Attractions on Vormsi Island

Suncrosses cemetery
The Vormsi cemetery has the world's largest collection of sun crosses. Sun crosses began to be used on the island in the 17th century. The crosses are made of limestone and sandstone, and over 300 of them have survived. The oldest surviving cross is from 1743, the youngest from 1923.

St. Olav's Church
The construction of the St. Olav's Church in Vormsi began in the 13th century.
The church was originally built of wood. The stone choir was added only in the 14th century. A bell tower was also built on the western part of the church, the remains of which can still be seen at the entrance.
The building was completely looted during the Livonian War. The church silver was looted and the church bells were taken to Saaremaa. The looters were Russian soldiers, Saaremaa residents, and Swedes. In 1632, a new stone building was erected in place of the old wooden building, which still stands today.
A peculiarity of the church is the lack of a tower; the church bell hangs above the door under a high ridge.

Saxby lighthouse
The 27-meter-high Saxby Lighthouse marks the entrance to the Väinamere archipelago. The entrance to the Gulf of Finland is also not far away. The tower, built in 1864 during the Tsarist era, is a lighthouse assembled from cast iron according to the Gordon system. A utility building, a residential building, a machine room building, a sauna, a barn and a well were also built next to the lighthouse. The tower was built at the same time as the Kihnu Island and Virtsu lighthouses and is also similar in appearance to them.

For centuries, grain was ground in the windy areas of Western Estonia with gantry windmills, the entire body of which could be turned to face the wind. Small windmills on farms, built for the use of one family, were a peculiar phenomenon, which had parallels with the very old tradition of farm mills in Scandinavia and Western Finland. The first written records of windmills date back to the 14th century.
Windmills were characteristic of the Western Estonian landscape and they also symbolized freedom, they were also used as nautical markers etc.
Before World War II, every farm in Vormsi had its own windmill. In the village of Rälby you can find out what a typical gantry windmill looked like.

Vormsi was inhabited by coastal Swedes since the 13th century and was a Swedish-speaking place. In the 1930s, about 2,500 Swedes and only a little over 100 Estonians lived on the island. During World War II, most of the coastal Swedes left Vormsi, leaving behind much of their property.
Vormsi Farm Museum is a typical pre-World War II Vormsi Swedish farm with its surroundings. The farm has been restored using old photographs and written sources, and of course also based on the memories of Vormsi residents who were born in Vormsi and fled to Sweden to escape the war.
The museum features authentically renovated thatched-roof buildings, a large number of household items and clothing, and photo exhibitions of the life of Vormsi and coastal Swedish areas. Some of the household items were different in the isolated culture of the island than what we are used to seeing on the mainland, be it Vormsi clothing fashion, beehives or neck cakes. The pearl of the museum is a working traditional smoke sauna.