Main Building of Albu Manor

The travel books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marveled at the dense network of upper-class manors characteristic of the Baltic region.[^1] Manors as such are not unique, but the region’s distinctive feature was the convergence of class and ethnic boundaries — the German-speaking elite and the Estonian- or Latvian-speaking peasantry remained clearly separated from one another until the twentieth century; later art history has viewed these categories as “alien” and “one’s own”. Two thirds of the more than a thousand manors in present-day Estonia have been destroyed.