100 YEARS OF HISTORY

Fejan has an exciting and interesting modern history that reaches back to the end of the 19th century. Back to the days when a new cholera epidemic sweapt through Europe. The Swedish authority decided that the disease should be stopped at the border. The East coast quarantine station was built on Fejan. In a great haste, during the summer of 1892 a hospital, namned Wasa, and a few other buildings, among them a doctor's villa that originally was meant to be a missionary station in Kongo, Africa.

Perhaps the most famous event on Fejan during this time was when "Orphei Drängar" was detained there after a concert tour in 1894. A fellow passenger on the ship "von Döbeln" from St Petersburg had fallen ill in cholera during the journey and died on arrival at Fejan on July 3rd, 1894. During the weeks that "Orphei Drängar" spent on the island they formed a choir that they with gallows humour called "The Cholera Time Singers".

At the end of WWII the buildings were used once more. When the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in September 1944, more than 30,000 estonians travelled across the Baltic sea in badly worn out boats. Fejan, which had yet another great hospital "von Döbeln" built in the beginning of the 20th century became a transit camp for refugees from the Baltics.