“I need a new rifle,” I say to the cashier at a petrol station. Two young women look at me astonished, and I realise my mistake. The word I want is rehv, not relv, and after we’ve sorted that out, a young man says in English to follow him to a garage where they can replace a tyre. I had arrived in Elva, a little town south of Tartu, a new place to explore, starting with how to fix a flattie. No spare wheel, no jack, but a bottle of sealant and a car battery-powered air compre

I arrive down a reddish sandy track to a campsite by a reed-lined lake, smoke still issuing from an earlier fire, and with a few birch twigs and splits, a merry, crackling fire springs to life. The perfect campsite – and it was because I was later able to drive uphill out of it. After a frantic time swapping two fun-loving Estonians at one campsite with friendly Finns at another, it’s been a day of heading south, through Tartu, deep into the Devonian geology, and rolling coun

Leaving the dance events for camping in the forest, or not quite a forest - a wooded meadow or puisniit. These spaces (for camping and wandering about in my case) are clumps of trees within large areas of grass, alternatively, forested spaces mown for hay, having a parklike feel. The puisniit asks: are humans part of the ecology? The answer to Estonians is yes. Ever since the ice sheets receded some 10,000 years ago humans have followed the fish and game, the berries and mush

Sunny and warm in the back garden, reading, and I catch in the distance the Estonian national anthem. Tiia messages me, saying there is a dance-and-choir event happening a few blocks down the road. I take a pot off the stove, quickly lock up, cross the road and through a stand of pine trees, and so it is. Hundreds are gathered and that’s just the performers: dancers in traditional costume, spinning in circles and weaving through each other, or waiting in the wings patiently f

“Until 1951 Saesaare rapids were the largest in Estonia, as well as considered the most beautiful. The rapids were a couple of hundred metres long and 30 metres wide; the water flowed at 3 metres per second. The rapids attracted both nature enthusiasts and anglers.” So says an interpretation panel titled “Saesaare power station and dam are built”, and it adds the following helpful information: the power station opened on 28 December 1952, at a 54-hectare artificial lake and a

In New Zealand, all who identify as Māori and have a tribal connection know their ancestral mountain, river, and lake / sea. In introducing oneself at a tribal meeting house, Māori recite their ancestral connection to their natural environment, cementing their status as people of the land, or tangata whenua, a distinction not available to other New Zealanders. Later arrivals must resort to explaining themselves differently. Nevertheless, in the old country, there is a chance

A day of disjointed events, pointing eventually to camping in Soomaa – the marshland – where Estonian partisans hid from Soviet troops during WWII. After packing the tent among sheltering pines in a cold wind, the Toyota Yaris heads northeast, burning through the petrol. It’s supposed to be a hybrid; in reality, I am driving 300kg of half-dead battery around Estonia. A long drive on gravel roads through gloomy spruce forest alternating with light-filled Scotch pine towards a

So much of travel is going from one city to another, leaving untouched the spaces in between, and so it is often with me. Driving from Tallinn to Haapsalu, and then to the coastal resort town of Pärnu, through forested lands. Every now and again fields appear, sown in grain or spring grass, bordered occasionally by a talu or farmstead, large buildings and smaller sheds with steeply pitched roofs, built in wood or masonry. Thanks to google navigation, some travel is on gravel

I looked forward to meeting professor Kalevi Kull on our visit to Estonia in 2023, and ahead of that tried to bone up on his specialist field, “biosemiotics”. This word joins biology with “meanings in signs", and is not easy to understand. On the face of it, living things do stuff either because their brains are so programmed, or because chemical or physical changes make them do it. Shorter days in autumn cause male deer to start rutting, to attract mates and to challenge riv

When we were kids, dad had a thing about the water god of ancient Estonian tradition. In his mind, this was Taara – more of a weather god, actually, a version of Thor – and I carved the word as a name plate for a 10-foot wooden dinghy dad built in the 1970s. The boat still exists and so does its name. In Estonian myth, as elsewhere in northern Europe, the spirits reside in the trees, the water, stones, everywhere. For ancient Estonians, nature is alive, and they saw no disti

In Estonian, the word for sea is meri , which always struck me as like German Meer , Latin mare , or Russian more . I thought the Estonians borrowed the word from other languages, but it could be the other way around. “Based on different historical language sources, the use of the word ‘meri’ has been in the Estonian language for 10,000 years or more,” - Estonian Mythology for the Beginner (2023) by Marju Kõivupuu. Strengthening this idea is the word in related Finnish, also

100 blogposts in, and to collect what Estonia and its people uniquely offer to the world. This tough little country has hung onto its culture, language and traditions, despite centuries of foreign invasions and occupations, while over the last 34 years swiftly adopting western, liberal democracy, and the best of digital technology, mixed in with a can-do attitude. What have the Estonians done, and how have they earned their place in Europe, and in the world? In the style of t

Everyone loves a werewolf story. To English speakers, werewolves are dangerous, unpredictable, and incredibly difficult to combat. Neither quite animal, nor quite human, they are unearthly and supernatural. In JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, professor Remus Lupin had been bitten by a werewolf, and every month for a week at the full moon would involuntarily transform into a vicious predator. Only by taking a magic potion could he retain his human mind while transformed. This

Among Estonian girls’ and women’s names, Liivi holds a special place; it honours a Baltic territory that no longer exists, and a Finnic language that is all but extinct. So, what is there to celebrate about Livonia? Going back to the early 1200s the three Baltic States we know today were divided between northern Estonia, ruled by Danes, and lands to the south, Liefland and Courland, occupied by land-grabbing, German-speaking, crusading orders, operating with Papal blessing,

In ancient Estonian belief, a shadowy figure in the dark sitting on the roof of a shed, or a tongue of flame flickering into the hearth recalls the firebrand, or tulihänd . The word can also mean a lendtäht , or “flying star”, and the idea extends to sparks in the fire. If a tulihänd got into the home, the head of the family had a tough road ahead, to feed it with good food – on pain of an untimely death, or fiery destruction of the home - and to keep it in meaningless work t

Another’s words can bring old memories to new life. I recently reread John Le Carré’s iconic 1979 spy novel. George Smiley is a British spymaster, and his people are Estonian émigrés whose gathering of secrets eventually forces their Moscow Centre nemesis, Karla, to defect to the West. But not without Soviet reprisals along the way, and Smiley explains the mindset of a former agent to his superiors, and hence the value he places in him: “Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and

No Estonian with a country house and sauna can do without a woodshed full of firewood. Birch splits burn well with bright, welcoming sparks, and are highly prized. Any decent rural block comes with its own stand of birch trees, for sustainable harvesting. Other types of wood are also good; alder is one, and maple and ash would be others. When visiting, our hosts would proudly show us their woodsheds - one we saw was the size of an aircraft hangar - or carefully stacked rows o

In a log cabin in the forest there lived an Estonian. That is to say the ancestors of a people who spoke an ancient tongue, east of the Ural mountains, and to be precise, in the Ob river catchment in western Siberia. Pine, spruce and birch forests formed their home, amid rivers, bogs and lakes, within that vast horizontal band across northern Eurasia called the taiga. To the south lies the steppe, grasslands spreading from Mongolia / China to Ukraine in the west, as far as

Spring has arrived, and the swallows and other birds are already angling to nest in the roof of, and under the eaves of the summer cabin....

I have long wondered whether the ancestors of Finns and Estonians invented the log cabin, and CA Weslager provides an answer. In The Log...