Gea Troska teadlasetee

This article examines the life of a prolific but somewhat unheralded ethnographer, the researcher of village and settlement history Gea Troska (1926–2015), attempting to provide a hitherto lacking overview. Her work as ethnographer largely coincided with the Soviet era: she began her ethnography studies in 1945 and retired in 1996. The article looks at the opportunities and choices that a researcher in the Estonian SSR had, which societal and scientific processes she was engaged with, and what influence these processes had on her research. The articles draws on Troska’s numerous works, in both published and manuscript form, as well as museum and archive collections and an interview given in 2007. Troska was born in Tallinn in 1926. Her father was the public servant Hugo Reiman and the family was known for its broad cultural interests and activity in society. Her youth was spent in the woody garden town of Nõmme just outside Tallinn, she was well-educated and had a fairly solid patriotic upbringing. In 1945, in occupied Estonia, Troska entered Tartu State University to study ethnography. Like many institutions at that time, it was in the process of being Sovietized. Her principal teachers there were Harri Moora and Ants Viires. After graduating, she was accepted to the degree programme at the Institute of History in the recently established Academy of Sciences system. She was assigned to the Moscow Institute of Ethnography where her supervisor was the well-known ethnographer Nikolai Cheboksarov. Troska’s chosen research topic was family life in the 19th and 20th century but the work she started was soon cut short when in 1952 she was expelled from the party and the doctoral programme due to accusations of an ideological nature. Her expulsion from the Academy of Sciences system prevented her from pursuing her desired avenue of research. Two decades of work at museums followed: at the Tallinn City Museum in 1953–1960 (including as director from 1955), and at the newly established Open Air Museum in 1960–1971 (as research director from 1970). The role of a research employee at the museum involved collections and exhibitions, while she continued academic research out of her own personal interest and dedication. She chose a new research topic, the history of settlement with a focus on the 19th century, which she was able to pursue based on map materials hitherto not used in this context. The Soviet system did give her one quite extraordinary opportunity: to participate in the establishment of the Open Air Museum and its exhibition, for which extensive research and field work in the field of rural architecture was required. She was also a keen photographer and a large number of photographs taken by her during field work can be found in the collections of Estonian museums. In 1971, Troska returned to the Institute of History, where she devoted herself to scientific research and defended her Candidate of Sciences degree in 1974. Her decades-long research into Estonian settlement was encapsulated in a monograph published only in 1987, on the topic of Estonian villages in the 19th century, but she also produced several dozen research articles (some studies remained only in manuscript form), contributed to general volumes on history and ethnography, compiled both histories of villages and regions as well as methodological materials for local historians. In the 1960s and 1970s, she conducted research for a corresponding volume of the Baltic historical and ethnographic atlas, which unfortunately was never published. She worked at the Institute of History until her retirement in 1996, and was considered one of the premier experts on the history of settlement in Estonia.