Foundation Hereditas has organized festival TriaLogos at the Old Town of Tallinn since 1998. Usually it takes place at the end of September, during the week of St Michael’s Day, but as necessity and possibilities may have it, it has sometimes gone past it’s usual spatial and temporal bounds.

The festival has evolved in the context of the revival of Tallinn’s ancient spirituality. During the last 35 years a spiritual movement of young intellectuals has developed in the district of Tallinn where in the 14th century the Dominican monastery founded the town’s first school. With the passing of years this small district has grown into a cultural environment with different studios, schools and craftsmen’s guilds. Since the educational and intellectual language of this region was for centuries Latin, the district is now called the Latin Quarter.

Surviving documents of the Dominican school, including vernacular notes in 15th century Latin documents, bear witness to openness and ability to dialogue that was prevalent in the Medieval monastic culture. Contrary to well-rooted myths, such and other evidence points to wide freedom of language, thought and expression during the Middle Age.

Organizers of festival TriaLogos try to learn from the mistakes of our past and attempt to replace cultural dictatorship with a space of dialogue that was the cradle and implantation of Christian and educated Europe. The intention of the festival is the revival and preservation of a free and open cultural forum of dialogue between dominant contemporary ways of thinking and the tradition of thought that has flourished in the Latin Quarter for centuries.

TriaLogos does not embark upon solving problems and conflicts. Rather, it hopes to contribute to understanding the situation in which Europeans find themselves today, defining the position of individuals in this situation, and sketching perspectives.

Throughout last years, TriaLogos has constantly been focusing on defining (and discovering) its own cultural identity and thereby becoming a substantial dialogue partner to other actors. What is the Christian European culture and who is a Christian in the midst of all the ideologies and religions storming across the globe? These have been the central questions of recent years’ festivals: in 2006 the theme was “Culture Wars” and in 2007 “In Search of Europe’s Cultural Identity”. Throughout its ten years of operation, the festival has hosted many academics from many countries, foremost with the background of theology, philosophy, history and culture.

The 2007 festival session left us facing several issues calling for further and more thorough treatment. On the one hand, our top politicians, Tunne Kelam (PhD) and Mart Laar (PhD) encouraged the organizers of the festival and called for re-establishment of the Christian cultural identity of Europeans. Yet, on the other hand, dr John Rao’s thorough treatment of common patterns in dominant ideas and ways of thinking throughout 3000 years of the history of Western civilization demonstrated to the organizers as well as the audience that there is an enormous vacuum in our knowledge that has to be filled if we indeed wish to restore our identity. In his lectures, dr Rao drew accurate parallels between our day and the great thinkers of the beginning of 19th century, such as John Henry Cardinal Newman, count Nikolay Kolitsyn and others, who discovered that they were unable to participate in solving the problems due to lacking a clear understanding of the roots of their own culture. Thus they set out to explore the principal sources of early Church fathers and Christian culture. As a result, they developed a clear conception of how to find prospects for the development of European culture in the context of their time. Today, being faced with very similar problems, we can gather inspiration from these visionaries as to how to restore our own identity. In fact we are called and encouraged to do so.

Setting out to study the cultural identity of ourselves as Europeans  the identity which has developed for 1500 years in a Christian context  it is inevitable to move into the past until we reach the period during which our identity was most uniform and monolithic and as such most identifiable. We have to reach the period during which our culture did not yet suffer from the separation of “Eastern” and “Western” Christianity; the period that knew a plethora of liturgical rites and forms of spiritual life, which were nevertheless like branches of a single tree. Based on what has been said thus far, the theme of TriaLogos 2008 could be phrased as follows: “ECCLESIA UNA - In Search of the Common Roots and Perspectives of East and West in the Christian Cultural Space”.

Today, in the midst of a flood of information, comprehensive knowledge of one’s spiritual identity and of the models of thought surrounding us is more needed than ever before. Through festival TriaLogos we hope to help restore the attitude of classical thinking, the ability to carry out an analysis of the actual situation, and an overall understanding of sources and basic texts.

     TriaLogos 2009