Getting away from the heat, I moved north to the
long-awaited semiotics summer school and a new season of Game of Thrones. Having crossed the Seven Kingdoms (four, to be honest), I found myself in
Estonia where dried yellowness of Ukrainian fields turned into the deep green saturation
of the forests that always have enough rains to drink and cloudy shadows to rest
under. Tartu is my Oldtown: the second largest city in the country, a meeting
place of historical heritages, an intellectual and educational centre that
boasts its own Citadel – the glorious University of Tartu. But back then, tired
after a long bus ride, I saw nothing but an ordinary neat town, unsuitable for
stories about great battles and tremendous feats. However, after several
semiotics lectures my Tartu experience became more vivid, as step by step I
learned to read the city and its inhabitants: from left to right, bottom-up, in
boustrophedon, chapter by chapter, as a hypertext, creating my own pagination,
commenting in the margin and dropping ice cream on the pavement/parchment.
