Aru Manor

Aru in Nõo parish has an unusual 20th-century story. In 1913 a Finnish philosophy graduate, Ilmari Auer, bought it from the von zur Mühlen family, and in 1917 he gave the estate, worth 312,000 roubles, by deed of gift to a group of Estonians: merchants, a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor and others. Aru thus became one of only about seven per cent of knights' manors that passed into Estonian hands. Jaan Prüüs bought it the same year, and his family kept the manor centre even after the 1919 land reform, until the Soviet authorities deported them to Siberia.