated at about 500 BCE. It seems that the classical Greek scientist and traveler, Pytheas of Massilia, visited the region and he reports that "the Aests showed him the grave of the Sun, or the place where the Sun fell asleep (Helios koimatai)." Pytheas visited the place in the 3rd century BCE, and parts of his travelogue have survived as quotations in works by other classical authors. An entire work by Pytheas was obviously destroyed when religious bandits (the Christians) burned down the Alexandrian library. The cosmic catastrophe had a great influence upon the myths of the peoples then inhabiting the Baltic region. For example the Kalevala verses "a fiery island in a fiery lake, a fiery eagle on the fiery island..." are thought to relate about the Kaali meteorite. Likewise, the Germanic twilight of the gods, the Goetterdaemmerung, describes excellently the post-catastrophe weather and clouds of dust.

Obviously the Kaali crater soon became a sacred place and it was surrounded by a stone wall. On top of the wall there used to be a log fortress with five tall towers. The fortress protected the smithies and blast furnaces where meteorite fragments were smelted into pig iron for export. The material was mostly collected from outside of the crater out of the ground where most of the meteorite iron had landed as droplets when the core was vaporized in the explosion following the impact. Besides bulk iron, the inhabitants of Saaremaa and Estonia produced high quality swords and spears by damasking technique, in which the same piece of metal is rolled and turned over several times in order to improve its quality. Damasked objects can be identified by the beautiful ornament on their surfaces which was meant to make them more valuable. Damasking was practised also in Finland and Sweden. There is an in-depth monograph written in the former Soviet Union about the Iron Age Baltic area damasked weapons.

The lake was also used for sacrificial purposes, and its bottom is currently studied by a Danish-Estonian group of scientists, and the researchers are prepared to collect any large tissue samples preserved inside the oxygen-free mud of the lake--whatever they may be.

Copyright © 1998

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