10 Reasons To Love Estonia

For about three weeks in July 2015, I traveled around the country of Estonia, bumping into the Baltic Sea to the north and west, the Latvian border to the south, and the Russian border to the east. I loved Estonia, and wished I could have wandered it for a lifetime, crisscrossing it over and over like some steel ball in a pinball machine.

About twice the size of New Jersey, Estonia is not a big country. Population-wise it is even smaller — with 1,325,000 people, it is roughly equivalent to New Hampshire. But the best things sometimes come in small packages.

Here are ten reasons I loved Estonia:

 

1. PEOPLE

When I think of Estonians today, a reel of faces will flip through my mind and the faces contain laughter, openness, and dignity. Kerlin, Ann, Ants, Piret, Mariliin, Marju, Egle, Gert, Ivar, Aliise, Karl — these are a few of the people who contributed to my positive experience in the country. Kerlin, for example, I met in Tallinn outside a restaurant where she worked and some days later she and her boyfriend drove me to the beautiful Rummu Quarry. I met Ants at the Hiiu Folk Festival, where he was performing, and some days later when I visited the town of Tartu where he lives, he drove me around to see the sites, including Raadi Airfield, which for 50 years was a major Soviet Air Force base.

In the photo below are Kairi and Leenu, a mother and daughter who hosted me for a couple nights in the tiny town of Värska, tucked into the southeastern part of the country about one mile from the Russian border. Here they are running down an old sand quarry in nearby Piusa, one of several lovely spots they took me to see.

 

2. HISTORY

History is plentiful in Estonia. Vikings were here. So were Danish troops and German knights, conquering the locals and building cathedrals in the 13th century. The Livonian War (1558–1583), in which Russia’s Ivan the Terrible faced off against several opponents for control of modern-day Estonia and Latvia, was not a good time to be in this region. Estonia fought for its independence in 1919 — part of the tumultuous post-WWI era in eastern Europe so well documented in Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End — and in 1920 signed the Treaty of Tartu with Soviet Russia. In the treaty, Russia renounced any claim to sovereignty over Estonia. But in 1940 the Soviet Union swallowed the small country anyway. Fifty-one years would pass before Estonia regained independence.

The photo below is of the train station in Valga, which is actually a city in two countries (part is in Latvia, where it is called Valka). The station was completed in 1949, the work of German prisoners of war.

 

3. MUSIC

I enjoyed music throughout the country, but the highlight was the annual Viljandi Folk Music Festival, held the last weekend of July. Ants Johanson, who showed me around Tartu, performed here with with his two brothers and sister — the group is called Johansonid. Here’s a clip of one of their songs called “Külm” (cold):

https://youtu.be/4wzGIwilM_0

In the photo below, Estonians at the festival enjoy an impromptu folk jam session near the statue of an important figure in modern Estonian history, General Johan Laidoner. Exiled by Stalin in 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Laidoner died 13 years later, in 1953, at Vladimir Central Prison outside Moscow — the same prison where U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers would be held less than a decade later.

 

4. THE BALTIC SEA

If you google “The Baltic Sea in Estonia,” most of your first few hits will be articles about the tragic 1994 sinking of the cruise ferry M.S. Estonia, in which 852 souls were lost on a voyage from Tallinn to Stockholm. It was the second deadliest European ship accident to occur in peacetime, surpassed only by the sinking of the Titanic.

Once past those results, however, you may learn about the actual body of water called the Baltic Sea, or about Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, the country’s two largest islands, or about the popular summer beach resort city of Pärnu.

 

5. THE SAUNA

One of the best things about Estonia, and human existence, is the sauna. Here are two lines extolling the sauna, plucked from an article on Estonia’s official tourism website:

Line 1:  “there’s nothing more social than sitting naked together in a dark wooden cabin and ‘taking the heat’.”

Line 2:  “Now that you’ve got all that down, you are more than ready to join Estonians in the sauna. A place where the naked truth is revealed and world is put to right, with conversation topics ranging from weather to philosophy.”

I had only one sauna experience in Estonia, which was not enough and is but one reason I intend to return. In the photo below, Estonians are constructing a temporary sauna outside a home. By nightfall it would be finished, with a wood-burning stove and wooden seating area, and shortly after midnight five bodies, including one from America, would be sweating blissfully inside.

 

6. THE SIZE

I’m intrigued by small countries that border giant countries. It’s a reality foreign to an American, with all our breadth and power. But when you are the 123rd largest county in the world and your neighbor is the largest country, Russia, it affects how you see the world, and yourself.

In the photo below, the swinging bench is in Estonia and the castle seen across the Narva River is Ivangorod Fortress in Russia. Though a nearby bridge keeps busy with cross-border traffic, it’s not a sign that relations between the two countries are smooth. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and ongoing involvement in eastern Ukraine’s separatist movement hasn’t helped the tension. In 2007, a crippling cyberattack targeted Estonia and was attributed to Russia. For a good article about this infamous event in the tech world, read Wired magazine’s “Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe”.

 

7. THE SAATSE BOOT

Speaking of Russia, see that red and green post on the left-hand side of the road in the photo below? That’s the Russian border, which the car I’m riding in with Kairi and Leenu (see reason #1 to love Estonia) is about to cross, and it’s part of the Saatse Boot, the name given to the 280 acres of Russian territory that extends across the road between the Estonian villages of Lutepää and Sesniki. It is one of those geographically awkward remnants of the break-up of the Soviet Union. The portion of road that crosses Russian territory is only 900 meters long, and Russia allows passage of this normally unmanned border by car but not by foot.

The two countries have attempted to negotiate a land swap to straighten out this oddity. But so far it hasn’t happened.

 

8. THE ARCHITECTURE

The medieval old town of Tallinn is rightfully popular. The photo below shows one view from the 64-meter tall Town Hall tower. It’s not my favorite view from the tower, but I like how it shows the edge of the old town fading into the modern part of the city.

 

9. THE CAFES

Small cafes in small countries are among my favorite places to sit a while. In the photo below, Egle, one of the employees at Kohvipaus in Tartu, takes a break for a bite to eat. It rained a lot during the days I was in Tartu, and this cafe was one of my shelters.

 

10. THE BARN SWALLOW

At the suggestion of my hosts Kairi and Leenu in Värska, I stayed one night on the farm of an Estonian-Canadian couple. Along with three of their Workaway volunteers (and numerous barn swallows) I slept in the hayloft of a building constructed in 1938. What you see in this photo is a barn swallow entering the hayloft, some kind of fibrous material in its mouth, working on its nest. The barn swallow is the national bird of Estonia.

 

It was hard to leave Estonia since I loved it so. But when I did the math, I knew I had to move on. The math, you wonder? Here it is: There are about 1,325,000 people in Estonia. I was here about three weeks. If one were to move at this pace to visit groups of 1,325,000 people until you got through all 7 billion people on Earth, it’d take about 305 years.

And so it was time to pick up the pace, and I boarded a bus in Tallinn bound for Latvia (which I would also love!). But as the bus headed south, I knew that one day I’d return.

 

For more about Estonia:

• https://www.visitestonia.com/en
• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/en.html