If you had visited St Michael, the parish church of the Swedish
Lutheran congregation at Reval ( Tallinn) in the Estonian republic,
before 1939, you might have noticed on the east side of the first
pillar facing the west entrance, a simple oblong grey marble
memorial tablet, thirty by twenty-four inches, topped by an oval
wooden plaque. On the latter, Death with scythe and hour-glass sat
above the sentence, Der Tod heilt alle Noht ( Death heals every need),
and the following verse:

Steh Wandersmann und lies an diesen Stein die plagen,
Die sechszehnhundert zwey das Vaterland gedrückt,
Am End des seculi betraf uns gleiches Klagen,
Well da der Hunger auch viel tausend hingerückt,
Da diese gute Stadt bey tausend hier gespeiset,
Und ihr auf ewig hat ein Denkmahl aufgericht:
Der Segen ist der Lohn, den Gott dafür verheiset,
Drum Leser, eh du gehst, vergis der Armen nich.

(Pause here, O Traveller, and read on this stone the misfortune which
afflicted our country in 1602. At the end of the century we suffered a
similar affliction because many thousands died of starvation. At that time
this magnanimous city fed about a thousand people: a deed which will
make people remember it for all time. God rewards such actions with his
blessing: that is why you who read this should remember the poor before
you go on your way.)

The verse was written by the steward of the infirmary, Christoffer
Schwabe (St Michael was the early sixteenth-century infirmary
chapel dedicated to St John before it was handed over to Reval
Swedish congregation in 1733), after he had restored below it the
marble tablet commemorating the great Estonian and Livonian
famine of 1602. He had found the tablet embedded in the floor,
surprisingly enough in 1697, another year of widespread famine in

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