From 1863-81 the Provincial Statistical Committees in the Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Kurland carried out a series of local censuses to count the population and collect data on various aspects of society.
Aerial photo of Patarei Sea Fortress in the early 20th century. Source .
The stacked bar charts enabled viewers to easily compare Reval's various districts. For example, the data visualisation drew readers' attention to how Reval's I district (Fischermay, or today's Kalamaja) was the most religiously diverse. It was home to the largest proportion of non-Lutherans (Orthodox, Catholics, and Muslims). 19th-century Fischermay was an industrial district that was located next to the port and Patarei Sea Fortress , used at the time as military barracks. Many of the workers, sailors, merchants, and soldiers living in this part of the city had moved to the Baltic provinces from other parts of the Russian Empire, thereby contributing to the multiconfessional character of this district.
‘In general, confession was often mixed up with nationality, so that it is not uncommon for people who, like everyone in their immediate vicinity are ethnically Estonians, spoke German and were in name and by ancestry Estonian, were counted as Russians because of their Greek confession or were counted so by others, and so it happened, for example, that in one and the same family one Greek Orthodox child was referred to as of Russian nationality and the other Lutheran as of Estonian nationality.’ - Paul Eduard Jordan, Die Resultate der ehstländischen Volkszählung vom 29. December 1881 in textlicher Beleuchtung (Reval, 1886), p.24
"Cartogram" of Protestants in European Russia based on data from the 1897 census. Source: Общий свод по Империи результатов разработки, данных первой всеобщей переписи населения, произведенной 28 января 1897 года, I-II (Т. 1) (Санкт-Петербург: паровая типо-литография Н.Л. Ныркина, 1905). Source: National Library of Russia .
These cartograms clearly show that the three Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Kurland stood out from by their relatively low proportion of Orthodox and high number of Protestants. These maps reinforced the idea of the Baltic provinces as a religious borderland, at the fringes of the Orthodox world.
Eesti Rahvusatlas/National Atlas of Estonia (Regio, 2019), pp.183-7.
