St. Catherine's Church in Liiva village dates to the 13th century and is one of the oldest surviving churches in Estonia. Built of local limestone in a simple Romanesque style, it has the solidity of a building that was also conceived as a refuge — the walls are thick, the windows narrow, the whole structure low and anchored to the ground. What makes it exceptional are the pre-Christian tombstones that were set directly into the exterior masonry, their carved pagan motifs still legible after eight centuries. You can walk the perimeter and pick them out: abstract spirals, stylised figures, symbols that no one now can fully decode.
Inside, the barrel-vaulted nave is spare and whitewashed, with the unadorned quality of an early Lutheran interior. The church remains an active parish — services still take place here, and the small congregation takes care of it well. The churchyard has graves reaching back centuries, set among old trees in the Estonian way. It is a fifteen-minute walk from the main road, and almost always quiet. Go in the morning when the light hits the west wall and the pagan stones cast their shallow shadows.